A considerable amount is known about the reign of this Hittite King because his son, Mursilis II, later compiled a chronicle of his exploits, the Deeds of Suppiluliumas, which fortunately survives. Suppiluliumas (or Suppiluliuma) was the son of the strong, ambitious Hittite ruler King Tudhaliya III, and in young adulthood he acted as his father’s chief adviser as well as accompanied the king on his military campaigns. Despite the closeness of father and son, however, Tudhaliya ordained that he should be succeeded, following his death, by an older son, usually referred to as Tudhaliya the Younger. For reasons that are uncertain, this did not sit well with Suppiluliumas, nor with the leading Hit-tite nobles and generals. Not long after Tudhaliya the Younger ascended the throne, Suppiluliumas took it from him. According to Mursilis’ chronicle:
When my father revolted against Tudhaliya [the Younger], on the departure from [the Hittite capital of] Hattusas the princes, the lords, the military chiefs, and the nobles were all ranged alongside my father, and
An aerial view of the Elamite ruins in Susa, Iran. © Roger Wood/Corbis
The conspirators seized Tudhaliya and they killed [him].
King Suppiluliumas distinguished himself as an ambitious and politically astute imperialist. He led military campaigns that expanded Hittite power into northern Mesopotamia and Syria. But his greatest accomplishment was an invasion of Mitanni, then ruled by King Tushratta, which brought the once-powerful kingdom to its knees. Suppiluliumas’s army swept into Mitanni and sacked its capital, Wassu-kanni. Afterward the Hittites turned what was left of Mitanni into a vassal state whose leaders were expected to do the bidding of Suppiluliumas. In the “treaty” ending hostilities between the Hittites and the Mitannians, he states, “I, the great king, the king of Hatti, I conquered the Mitanni lands. ... I established the Euphrates River in my rear and Mt. Niblani as my boundaries. All of the cities of the land. . . of Mitanni... I allotted to my son, Piyassili.”
After subduing Mitanni, Suppiluliumas attacked the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Alalakh, and Amuru. He also negotiated a peace treaty with the king of Babylonia and sealed the deal by marrying that ruler’s daughter. Suppiluliumas eventually died of a serious disease, probably bubonic plague brought to Hattusas by infected prisoners of war. But he left behind the legacy of having turned Hatti, at least for the moment, into the most powerful kingdom in the Near East; later generations of Hittites, as well as modern historians, came to see him as the greatest of the Hittite kings.
See Also: Hattusas; Hittites; Mittani
World History
