Suppiluliuma I

Suppiluliuma I took a Hittite kingdom that had been raided to its capital and in twenty-two years made it the equal of Egypt, destroyed Mitanni, took Syria to the Lebanon, received a letter from an Egyptian queen asking for one of his sons as her husband, and died with his army of the plague that the Egyptian prisoners had brought home; his son's prayers to the gods about that plague are the most personal documents the Bronze Age left. He was a younger son of Tudhaliya II who commanded the armies that recovered the Anatolian plateau in his father's reign, and about 1344 BC removed his brother from the throne and took it, which the later texts admit and the gods, his son thought, remembered. The enemy was Mitanni, the Hurrian kingdom across the Euphrates that held northern Syria. He made a treaty with the Hurrian king's rival, crossed the river, took the Mitannian capital Washukanni when the king fled, and in a single campaign marched down through Syria taking Aleppo, Alalakh and Qatna and installing his sons as kings of Aleppo and Carchemish, so that the Egyptian vassals of the Amarna letters wrote to the pharaoh asking for help that did not come. Mitanni was finished as a power in a second war a few years later. The letter came while he was besieging Carchemish. A queen of Egypt, the widow of a king named in the Hittite text as Nibhururiya, who is probably Tutankhamun, wrote that she had no son and would not marry a servant, and asked him to send a prince to be king of Egypt. He did not believe it, sent a chamberlain to check, was written to again, and sent his son Zannanza, who was killed on the road. The war he made in revenge brought back the prisoners and the epidemic. He died about 1322 with his heir, and the second son, Mursili II, spent his reign asking the gods why. The treaties he made with his vassals, with their histories and their curses, are the form every treaty of the ancient Near East took after him.

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