Hittite Warrior

I, Uriah-tarhund, son of Arnandash the horse breeder, am a Hittite. I was born of a race of men who came down from the unknown north a thousand years ago and became the rulers of half the world. But that world has come to an end, and I can never go home again.


I was born in the Hittite province of Arzawa. My father was a kinsman of the chief of the province and raised horses in the grasslands to draw the battle chariots for which our land of Great Hatti was famed.


When I was a child, the world was as it had always been, or so I thought. We, the Hittites, lived in Great Hatti with its rocky mountains, its plains and its forests, stretching to the Black Sea of the north and the great sea of the west. We ruled the northern world; and Egypt, the accursed land, ruled the world of the south.


Other people did not matter. There were the lands of Canaan and the Amorites to the south, with their rich trading cities, divided between us and Egypt. To the east, the lands of Hurri and Mitanni sent us tribute; and sometimes traders from the great city of Babylon came to our towns and villages, but I never spoke to them.


For the nobles of Great Hatti, whose ancestors came down from the northern wilderness a thousand years ago, scorned all merchants and scribes and left such work to the dark skinned, ancient peoples of the land, who had lived there since the world began. Our women, like my mother and my sister Annitis, were kept close at home to guard them from these people; and I myself was not allowed to speak even to the elders of the ancient village where we lived. It was so wherever our fair skinned ancestors had settled and conquered … even, the story tellers said, in the far off Hindus valley.


The world was as it had always been, and it was protected by the gods. We Hittites worshipped all the gods, some of them our own, brought with us from the unknown north; many of them the gods of the people with whom we traded or who sent us tribute. We worshipped them all, and we knew that they would always keep us safe and strong.


But they did not. My story will tell of how they failed us, how disaster came upon us all, and how strangely I have survived it. It will tell of the rise and fall of nations, the fading of old glories and the birth of new And it will tell much of that little strip of land called Canaan to the south, between us and the accursed land of Egypt, which was only a name to me when I was a child. For all the wealth and all the armies and all the glories of the nations have passed through that little land and probably always will; and the story of the kings of Canaan is the story of the world.