#moar hittite facts

[frostfire-17]

@jul-likes-magpies sure! I put some other ones in a post here (also a couple of more general resources here and here if people want them) but have some more! I could do this forever!

Hattusili I seems to have been a good empire-builder, but a terrible dad, which is fair because I don't think those skill sets overlap much. But the point of the above document is to make his teenaged grandson his heir - no other relatives left! - and that kid survived to grow up and sack Babylon, so he did okay in the end (for certain definitions of okay).

Anyway yeah Mursili I sacked Babylon! Babylon is very very far from Hattusa! He should not have been able to manage this but somehow he did! He didn't keep it (would not have been practical), but he seems to have been the straw that broke the back of Hammurabi's dynasty. Would totally not believe this happened were it not for a corroborating Babylonian text about "when the Hittites came."

The Hittites had to work pretty hard to maintain a large population in nowheresville central Anatolia where their capital was, so they developed a hermetic sealing technique to store grain and created artificial lakes at their capital using a method that still keeps the ground damp today. (Also they carried off a lot of people when they conquered other places and made them live there: less admirable!)

The Hittites had a professional religious position called the "Old Woman." The Old Women did medicine, magic, divination, and ritual at the highest level - their specialty was rituals against sorcery/curses directed at the royal family. (Also presumably there were less important Old Women but they don't get a mention in the documents.) They were total badasses. We even have several ritual texts ascribed to named female authors in the Hittite corpus of tablets! It is VERY COOL AND UNUSUAL for the time period.

wake up babe new IE language dropped

Yoooooo????