The Mitanni

Five 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. In 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. Then 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. This 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. What you'll learn: How the Amarna letters preserve a vanished kingdom's diplomacy, marriages and complaints—in its own king's words Why a Hurrian-speaking kingdom had kings with Indo-Aryan names who swore by Vedic gods How 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 How Mitanni fought the Egypt of Thutmose III to a standstill, then married into it Why a first-rank empire collapsed in a single season when the Hittites struck Where archaeologists have looked for Washukanni, and why the search is still open What thousands of ordinary legal tablets from the town of Nuzi reveal that no royal inscription would This book is for you if: You've read about ancient Egypt, the Hittites or Mesopotamia and want the missing piece between them You're drawn to lost civilizations and genuinely unsolved archaeological questions You want narrative history built on documents, told with a clear account of what the evidence can and cannot support You'd rather have an honest reconstruction than a confident guess The 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.