The Hittite Prince Who Stole an Empire
April 2025 | Vol. 13.4
By Trevor Bryce
A Sickly Child Destined for Greatness
He was a sickly young child, now close to death. We do not know his birth name, but he was no ordinary child. His father was the Great King Mursili, ruler of the Hittite empire, the most powerful Bronze Age kingdom in the Near East. The year is sometime around 1315 BC. Our ailing prince was the youngest of four siblings — there were two older brothers and an older sister. Muwatalli was the eldest, and it was he who would inherit the mantle of Great Kingship when his father died.
Relief of Muwatalli II (reigned ca. 1295 – 1272 BC), son of Mursili II, at Sirkeli Höyük. Photo by Mirko Novak.
But as his youngest brother, our prince was an important “spare”. One day he might inherit the kingship if he survived his eldest brother, and if he himself lived long enough. Maybe that was his destiny. One night the goddess Ishtar, amongst the most powerful deities in the Hittite pantheon, appeared to Mursili in a dream. His ailing youngest son would survive and prosper, she told him, if he was dedicated to her service. Mursili mentioned this dream to his eldest son, the Crown Prince Muwatalli, who immediately consigned his youngest brother to Ishtar’s service, care, and protection. In another version, the kingdom’s Chief Scribe Mittanamuwa, probing deep into the kingdom’s records, found a cure for the young prince’s illness. Either way, Mittanamuwa became an important mentor for the young prince, and Ishtar a powerful and ever-present divine patron, both on the battlefield and in the toxic environment of the royal court. The latter saw Mursili’s banishment of his stepmother, the Babylonian princess Tawananna, for corruption and gross abuse of power, and above all for contriving the murder of his beloved wife Gassuliyawiya. There was much else beside that smacked of plots and intrigues in the ever-expanding factions of the royal household.
Relocation of the Capital
When Muwatalli assumed Great Kingship, after Mursili’s death, he continued to bestow special favours upon our young prince, first making him governor of a northern region of the kingdom called the Upper Land, and then king of the entire northern half of the kingdom. Around the same time, Muwattalli shifted the capital of the empire to a region in southern or south-central Anatolia called Tarhuntassa, where he built a city of the same name. Scholars have different opinions about the reasons for the change. Hattusa was not totally abandoned, but placed under the administration of the Chief Scribe Mittanamuwa.
Map of the Hittite World, by Trevor Bryce.
The Upper Land had previously been governed by a more distant royal connection of the royal family, called Arma-Tarhunda, who had rather liked his job and was furious at being sacked from it. He even tried getting reinstated by making a court case of it. But who could doubt the outcome when Muwattalli was the judge, with Ishtar’s divine backing. Even a spot of black magic and witchcraft by Arma-Tarhunda made no difference to the outcome.
Much of this is recorded in a surviving document commonly misnamed as our prince’s (and future king’s): Apology. This document is in part the author’s autobiography and a defence of his conduct. The Apology doesn’t tell us this, but already in his teens and early adulthood our prince must have displayed considerable military skills, perhaps in the chariot contingent and in fighting against the kingdom’s northern enemies. Muwattalli appointed him “Chief of the Bodyguard of Spearmen”, a title which made him, after the king, the most powerful man in the empire.
At the battle of Qadesh, a military showdown between the great powers of the age, Egypt and Hatti (the Hittite empire), the prince commanded a division of the Hittite army under Muwattalli’s supreme leadership. Neither side was able to win a decisive victory in this battle. But in the long term the honours went to Muwattalli, who won and maintained control over the Syrian territories, Amurru and Qadesh, which had finally sparked the conflict.
A Divinely Sanctioned Marriage
On his way home from the Syrian territories where he held temporary control, our prince detoured to a city called Lawazantiya, cult centre of the goddess Ishtar. Here he met and married a beautiful young woman called Puduhepa. He was in his early forties, and she must have been all of fifteen — certainly of marriageable age. And the goddess Ishtar “gave them the love of husband and wife”. Our prince already had several wives, or, more strictly, “concubines”, and Puduhepa now became his chief consort. They shared a love and partnership which lasted for the rest of their marriage.
Rock relief at Fıraktın, near Kayseri, Türkiye. On the right, Puduhepa makes na offering before the sun goddess Hebat. On the left, Hattusili makes an offering to a storm deity. Photo by Krähenstein, CC By-SA 3.0.
The stay in Lawazantiya was long enough for the marriage to have produced at least one child, a son called Tudhaliya. But hostile forces both within and outside the Hittites’ northern territories required our prince’s return to his capital Hakpis without further delay. Muwattalli had made him King of the northern regions before the battle of Qadesh, and on his return home our prince had managed to stabilize the region before alarming news came from Muwattalli’s capital Tarhuntassa.
The Great King Muwattalli was dead. We have no evidence of foul play, or indeed of any reason for his death. But continuity of rule had to be assured by installing a new king on the throne as quickly as possible. As the empire’s second-in-command, the task fell to the dead king’s brother. Hastily summoned from his capital in the north, our prince quickly appointed his nephew Urhi-Teshub to the vacant kingship. There was some controversy over the appointment, for Urhi-Teshub was not a son of a Chief Wife, but merely of a concubine. Even so, long established rules of royal succession made clear that a concubine’s son could indeed become king if there were no son of a Chief Wife. And for some reason Muwattalli didn’t have a Chief wife, or if he did, he had no son by her, or at least not one worthy of succeeding to his throne.
A Throne Stolen
Yet Muwattalli must have made clear who his designated successor was, well before his death. The security of the kingdom depended on it, especially when Muwattalli was about to embark on a major campaign against Egypt, from which he might never return. If he didn’t, our prince must have been entrusted with installing his nephew Urhi-Teshub as Hatti’s new Great King. But in his so-called Apology, our prince gives the distinct impression that he alone was responsible for Urhi-Teshub’s elevation: “Since my brother did not have a legitimate son, I took up Urhi-Teshub, son of a concubine and made him King over all the Hatti Lands” (transl. Theo van dan Hout). As we shall see, he had good reasons for this piece of duplicity.
For a time uncle and nephew seem to have had a constructive relationship, with the former acting as the young king’s mentor. Indeed, the uncle may have been responsible for a number of his nephew’s decisions during his seven-year reign, including, most importantly, the shift of the capital back to Hattusa. But the pair’s relationship gradually soured, likely because the uncle increasingly assumed the role of puppeteer rather than merely adviser. Gradually, Great King Urhi-Teshub stripped his uncle of the powers he held in the north, until the uncle was left with but a single castle. This was too much for him. Anxious to give the impression of due legal process, he wrote to Urhi-Teshub proposing that the matter be judged in a court of law, presided over by Ishtar and the Storm God of Nerik. It was a put-up job. Not only was Ishtar the uncle’s patron deity, he had also rescued the Storm God’s holy city of Nerik in the north from centuries of enemy occupation — thus earning the god’s eternal gratitude.
Erased rock relief believed to have depicted Urhi-Teshub (aka Mursili III). Photo by Klaus-Peter Simon, CC By-SA 3.0.
Urhi-Teshub would have none of it. The dispute erupted into a brief civil war. In a quixotic display of bravado, Urhi-Teshub gathered what forces remained loyal to him, and marched north to confront his uncle who was much more experienced in fighting battles, and no doubt led a much stronger armed force. Urhi-Teshub was quickly defeated and shut up in the city of Samuha “like a pig in a sty”. But his uncle was merciful. Instead of executing or permanently locking up his defeated opponent, he sent him to Syria to carry out some light administrative duties. Past experience had shown that kings who assassinated their predecessors came to sticky ends through divine intervention; the prince’s grandfather Suppiluliuma was a classic example. He had looked the other way while his royal predecessor was murdered, leaving him free to mount the Hittite throne. Subsequently the gods inflicted a devastating plague on the land of Hatti to which Suppiluliuma himself fell victim.
Anyhow, the victorious uncle tells us that now “Ishtar took me as a prince and made me Great King (of the Hittite empire)”. And thus he became the prince who stole an empire. We do not know what his original name was. But on ascending the throne he assumed the name Hattusili. This was a revered name in Hittite tradition — the name of the founder of the city Hattusa and the Great King who led his armies into Syria and across the Euphrates to win famous victories there.
Winning Acceptance from his Royal Peers
There is much more of the new Hattusili’s life to be told. For example, his difficulties in convincing his royal peers, including the Great Kings of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt, that he was now the genuine Great King of Hatti. This was a task made much more difficult by Urhi-Teshub, who quickly fled his place of exile and apparently did the rounds of the Great Kings in an attempt to convince them that he was still Hatti’s Great King, before disappearing into Egypt, where Hattusili accused the pharaoh of giving him asylum.
Nevertheless, Hattusili managed to stabilize his rule, winning the acceptance both of his subjects and of the other Great Kings. And despite constant bouts of illness, he lived and reigned well into his seventies. Perhaps his single greatest achievement was his conclusion of a peace treaty with the pharaoh Ramesses II, a treaty which remained in force until the end of the Hittite empire.
Cuneiform inscription narrating the peace treaty between Hattusili III and Ramesses II. Neues Museum, Berlin. Vorderasiatisches VAT 7422. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Gasg), CC By-SA 4.0.
Much of Hattusili’s success was almost certainly due to his beloved Puduhepa, who shared both his bed and (metaphorically speaking) his throne. She figures as co-signatory in many important documents, both national and international, including the famous peace treaty with Egypt. And she survived her husband for many years, living into her nineties.
Despite the manner of seizing the Great Kingship, and the constant threats posed by Urhi-Teshub and his supporters, Hattusili’s reign was by and large a successful one, though when he died (perhaps around 1340) the empire had but a few decades left to it, like many states of the Late Bronze Age Near East. The last king of Hatti, Suppiluliuma II, realising that the end was at hand, emptied the palace and the temple archives of all their important documents and other valuable items and took them with them to a new place of royal residence. It has yet to be found.
Trevor Bryce is Honorary Professor of the University of Queensland, Australia. His most recent book, Hattusili, The Hittite Prince Who Stole an Empire. Partner and Rival of Ramesses the Great, has just been published by Bloomsbury Press.
How to cite this article:
Bryce, T. 2025. “The Hittite Prince Who Stole an Empire.” The Ancient Near East Today 13.4. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/hittite-prince-empire/.
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