Herstory: An Ancient Cold War Resolved by a Marriage

By Judith Starkston

Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, in the decade after their colossal confrontation at Kadesh in

Ramses II,  Temple at Abu Simbel

1274 BCE, the two major world powers, Egypt and the Hittite Empire, eyed each other with hostility. Rather like the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War, neither could afford to restart open warfare, but the treaty they had signed formed an uneasy peace.

(If you are caught by surprise at the mention of the Hittites as a major world power at any period, you are merely a victim of what we might call the Forgotten Empire Syndrome. The Hittites got buried and lost to memory until not so long ago when modern archaeology dug them up.)

Rock carving of Queen Puduhepa (far right) making an offering

Into this diplomatic breach stepped Great Queen Puduhepa, the indomitable leader of the Hittites, who frequently took state and judicial affairs into her own hands on behalf of her husband Great King Hattusili III. Theirs was a genuine partnership of equals. Hittite law and custom allowed queens plenty of latitude but few took every inch of that power the way Puduhepa did. She reigned until she was at least 80 and probably started before she passed 20. An impressive run, with many impressive accomplishments.

We often think of the power of women through much of history as arising from their use as brides to kings, sealers of bonds between two dominant men. This reeks more than a bit of chattel. Certainly it isn’t the role we most admire and celebrate when we study women’s history.

But in Puduhepa’s case we get the bizarre mixture of a powerful woman using a lot of mostly anonymous young women as guarantors of her country’s peace and power. She arranged politically adept marriages for her husband’s many daughters and sons, both sending out Hattusili’s girls and bringing in foreign potentates’ daughters for his sons. (Only some of these children were literally Puduhepa’s. Concubines were the norm, but only for the royal family. Before Puduhepa arrived in the palace, there was already a good stock of future political brides and loyal generals. The loins of the king were the supplier of the state department staff and military leadership, so to speak…)

Of all the marriages Puduhepa arranged, the most complicated and tricky was between Pharaoh Ramses II and one of Puduhepa’s own daughters. She had to negotiate for months—years—the appropriate size of dowry, the travel arrangements, the status once of this wife within Pharaoh’s court, and most challenging, she had to first convince Pharaoh that he wanted a new wife.

This marriage was the crowning achievement of her peacemaking. The Hittite Empire needed this surety that Pharaoh would not back Hattusili’s challengers far more than Pharaoh needed anything from the Hittites. Hattusili and Puduhepa had usurped the throne from a secondary son of a concubine who as near as history can tell us was singularly untalented at ruling judiciously. They may have been right to take the throne, but that didn’t eliminate all the challenges of establishing a legitimate claim. Marriage with Pharaoh settled the question.

Rameses smiting the Hittites
A really BIG Pharaoh
in Egyptian iconography

Puduhepa’s other difficulty in making this peace-sealing marriage happen lay in Ramses’s personality. He shows clear signs of an ego even bigger than the one of a certain recently elected U.S. president. Not an easy guy to talk into doing something that might imply that he is equal to, not greater than, his least favorite “Brother” king. (If you were important enough, you got to address your fellow king as brother. Most kings didn’t qualify.)

In defense of Puduhepa’s chattel-like use of her daughter, other than that it was the norm and the best expected outcome for said daughter, the queen took extreme precautions to assure her daughter’s status as Ramses’ “first wife.” He was an old man with a large harem and women tended to disappear into oblivion at his court. They probably led comfortable lives, but who knew for sure? None of the ambassadors Puduhepa sent could reassure her on this point. The Babylonian princess had been denied access to her family’s messengers once the marriage was consummated. Sadly, Ramses went back on his promise to keep this newest wife as the top lady. But Puduhepa tried. If he hadn’t lied, she’d have won that one, too. Along with world peace and economic well being for her country. Not too bad with one marriage deal.

Here are some trimmed excerpts from her most famous letter to Ramses, giving him a hard time

A cuneiform letter similar to Puduhepa's
next to its clay envelope
Istanbul Archaeological Museum

about his complaints. He has accused her of stalling, but she points out putting a dowry together is tricky because the king before Hattusili (whom Hattusili usurped and who is now living in exile with Ramses) stole most of the state treasury (or something like that, the words aren’t totally clear, as is true with pretty much every word in every Hittite document for reasons I won’t go into, but that are fascinating.)

After her dig about the missing treasury, which she tells Ramses to ask his pal the ex-king about, she carries on with some salesmanship:

“To whom shall I compare the daughter of heaven and earth whom I will give to my brother: Should I compare her to the daughter of Babylonia, of Zulabi, or of Assyria? [absolutely not, she’s way better]

[Then back to the dowry quarrels, Ramses wants a lot] Does my brother have nothing at all? Only if the Son of the Sun God, The Son of the Storm God, and the Sea have nothing, do you have nothing! Yet, my brother, you want to enrich yourself at my expense! It (i.e., such behavior) is unworthy of name and lordly status.”

A later bit of salesmanship about the daughter Puduhepa has chosen for Ramses comes in this sentence: “And may the gods likewise endow the daughter whom I will give to my brother with the Queen’s experience and capacity for nurture.”

As she hints in the letter, Puduhepa counted as one of her greatest accomplishments her mothering and loving raising of her children and, quite inclusively, Hattusili’s children by his concubines. Sometimes that poses challenges for the modern mind to get around—just what was this equal partnership really like?

About the author

Judith Starkston is the author of Hand of Fire: A Novel of Briseis and the Trojan War

Her website is a great place to subscribe to if you enjoy engaging windows into ancient history and archaeology. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter. 

Curing the Hittite Way: Analogical Magic and Powerful Words

Hittite Mother Goddess Figurine

By Judith Starkston

Like many ancient peoples, the Hittites of the Late Bronze Age (13thC BCE) in what is now modern Turkey, along with their semi-independent ally, Troy, believed that illness came from the gods. Sickness revealed a lack of harmony between mortal and immortal worlds that once restored would also restore physical well-being. Their definition of illness was considerably broader than our modern one often is. A quarrel between a wife and husband was viewed as needing the attention of the healer just as much as a cough or broken limb. Perhaps in this respect they had a more progressive, holistic view.

Although there is some evidence of herbal cures, poultices and brews of various sorts as well as practical wound treatments, most of what we know about Hittite cures is more magical than practical. They were particularly drawn to analogical magic. So if a baby in the womb was turned the wrong direction, they would hold a root vegetable, perhaps an onion, that had layers within layers and turn the inner layer as they said the proper words, and the assumption was that the baby also would turn in the same manner as the onion. This is an example that strains our credulity. Certainly they noticed the baby didn’t turn? But perhaps they accompanied this magical formula with some manual procedure and attributed the benefit to the prayer and rite.

Hittite Cuneiform Tablet

The cuneiform tablet only mentions rather opaquely an unidentified root vegetable, turning and special words. For Hittites words were of utmost importance and power. They had a saying, “The tongue is the bridge.” The words are the connection between human and divine worlds. Words have transformative power.

The Hittites were also early practitioners of “scapegoating” as a healing process. If you suffered from a pain in your chest, the healer would rub a mouse on the source of the pain, transfer some red and green wool threads from your chest to the mouse, and then send the mouse away—again with the proper incantations to the gods. Your pain was supposed to wander off with the mouse. In some cases it probably did, at least temporarily. Modern studies of placebos show a remarkably high success rate, after all. If your whole belief system built trust in the efficacy of a rite, it may well have accomplished pain reduction often enough to sustain the overall belief.

Here is a brief excerpt from my novel Hand of Fire, showing a healer named Briseis trying to use her array of tools to heal her mother, divinations, rites recorded on tablets, incantations, and analogical magic:  

Briseis believed her mother had given in to this illness, accepted defeat from the beginning. Illness generally came from the gods as punishment for violations against the gods’ laws. In case her mother had neglected a sacrifice or some similar affront— any more serious sin seemed unlikely—Briseis performed a snake divination at the temple to ask Kamrusepa directly how they had offended the gods. But the swimming snakes had given only a muddled answer as they touched the words inscribed in the great basin. The snakes failed to identify anything Briseis could correct. Even before she’d tried the divination it had seemed impossible to Briseis that her mother could have sinned so greatly that Kamrusepa sent the illness, but giving in to the disease felt like a sin to Briseis. Her mother had resigned herself to death too easily, and the gods abandoned her because she did not love life enough— their gift to all. She needed to be dragged back to life.

Briseis had an idea. “You two stay with Mama. I need some supplies.”

She ran downstairs to the back storerooms, the sound of the storm growing muted as she went deeper into the house with its thick walls. Once inside the library, the comforting odor of clay soothed her. Her mother, Briseis thought, was a mixture of lavender and earthy clay. She pulled tablets from the wooden pigeonholes, scanning the words formed with a reed stylus that her brothers said looked like bird tracks. She found it, “The Breath of Life Incantation.” It hadn’t made sense to her when she’d been required to copy it for practice three years ago, but it did now. Her heart felt light. She committed the rite to memory and tucked the palm-sized tablet back in its place.

She hurried through the megaron hall, the main room of the house with its two-storied ceiling and circular hearth, out to the main courtyard and into the kitchen opposite the stables. The wind-driven rain splattered under the portico’s shelter.

The cook, a middle-aged woman with a kinder heart than her boney, hard face indicated, looked up in surprise from sorting lentils when Briseis appeared at the door.

“For Mama, hurry. I need honey, mint and sweet wine.”

The cook quickly gathered everything on a tray, and Briseis carried it back upstairs. From the carved wooden chest next to the floor-to-ceiling loom in her mother’s sitting room, she grabbed a sachet of lavender and a clay incantation jar shaped like a fig.

Iatros and Eurome looked up when she entered the sleeping chamber. She set down the tray on the table and leaned in close over her mother. Antiope’s lips were parted, her eyes closed, their lids withered like fallen leaves in winter. The space between breaths felt impossibly long.

Iatros crouched by the bed, biting his upper lip, eyes fixed on his sister.

Briseis shifted her mother’s legs aside and sat down. She closed her eyes and waited while the fear she felt emptied out with each breath she exhaled. The power of the ritual’s words filled her mind. She called to Kamrusepa, praying for her to give power to this rite.

She opened her eyes and placed both hands on her mother’s chest, then her head.

“Antiope, wife of Glaukos, mother of Bienor, Adamas, Iatros, and Briseis, you have heard death whisper in your ear. You have mistaken that whisper for the nurturing breath that flows in and out of every human being. You have gone after death. Return now. Hear the breath of life.”

Briseis poured wine and honey into the fig jar, breathed into it, and then added the lavender and mint, crushing the leaves to release their scent as she held the jar close to her mother.

“Antiope, do you smell the spring? The time of new growth and blossoms? Remember the spring. Remember your children. Remember the sweetness of life. Remember that you love life. Take a strong breath.”

Silently Briseis added, Come back, Mama, I need you. Remember how much I love you. Antiope sighed and her eyelids fluttered for a moment. Iatros cried out.

Briseis’s heart leapt like a deer. “Mama!”

Daughter and son clung to their mother’s hands. They waited for Antiope to open her eyes and reassure them that she would live. They listened for the slow rattle to quicken. Instead it faded, caught once, tangled in a last wisp of life, then fell silent.

Tears ran down Briseis’s face, hot against her skin. Gradually her wet cheeks grew cold.

About the Author:

Judith Starkston writes historical fiction and mysteries set in Troy and the Hittite Empire. Ms. Starkston is a classicist (B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, M.A. Cornell University) who taught high school English, Latin and humanities. She and her husband have two grown children and live in Arizona with their golden retriever Socrates. Hand of Fire is her debut novel.

Find an excerpt, Q&A, book reviews, ancient recipes, historical background as well as on-going information about the historical fiction community on Starkston’s website www.JudithStarkston.com

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Visit on Goodreads Hand of Fire or Amazon

Helpful, Harmful and Hallucinogenic Herbs of the Bronze Age

By Judith Starkston

In my novel Hand of Fire, set in what is now Turkey during the Trojan War, I made a lot of people sick. That was the easy part. But when I wanted to cure them, well, that proved more problematic. What were the Bronze Age equivalents of aspirin and Robitussin in about 1300 BCE?

Cuneiform Tablet, David Hawkins Wikimedia

My main character, Briseis, the woman Achilles and Agamemnon fought over in the Iliad, is a hasawa, which I translate as “healing priestess.” Accordingly I had to show the specific cures she used. I had some excellent resources to draw from. Large libraries of clay tablets written in cuneiform have been uncovered, dating to this period. They describe in detail the rites—many of which we would categorize as magical—that could bring a sick person back into harmony with the gods and hence to health. They also list the herbs and roots she would have used as medicines. But scholars usually can’t identify/translate the names of the specific plants mentioned on the tablets.

Hmmm. What’s a responsible historical novelist to do? Early on in my research I discovered a Greek Herbal by Dioscorides Pedanius of Anazarbos. This isn’t an ideal source—he’s a millennium or so after my period, but it’s the earliest listing of medicinal herbs I could locate and such knowledge is traditional and not likely to change dramatically, and this guy did live in Turkey not too far from where my novel is set—near Troy. I combined Dioscorides with some modern information about herbal medicines and did my best uniting that understanding with the cuneiform tablets.

One tablet mentions a plant we can translate—the onion—but this rite demonstrates how differently a Trojan or Hittite healer might approach healing a sick person.

Onion layers, Wikimedia

“Like this onion he peels and throws into the fire—and fire consumes it entirely—whose roots will not take hold in the soil, whose shoot will not sprout, so may the pain of my sin and transgression, the sickness that is in my body, my flesh, my veins be peeled off like this onion.”

This rite uses analogical magic—as with this onion, so with my body. The Bronze Age peoples in the region we now call Turkey and into Mesopotamia believed that illness came as punishment from the gods for offenses by the sick person. So it made sense (to them) that disease could be lifted by the gods if the correct procedure was followed—hence the creative use of onion layers. (Wouldn’t you love to peel away your problems and burn them in a fire? The symbolism is quite compelling.)

In the case of this onion, the actual plant is consumed by fire not ingested by the patient. Another example of this kind of analogical use of plants occurs when a person’s soul or inner state can be “sweetened” by making it like the inside of a grape or fig. The Hittites did not distinguish between mental and physical ailments—they were on to something there. Other times, as we hear from the tablets, plants were used in ways that we more readily identify as medicinal.

Astragalos, Magnus Manske Wikimedia

My character, Briseis, needed something to staunch blood in a wound. Dioscorides tells his reader of astragalos, the root of which can be ground and when sprinkled on a wound, controls blood flow. He mentions helpfully that it is hard to grind, so if Briseis is particularly upset she can be seen to smack that pestle hard and this is all to the good. Later, on Google, I discovered astragalus (Latin spelling) turns out also to be used in traditional Chinese medicine as an energizing tonic not a blood stauncher, but I’m sticking with Dioscorides and hoping that’s what Briseis used. It happens to grow in both Turkey and China, so it makes sense that two separate traditions discovered this handy little shrub.

Henbane, Wikimedia

Historians suspect that hallucinogenic plants might have been used in some ancient religious processes, such as having a priestess “speak” in the voice of a god. I hunted about for a possible plant to include in my book since no such secret information gets reported from the ancient world. I read about henbane, an herb that has curative qualities as well as hallucinogenic ones. Henbane induces sleep and soothes coughs, among other things. But then I found an article describing the experiences of a few unfortunate overdose victims of henbane. They had terrifying visions of wolves attacking them. I immediately did my due diligence as an author. Did henbane grow in ancient Turkey? Is it mentioned in the written record? Yes on both accounts. (Dioscorides includes it in his herbal, although he’s not very helpful about this particular plant.) A plausible case can be made for it. Into my novel went henbane—who could resist wolves? And conveniently I had a character with a chronic cough.

Mullein, Wikimedia

At one point Briseis marvels at the multiple qualities a single plant can offer. She is walking at night with torches made from the mullein plant and she used mullein-leaf infusion earlier that day to sooth the queen’s cough. Mullein is another traditional plant that I had to cull from modern sources and then backtrack to see if it could plausibly have been something Briseis used. But when the queen’s chest hurt from that cough, Briseis took a piece of green wool and tied it on a mouse, spoke the necessary words (words were considered to have intrinsic power of their own), and then sent the mouse away. Off goes the chest pain. Or so the theory goes. This scapegoat method is another common thread in the Hittite and Near Eastern medical/magical traditions, rather similar to the onion rite. My heroine Briseis would have used a combination of herbal and magical processes to bring health and well-being.

So we may not know all the specifics of herbal lore in the Bronze Age, but we can make some educated guesses and combine those with the more solid ground of ritual procedure and end up with a pretty accurate portrayal of what a hasawa, a healing priestess living near Troy, would have done to help those struck by any sort of illness, physical or mental. 

For more about Bronze Age Troy and the Hittite Empire or to hear the announcement of the release date of Hand of Fire, go to judithstarkston.com

Feasts: Bronze Age Solstice Feast by J.S. Dunn

By J.S. Dunn

“Mead distilled sparkling, its praise is everywhere.”

From Welsh myth, Song to Mead

What did the ancient Irish eat at 4,000 years ago? And, what about the peoples in what is now Spain’s Costa Verde, and up the Bay of Biscay to the Morbihan and Brittany’s coasts? At first, researching prehistoric foods looks daunting.

The Dindshenchas, a medieval text of oral histories, has clues to the early diet: the sacred salmon of knowledge, the hazelnut which also imparts wisdom, cereal grains for porridge and brewing, and various berries. The ancients made milk and butter from their herd animals. To this day, well-formed oak casks holding Bronze Age butter turn up at digs in the Irish bogs, the contents still smelling of dairy---though no one samples!

Meats of early domesticated sheep and cattle, and cuts of wild deer and boar, show in the bone counts from archaeological digs. Fish were trapped in wattle river weirs long before the Bronze Age. The north Atlantic produces a diverse marine life that is richer than the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic peoples consumed shellfish in great numbers per the remains in ancient shell middens: mussels, whelks, periwinkles, oysters, lobster.

Despite an ancient prohibition on killing swans in Irish myths, there is evidence that swans were indeed eaten for food, and swans winter at the river Boyne and other areas in great numbers. The prohibition re: swans was perhaps politically motivated or may have been an early conservation measure.

The ancients’ knowledge of edible seeds, roots, and herbs, would far exceed our own based on paleobotany surveys at excavations. They collected and dried the wild apple, and berries, which were used for beverages in addition to mead from fermented honey.

In warmer latitudes like ancient Spain, the Bronze Age people began to cultivate the olive and other fruiting shrubs. There is evidence they knew which acorn varieties to collect, and ground those into flour. Spain’s meltingly tender acorn-fed ham of today may have begun in antiquity given their early use of the abundant acorns.

The richness of the environment held bounty for those who well knew how to utilize it. For these ancients, a feast was literally a sacrament of life. The reborn winter solstice sun showed the ancients that spring’s bounty would return.

Boyne solstice feast:

Smoked salmon, smoked haddock

Dried apples stewed with fresh or dried swan

Wild boar, venison, joint of beef ; boiled or roasted

Meal cakes of finely ground hazelnuts, seeds, and grains, sweetened with honey

Soft white cheese, sweet butter

Mead, herbal infusions, primitive beer and cider

Juniper reduction sauce for modern roast wild game:

Here is a simple (and relatively low-fat) reduction sauce if you happen to be serving wild boar or venison for winter solstice or a more modern holiday. Juniper berries impart a flavor like rosemary with a citrus hint. The berries should be dried and crushed before use. Note, buy in a shop—don’t try to harvest your own; some juniper varieties are toxic.

Roast or sauté the meat, keep warm. Deglaze the pan with around ½ cup of red wine (or Calvados, or Guinness, or whatever!), and simmer that mixture in a heavy saucepan until the essence reduces by half in volume. The sauce should coat a spoon. Add one chopped shallot ( or wild garlic shoots if you have those at hand ) and  8 fluid ounces of beef consommé ( not bouillon) and reduce again. If desired, butter (3 tbsp) can be added for a smoother, shiny sauce or to correct overcooking! Add the crushed juniper berries when almost ready to serve the sauce. 4-6 portions.  

J.S. Dunn lived in Ireland during the past decade, on 12 lovely acres fronting a salmon river. The author continues to research and travel the Atlantic coasts and recently  enjoyed wonderful seafood on the Cotes d’Armor, and in Cornwall, and at the famed Lobster Pot restaurant in County Wexford, Ireland.

History's Mysteries: The Nebra Sky Disk

By J.S. Dunn

THE FORGED HEAVEN AND AN ENIGMATIC OBJECT OF CA 2000 BCE

The Nebra sky disk

Der geschmiedete Himmel, the forged heaven.

That’s the poetic title of an exhibit that featured a bronze disk about the size of a dinner plate. The exhibit took place in Mannheim, Germany in July 2006, and attendance totaled over 300,000 persons over a few months. Why the buzz?

For starters, this disk is absolutely unique. No prototypes, earlier models, or later knockoffs exist. The Nebra sky disk, as it is called, has been the subject of controversy since it was rescued from looters who dug it up around twelve years ago by a daring archaeologist participating with police in a tense sting operation. Instead of netting one million DM for their troubles, the thieves got jail time. That much of the story would suffice for a good thriller film. The star might well be the disk itself, its upper surface covered in gold foil symbols of a sun (or full moon), a crescent moon, scattered stars, and gold foil strips at precise places on its perimeter.

The real controversy and the intellectual kick of this object lies in deciphering when and where it was made, and ultimately why or its purpose. Micron-level analysis of its green patina surface revealed that it is genuine, the corrosion crystals too large to have been faked. The metal composition is northern European rather than Mediterranean, despite its having been found with Mediterranean-styled long knives. 

Other items found with the Nebra sky disk

The overall find has been dated with relative confidence to say that the disk was made between 2100 BCE and 1700 BCE and deposited shortly after the latter date with the associated objects. Its perimeter has pierced holes that were added to it later and indicate a long period of use or change in its function. But physical scientists and archaeologists still debate its function.

Is this the oldest astronomy object in Europe, and older than any Egyptian representation of the stars (the oldest of those from around 1400 BCE)? If so, the implications for northern Europe at this time are sweeping.  Rather than being brutish warriors ruling by the sword, crudely clad, and digging their carrots with a short stick, is it possible those in the northern part of what is now Europe developed an astronomy that rivaled that of later Babylonian, Greeks, Phoenicians?

Naysayers claim the object to have been merely decorative, the riddle of the sun and crescent moon appearing together on a field of “star” shapes signaling nothing in particular. Other experts analyze old stone carvings, clay tablets, and papyrus fragments to find parallels. For those of us who enjoy astronomy, and the history of scientific instruments, the puzzle is delicious.

The Sky Disk has even been said to be the famed shield of Achilles as wrought by Hephaistos that contained the heavens: sun, moon, and Pleiades according to Homer, Book 18, The Iliad. To read more about the Sky Disk, Google Nebra Sky Disk and find abundant articles and discussions debating its origin and purpose.

The sky disc of Nebra was found near Europe's oldest observatory in Goseck

The decorated disk in bronze and gold is truly a beautiful object and the fascination of science and laypersons is unlikely to abate. No other such object has been found to date in northern Europe. However, the wooden observatory-circles of Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium; and the engineered mounds and megaliths from even earlier dates on Ireland, Wales, and Orkney, stand today in mute testimony to the power of the heavens on early human imagination.

J.S. Dunn is the award-wining author of Bending the Boyne, which took first place in the Next generation Indie Book Awards 2011