Three - Sovereign Performance

Summary

The transformation of physical space is a powerful technique of political production, which results in potentially wide-ranging rifts in regional social and economic practices and their networked relationships. New and old Anatolian communities, however, had to be repeatedly socialised to accept as legitimate the new regime’s claim to sovereignty. Chapter 3, therefore, examines Hittite ritual as a performance of state, its material agents, and the significance of royal movement in the production and integration of central Anatolia’s new political landscapes, and in the legitimisation of surplus extraction from it.