The late archaeologist of the Troia Project, Manfred Korfmann, suggested that there probably was either one or several “Trojan wars.” The archaeological dig at Troy certainly supports the idea of a large, powerful city that underwent a long period of attack.
“You are a woman and think like one. You know nothing at all.” So, in a Hittite myth, says a very grouchy husband to his wife when she has asked yet again about his inability to get her pregnant. Does this show that Hittite men had a decidedly low view of women?
In the Hittite law codes a woman could both initiate a divorce and keep her inheritance and half her husband’s estate if she divorced. On the other hand, the expressions used in Hittite for marriage—there is no one abstract word for “to marry”—reflect the control men exercised over women, “to take a wife” “to take as his own wife” “to make her your wife.” The laws of adultery and rape present a similarly mixed bag.
In the Hittite world the hasawa served many essential roles. Using the sacred stories of myth, she brought the human and divine worlds back into harmony. She performed rites to “cure” family quarrels, disease, and injury. She made divinations to read the will of the gods and she delivered babies.
One way to see how a society views women is to examine its leaders. Are women included and, if they are, to what extent? Both the Hittite and Mycenaean world had powerful queens, in particular: Queen Puduhepa and Queen Helen of Sparta
This article discusses the lives of Hittite and Mycenaean women and the wide range of work they performed, including powerful landowning priestesses and skilled artisans. It also examines the relative wages of men and women in the Hittite and Mycenaean worlds.
Who were the Trojans? Probably a people called Luwian who were part of the extended Hittite world.
For a novelist, a beautiful or mystifying object preserved from the past can trigger an entire scene. An ancient setting with so many exotic and intriguing elements is particularly fruitful this way. I thought when I started writing fiction that my training as a classicist and years of teaching humanities, with its interplay between cultural artifacts, history and literature, had taught me enough to portray a town near Troy on the eve of the Trojan War. Every time a character reaches for something, wears clothes, eats food, travels or sits down, I had to know what might actually have existed—a… Read More »The Silver Stag Rhyton
