During the Mycenaean period in Greece, the Kingdom of the Hittites flourished in central Asia Minor. When, in the late fourteenth and thirteenth centuries bc, the Hittite kings Mursilis II, Muwatallis II, and Hattusilis III sought to gain control over the lands of western Asia Minor, they came into contact with another land which they called Ahhiyawa. It lay somewhere to the west of Asia Minor in the Aegean region as a fragmentary passage in the so-called Ten-year Annals of Mursilis II shows.
According to this text, Mursilis II in his third year defeated the King of Arzawa which lay, roughly, on the territory of classical Lydia. After the battle Mursilis II marched into Arzawa's capital, Apasa (=Ephesus) and "he (Uhha-LU-is, the King of Arzawa) fled before me and went over the sea to an island and stayed there. . . Now Uhha-LU-is died there in the sea, but his sons separated. . . a son of Uhha-LU-is. . . came out of the sea and went to the King of the Land of Ahhiyawa. . . I (Mursilis II) sent. . . by ship" (Gotze 1933: 50-66).
The island in question, since the King of Arzawa fled from Ephesus, could easily have been Samos or Chios. From western Asia Minor one gets to Ahhiyawa by sea only; this suggests that Ahhiyawa lay either on another Aegean island such as Rhodes or one of the Cyclades or even further to the west on mainland Greece. Ahhiyawa closely resembles, even if it is phonologically not demonstrably identical to, a Greek toponym which in a contemporary Linear B inscription (C 914) is written as Akhaiwija (=the classical Achaia). In that text from Knosos, goods are being sent to Akhaiwija, so Akhaiwija probably lay outside of the Kingdom of Knosos.
The story of the conflicts between Ahhiyawa and the Hittites provides additional clues as to Ahhiyawa's location. An Ahhiyawan raider, Piyamaradus (known from the Tawagalawas Letter: Sommer 1932: 2-18), attacked Lazpa (Lesbos) according to the Manappa-Tarhundas Letter, so Lesbos is ruled out as Ahhiyawa. Correspondence between the King of Ahhiyawa and the King of the Hittites (Sommer 1932: 268-270) mentions conflicts about islands in the northeastern Aegean, where Ahhiyawa held interests, but evidently did not lie. The Tawagalawas Letter shows that in western Anatolia Ahhiyawa held an outpost called Millawanda (probably Miletus), which the Hittite King Hattusilis III eventually captured. Since the Pylians carried out a raid on Miletus (see Box 2.2), Pylos presumably was not Ahhiyawa. Wherever Ahhiyawa lay, it need not have been large in size. The conflicts of Athens and Rhodes with the Persian Empire and Antigonus Monophthalmus' kingdom respectively in the classical and Hellenistic periods respectively show how even a comparatively small state in the Aegean could with a good fleet challenge a land-based empire in Asia Minor (see chap. 12 and Box 23.3). Finally, the conflict between Ahhiyawa and an Asiatic power suggests, as does the Pylian slaving raid (Box 2.2), a genuinely historical background to the (heavily fictionalized) story of the Trojan War in the Iliad.
World History
