Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

Many biographies like to start at the end of their subject’s life. The final moments or days of their hero are presented as the climax of his or her life as if somehow summing it all up. Yet the reader does not know it yet. Her curiosity is piqued and, so the author hopes, she will be eager to read on. The author then turns around and starts at the very beginning, with the hero as a baby and child, with all the excitement still far away but with all the foreboding of the end just told. The hero of this book is literacy, writing and reading, in the Hittite kingdom in ancient Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey, from roughly 1650 to 1200 bc, give or take several years or perhaps even a decade or two. In this case, too, we could begin at the end, but the demise of the kingdom is still shrouded in mystery. Our hero just disappears unseen, it seems. Sometime around 1200 bc, the Hittite state literally vanished into thin air. We think the ruling elite abandoned its central Anatolian capital Hattusa and moved away somewhere south or southeast, but where to exactly? No obvious new capital has been identified as yet. And when did this all take place? Isolated outside references to a Hittite state might extend its life to 1190 or even into the 1180s bc, but nothing compels us to assume that it was still centered at Hattusa. As we will see, the number of written records dating to the very end of the kingdom suggests an earlier rather than later abandonment.