INTRODUCTION

Change and Continuity

The collapse of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria was accompanied by widespread destruction of the urban centres, and the sequence of historical record provided by the cuneiform archives of Khattusha and Ugarit comes to an abrupt end at this point. The prolonged dark age which ensued in this area is characterized by the almost total absence of any indigenous historical sources, a lack by no means filled by the very rare external references. The settlement patterns exhibit a considerable degree of discontinuity: the political centres of the Iron Age are not those of the Late Bronze Age but have moved to new sites which now rise to political prominence for the first time. The extinction of the tradition of cuneiform writing in Anatolia and Syria emphasizes the cultural break.

The immediate cause of this hiatus here and elsewhere seems to have been the large-scale population movements that occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, among them that of the Sea Peoples along the coasts from Anatolia to Palestine, that of the Phrygians into Anatolia, the Aramaean invasions all across the Fertile Crescent, and the entry of the Hebrews into Canaan. However, in the area of the Hittites' most successful imperial expansion, namely south-east Anatolia, the Taurus mountains and north Syria as far as the Euphrates, it is clear that a basically ‘Hittite’ population survived and expanded. It seems likely that the main migration of Anatolian peoples to these territories followed the sack of their paramount capital Khattusha and the loss of central and western Anatolia.