{"product_id":"the-mitanni-shane-larson-9798907140417","title":"The Mitanni","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFive 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.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat you'll learn: \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHow the Amarna letters preserve a vanished kingdom's diplomacy, marriages and complaints-in its own king's words\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhy a Hurrian-speaking kingdom had kings with Indo-Aryan names who swore by Vedic gods\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHow 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\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHow Mitanni fought the Egypt of Thutmose III to a standstill, then married into it\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhy a first-rank empire collapsed in a single season when the Hittites struck\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhere archaeologists have looked for Washukanni, and why the search is still open\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat thousands of ordinary legal tablets from the town of Nuzi reveal that no royal inscription would\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThis book is for you if: \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYou've read about ancient Egypt, the Hittites or Mesopotamia and want the missing piece between them\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYou're drawn to lost civilizations and genuinely unsolved archaeological questions\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYou want narrative history built on documents, told with a clear account of what the evidence can and cannot support\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYou'd rather have an honest reconstruction than a confident guess\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Shane Larson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798907140417\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Peak Grizzly Publishing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/23\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 258\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.77lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.58d","brand":"Shane Larson","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50666252140799,"sku":"9798907140417","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_0ca6181d-6728-43f1-ab42-eb769adae029.jpg?v=1792016652","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/the-mitanni-shane-larson-9798907140417","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}