This is one of the world’s oldest surviving international peace-treaties. Dating from the mid-14th century B.C., it seeks to solemnize an end to the conflict between two then-prominent Near Eastern regional powers – the waxing Hittite Empire under Suppiluliuma, and the seriously waning Mitanni by this stage under Shattiwaza.
The treaty in question is written in an *Indo-Aryan* language, rather than an Anatolian I.E. one; and makes direct reference to several strongly important Vedic Gods and concepts.
Now, in order to ‘set the scene’, we should probably briefly introduce the respective agonists of the agreement. And by this, I do not mean the rulers whose names are baked into the terms of the tablet; but rather, the polities, the peoples for whom they stood. Because that’s where things start to get interesting.
The Hittites should already be relatively familiar. They turn up just about everywhere dealing with the period – rampaging down to Babylon, fighting Ramses II at Kadesh (in what is probably one of history’s first recorded instances of deliberately promulgated “Fake News”, as applies Ramses’ presentation of the outcome of the battle as a crushing Egyptian victory), likely making war on the Greeks quite to the west, and potentially even turning up in the Bible – which is probably where most of us know the name from. In the mid-1300s, they’re a real regional Great Power, pretty much at the apex of their suzerainty.
Despite the fact that they’re *unquestionably* the *severely* dominant party to this peace-treaty (it’s really more of an imposition than an equal-footing act of diplomacy, in realpolitik terms; the Mitanni’s position after this is effectively that of a client-state of the Hittites, sealed with the marriage of Suppiluliuma’s daughter to the Mitanni’s new ruler Shattiwaza … who’d effectively been placed upon the throne *by* Suppiluliuma following a period of considerable instability amidst the Mitanni characterized by a string of assassinations and overthrows), the Hittites are not supposed to be the stars of *this* show.
Instead, that honour goes to the Mitanni – or, more specifically, to their courtly language and religious customs. Which, as I noted somewhere towards the intro, aren’t exactly what you’d expect in Northern Mesopotamia/South-Eastern Anatolia.
...the Mitanni are coming at a similar starting situation from the opposite angle. Literally. As in, from the *East*, as far as we can tell.
And instead of conquering and assimilating the Hurrians into an Indo-European dominant culture, the Mitanni’s Indo-European ruling elite find themselves increasingly Hurrian-ized, to the point that by the time this treaty is signed, it seems that they themselves are likely speaking Hurrian on a day-to-day basis, with their own original language having become increasingly reserved only for ‘special occasions’ – the incredibly serious and indelibly closely related fields of formalized politics/matters of state and religion.
I do not consider it to be coincidental that it is in the religious realms, the courtly realms, and the horse-training realms that the Indo-Aryan language features, indeed names and nouns, are seemingly most strongly preserved. All are, after their own way, effectively sacred, sacral actions; and the reign-names of their rulers – which often directly included elements around divinity and/or horses and chariots – are effectively at the apex of all three.
There is therefore, in the treaty in question, little surprise that we have *exactly* the right – indeed, the *rite* – Indo-Iranian/(Pre-)Vedic deities invoked, with highly recognizable names to scholars or speakers of Sanskrit (admittedly, in at least one case with the addition of a Hurrian grammatical suffix), rather than the situation prevailing in many other texts from, say, the Hittites, wherein theonyms (or even entire deities) from the cultures they were in contact with are straight-imported and placed alongside or otherwise overlain over the top of the Hittites’ own Indo-European theology.
Why does this matter? Because somewhere smack in the middle between where the Mitanni were, and where the core of Vedic society had set up amidst the Seven Rivers, there are the early Iranians – the Persians, and other such peoples. Who speak a different branch of Indo-Iranian languages, and who at some point come under the thumb of the religious inverter Zoroaster – one of whose ‘reforms’ specifically demonizes Lord Indra.
It’s *possible*, to be sure, that some of this *could* be explained by impressively long-distance trade and cultural contacts with the Vedic Aryans far to the east, which somehow bypass the (Old) Iranians somewhere in the middle; however while this *may* account for the technical terminology around horse-training etc, I suspect that this would be a pretty unsatisfying explanation for the presence of (Proto-)Hindu conceptry in reign-names and the apparent pantheon of the Mitanni’s ruling elite.
The *better* explanation – at least, to my mind; as well as being the more immediately ‘useful’ one – is that this all suggests that the Zoroastrian heresy was considerably *later* and more marginal in its earlier phases than some have otherwise sought to suggest.
There’s this incredible duality between the Deities mentioned in this text – assumedly, the deities the Mifanni held dear – and the Mitanni themselves. Hell, even the Hittites in whose imperial mouth(piece) They (the Gods) are Invoked.
See, of the Mitanni, we know if not “next to nothing”, then hardly too much more than that. We have a few fragments of Imperial correspondence, a horse-training manual (that is surprisingly – and I mean *surprisingly* – almost ultra-modern in its techniques), some scattered inscriptions here and there, and pretty much what can be untangled from the accounts of the people by those who lived in their immediate vicinity and warred against and/or intermarried with them (usually in that direct order). Even when it comes to the actual, physically baked hard-text in front of us, so much of what we present as fact about them is, ultimately, simply well-informed (albeit quite likely via inference) conjecture.
We can, in short, barely even tell you who or what they were as a people. It’s gotten to the point wherein we’re not even entirely sure if they’re *a* people, or just what precise role these Indo-Aryans among their midst *actually* played within the kingdom itself – warrior elite binding together a confederacy? royal family and upper aristocracy at the heart of an empire by then in decline? expatriate professionals within the relevant fields of war and equestrianism (and perhaps *especially* both at once) from further East who may have seen an opportunity for some “vertical integration” and taken it? We just simply don’t know.
...why these *specific* Indo-European deities are strongly resonant with the concept of (inter)National treaty-making and diplomacy, alliances, in the first place … and, for that matter, whether Suppiluliuma *really* meant to suggest that necromancy was one of the Cassus Belli for this *particular* war-effort against his neighbouring rivals...
Re: The Indus script, aka the Harappan script, aka the WTH? - Deciphered.
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ls.21-23)" (HIKADE 2012:843).
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