Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Ahhiyawa Texts by Gary M. Beckman; Trevor R. Bryce; and Eric H.
Cline
Review by: Annette Teffeteller
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 134, No. 1 (January-March 2014),
pp. 152-154
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7817/jameroriesoci.134.1.0152

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152 Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.1 (2014)

from simple lists of stars through to more complicated procedures involving mathematics “parallels the
development of ancient Mesopotamian astronomical texts” (p. 171) and therefore the development of
Mesopotamian astronomy. This conclusion relies upon an assumption that science progresses from an
observational process of categorizing nature to a theoretical or mathematical “developed” science, but
this assumption has been challenged by many philosophers and historians of science. Furthermore, in
order to make this claim, Watson and Horowitz characterize the astronomy of mul.apin as “observa-
tional science,” but this is also not quite true: the data on the length of the shadow cast by a gnomon,
for example, is given by a mathematical scheme. Indeed most of the material in mul.apin does not
reproduce data determined directly from observation but rather schematic data derived from some
observations combined with the available mathematical tools and underlying assumptions such as the
ideal 360-day year which are not based upon observations.
Although I do not agree with all of the conclusions reached by the authors, Writing Science before
the Greeks is a highly innovative study of an important text of Mesopotamian astronomy. The book
opens up a completely new avenue of approach to studying ancient scientific texts for historians of
science, and many of the results of Watson and Horowitz’s analysis of mul.apin are useful for under-
standing the purpose of that text.

John M. Steele
Brown University

The Ahhiyawa Texts. By Gary M. Beckman; Trevor R. Bryce; and Eric H. Cline. Writings from
the Ancient World, vol. 28. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. xvi + 302.
$34.95 (paper).

Ahhiyawa, a land recorded in the Hittite documents of the second millennium b.c., was equated
with Greek lands of the period (our “Mycenaean” Greece) by the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer in 1924.
After several decades of debate, the identification gradually won general acceptance, and now, some
years later, the Ahhiyawa texts have been collected and made available to an English-speaking audi-
ence in a volume jointly authored by a philologist, an historian, and an archaeologist.
The three co-authors provide the Hittite text (and for the Çineköy inscription, the Luwian) with
English translations of all the known documents relating to Ahhiyawa (Beckman), with a brief discus-
sion of the historical context of each text (Bryce), and opening and closing essays on the Ahhiyawa
“problem” and on Mycenaean-Hittite interconnections (Cline). Their stated purpose is to make these
texts “accessible to graduate students and undergraduates alike, in addition to professional scholars
active in related fields, such as Classics and/or Near Eastern archaeology” (p. xiii), and interested mem-
bers of these groups will certainly derive huge benefits from their efforts. But, despite the modesty of
their claim, the authors’ contributions in this volume will be welcomed by specialists in various areas
of Aegeo-Anatolian studies as well. The convenience of having these documents collected in a single
(and happily very affordable) volume is no small contribution in itself, but the major benefit to special-
ists is Beckman’s fresh transliteration and translation of all the texts.
The texts are presented in the order of the categories established by Laroche in his 1971 Catalogue
des Textes Hittites (CTH), with the addition of three texts discovered since Laroche’s publication. A
useful list is provided of approximately two-thirds of the texts in tentative chronological order; those in
the remaining third resist integration into a chronological list, though all are dated to the thirteenth cen-
tury b.c. (It is in fact an interesting point that only three of the thirty Ahhiyawa texts date unequivocally
to a period prior to the thirteenth century.) Each text now bears, in addition to its CTH number, a new
number designating its appearance in this volume, in the series AhT 1–28. (Thirty texts are included
in the volume but two of them have two parts each, labeled “A” and “B”: AhT 1A and B, the Ten-Year
Annals of Mursili II and the Extensive Annals, respectively; and 27A and B, the parallel letters found at
Ugarit from Suppiluliuma II and his official, Penti-Sharruma.) A list of sources provides text numbers

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 Reviews of Books 153

(KUB and KBo, plus RS and çineköy for the recent finds outside Hattusa); date; and (where these
exist) editions, translations, and discussions. A chronology of Hittite New Kingdom rulers is included,
along with two maps (Late Bronze Age Anatolia, northern Syria, and northern Mesopotamia, and Late
Bronze Age Greece and western Anatolia); a bibliography and seven indices complete the volume.
Cline’s introduction opens with a rather perplexingly negative statement: “The Ahhiyawa Prob-
lem—or Ahhiyawa Question, as it is sometimes called—still remains unsolved and unanswered almost
a century after it was first introduced” (p. 1), a claim immediately refuted by his ensuing discussion
and closing statement: “At the very least, perhaps we can say that the Ahhiyawa Problem/Question has
been solved and answered after all, for there is now little doubt that Ahhiyawa was a reference by the
Hittites to some or all of the Bronze Age Mycenaean world. It seems that Forrer was largely correct
after all” (p. 6).
Cline (p. 4) is right to reject Kelder’s (2010) view of the Mycenaean world as a unified state, but his
enthusiasm for Kelder’s earlier suggestion that “Ahhiyawa was more than one of the Mycenaean pala-
tial states” (2005: 158) places undue emphasis on the innovative nature of this view. On the contrary,
it is usually assumed that with the designation “Ahhiyawa” (or “Ahhiya,” the earlier term) the Hittites
referred generally to the ethno-linguistic/geographical totality that we now refer to as “Mycenaean,”
not to a particular kingdom in the narrow sense. The issues are which Mycenaean kingdom, if any,
held the hegemony at any specific time; whether the Hittite designation “Ahhiyawa” and the Egyptian
“Danaya” refer to the same or different Mycenaean regions; and in particular which kingdom was the
seat of the “Great King of Ahhiyawa” of the thirteenth-century Hittite texts. That is the central debate at
this time, and Kelder (2010), to whom Cline appeals for the supremacy of Mycenae rather than Thebes
(p. 4), has certainly not settled the matter.
Cline is on firmer ground with his comment that “the obvious analogy” for a political coalition
of the Ahhiyawan kingdoms is to the Assuwan confederacy, known from Hittite texts, and indeed
the Ahhiyawa coalition may have undergone the same kinds of “kaleidoscopic shifts in allegiance”
(Hawkins 1998: 19) that we see in the western Anatolian kingdoms in the Late Bronze Age, particu-
larly in the Arzawa group. And an obvious analogy for the Hittite use of the term “Ahhiya/Ahhiyawa”
is to the Hittite use of the ethno-linguistic/geographical term “Luwiya,” which appears to refer to the
area of western Anatolia in which the Luwian language was spoken, without specific reference to ter-
ritorial borders.
The orthodox view that we do not know the name of any Ahhiyawan king, reaffirmed by Bryce
(“Neither here [the Annals of Mursili II, AhT 1A-B] nor in any of the texts which refer to Ahhiyawa
is the name of any Ahhiyawan king preserved,” p. 46), is challenged by the old problem of the status
of Attarissiya, lú URUAḫḫiyā (AhT 3 §§1 and 12; p. 97; cf. p. 225 and n. 107), and further contested
by Jared Miller’s recent reinterpretation (2010) of the Tawagalawa letter (following earlier suggestions
by Heinhold-Krahmer and Alparslan), identifying Tawagalawa himself as the Great King of Ahhi-
yawa prior to the reign of his brother, the unknown addressee of the letter. We might note here that
if this compelling identification is in fact correct, it would almost certainly mean that Tawagalawa/
Etewoklewes (Eteokles) was the author of the controversial “Kagamuna” letter, KUB 26.91 (AhT 6),
with profound implications for the debate regarding the possible hegemony of Thebes in the thirteenth
century (see further Teffeteller 2013).
With regard to the history of Ahhiyawan studies, it should be pointed out for the benefit of non-
specialists (see p. 3) that it was Hans Güterbock (1983, 1984) who first observed that if the Ahhiyawans
are not the Mycenaeans, we are left with two insurmountable problems: 1) how then were the Mycenae-
ans—who must have been known to the Hittites, since we know from the archaeological evidence that
they were active on the Anatolian coast and the offshore islands—designated by the Hittites and where
are the textual references to them? and 2) who then are the Ahhiyawans (there being no other obvious
choice among the major powers that would have been known to the Hittites at the time)? And it should
be noted too (see p. 270) that it was Frank Starke who established that the islands referred to in the
letter KUB 26.91 were a gift exchange in a diplomatic marriage between Assuwa and Ahhiyawa, thus
identifying our earliest recorded Mycenaean-Anatolian interaction, announced in a press conference in
2003 (reported in Latacz 2004: 243–44) and elaborated at the Montreal Ahhiyawa Workshop in 2006
(where, as the authors note [p. xiii], the present volume was planned).

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154 Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.1 (2014)

Non-specialists may be caused some further confusion by an occasional infelicity, e.g., a refer-
ence to Homer’s Iliad as having been “written” in the eighth century b.c. (p. 5); the statement that the
Egyptian geographical term “Tanaja” (“Danaya”) may refer to more than one Mycenaean kingdom,
implying that by default it is likely not to do so (p. 5); the implication, resulting from too compressed
a statement (p. 2), that Sommer’s (1932) interpretation of the letter KUB 26.91 (AhT 6) is identical to
the one presented here; and by occasional lack of coordination among the authors on views presented,
e.g., whether Kagamuna (AhT 6) was Ahhiyawan or Assuwan (Assuwan [tentatively]: Beckman, pp.
134–35; Ahhiyawan: Bryce, p. 138 [though acknowledging Beckman’s differing view, n. 102]; and
Cline, p. 270 [apparently unaware of Beckman’s view]). But these minor problems do not seriously
detract from the positive contributions of this very welcome volume.
From the fifteenth century b.c. down through the thirteenth, the Ahhiyawans appear in Hittite texts
intermittently in conflict and in cooperation with various powers of Anatolia, with a coda from the
eighth century attesting to the survival of the name (and presumably the people) in the region of Cilicia.
In the epilogue Cline pulls together these scattered and frustratingly fragmentary texts into a coherent
(albeit tentative) history of Mycenaean-Hittite interconnections in the Late Bronze Age. Beckman’s
translations offer the most recent interpretations of the Ahhiyawa texts and Bryce does a masterful job
of setting them in their historical context. All three co-authors are to be congratulated for their efforts;
this volume is indispensable for anyone with an interest in the Mycenaeans and in international rela-
tions in the Late Bronze Age Aegeo-Anatolian world.
Annette Teffeteller
Concordia University, Montreal

References
Forrer, E. 1924a. Vorhomerische Griechen in den Keilschrifttexten von Boghazköi. MDOG 63: 1–22.
 . 1924b. Die Griechen in den Boghazköi-Texten. OLZ 27: 113–18.
Güterbock, H. G. 1983. The Hittites and the Aegean World: 1. The Ahhiyawa Problem Reconsidered.
AJA 87: 133–38.
 . 1984. Hittites and Akhaeans: A New Look. PAPS 128: 114–22.
Hawkins, J. D. 1998. Tarkasnawa King of Mira: ‘Tarkondemos’, Boğazköy Sealings and Karabel, AnSt
48: 1–31.
Kelder, J. M. 2005. The Chariots of Ahhiyawa. Dacia, Revue d’archéologie et d’histoire ancienne
48–49 (2004–2005): 151–60.
 .  2010. The Kingdom of Mycenae: A Great Kingdom in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. Bethes-
da, MD: CDL Press.
Latacz, J. 2004. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Miller, J. L. 2010. Some Disputed Passages in the Tawagalawa Letter. In ipamati kistamati pari tuma-
timis: Luwian and Hittite Studies Presented to J. David Hawkins on the Occasion of His 70th Birth-
day, ed. I Singer. Pp. 159–69. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Univ. Institute of Archaeology.
Sommer, F. 1932. Die Aḫḫijavā-Urkunden. Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Teffeteller, A. 2013. Singers of Lazpa: Reconstructing Identities on Bronze Age Lesbos. In Luwian
Identities: Culture, Language and Religion between Anatolia and the Aegean, ed. A. Mouton, I. C.
Rutherford, and I. Yakubovich. Pp. 567–89. Leiden: Brill.

Gods Carved in Stone: The Hittite Rock Sanctuary of Yazɩlɩkaya. By Jürgen Seeher. Istanbul: Ege
Yayinlari, 2011. Pp. 205, illus. €35 (paper).

Yazılıkaya is possibly the most significant monumental remnant of the Hittite Empire. In 1834, the
discovery of the rock-carved reliefs of Yazılıkaya and the nearby ruins of the Hittite capital Hattuša

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