The Mitanni (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798907140417)

Five great powers ruled the Bronze Age, and their kings wrote to each other as brothers. Four of them have libraries. The fifth has never had a book-and its capital city has never been found.

In the fourteenth century BC, the kings of Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Babylon, Assyria and Mitanni ran the civilized world by correspondence-clay tablets in Akkadian, carried by messengers for months, haggling over gold, gifts and royal marriages. Mitanni was a full member of that club. Its kings married three princesses to three successive pharaohs. When Amenhotep III lay sick, Mitanni sent him the statue of a healing goddess-twice. And when a promised shipment of solid-gold statues arrived as gilded wood, King Tushratta wrote the pharaoh a letter of genuinely wounded complaint that survives to this day in the ruins of Amarna.

Then the kingdom was torn apart-by the Hittite king Suppiluliuma in a single campaign season, and by a resurgent Assyria that absorbed the remnant and erased the name. Mitanni left no royal library. Its capital, Washukanni, is a hole in the map: there are candidate sites, but no excavator has ever pulled a tablet from the ground that proves the spot. Everything we know comes from other people's archives-the Amarna letters Egypt filed, the treaties the Hittites kept, the lawsuits of a provincial town, and one extraordinary oath in which a Mitanni prince swears by Mitra, Varuna and Indra: gods of the Vedas, witnessed in a Syrian treaty a thousand miles from India.

This book reconstructs the fifth great power of the Bronze Age from its neighbours' paperwork, document by document-and is honest at every step about how the reconstruction is done.

What you'll learn:

• How the Amarna letters preserve a vanished kingdom's diplomacy, marriages and complaints-in its own king's words
• Why a Hurrian-speaking kingdom had kings with Indo-Aryan names who swore by Vedic gods
• How the light chariot and composite bow became the weapon system of the Late Bronze Age-and the seven-month horse-training manual that survives from it
• How Mitanni fought the Egypt of Thutmose III to a standstill, then married into it
• Why a first-rank empire collapsed in a single season when the Hittites struck
• Where archaeologists have looked for Washukanni, and why the search is still open
• What thousands of ordinary legal tablets from the town of Nuzi reveal that no royal inscription would

This book is for you if:

• You've read about ancient Egypt, the Hittites or Mesopotamia and want the missing piece between them
• You're drawn to lost civilizations and genuinely unsolved archaeological questions
• You want narrative history built on documents, told with a clear account of what the evidence can and cannot support
• You'd rather have an honest reconstruction than a confident guess

The Bronze Age had five great powers. Four have had their histories written many times over. This is the fifth-recovered from the files its neighbours kept.