Page 198 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

11

THE GREAT KING

1650-1580 B.C.

8 e fortifications were going up on the ridge be­
tween the deep gorges where the Halys and its tributary had
cut down into the central Turkish plateau. The whole line of the
wall was already marked out on the ground, enclosing an im­
posing area. It stretched three quarters of a mile from east to
west, and ran from the junction of the rivers for over a mile up
the ridge to the south. And it dwarfed into insignificance the
original city of Hattusas, destroyed in the recent war, whose
ruins stood desolate in the midst of the area marked out for the
new city.
The citadel was already completed on a spur jutting out to
the east, its walls of five-foot blocks of rough-hewn stone tower­
ing up against the deep blue of the Anatolian sky. And King La-
bamas of Kussara had already taken up his residence there. It
was to be his new capital, meant to mark symbolically his inherit­
ance of the power and prestige of the ancient kingdom of the
Hatti. And further to stress the point he had already begun to call
himself Hattusilis, the builder of Hattusas, retaining his ancestral
name of Labamas merely as a title, and as a reminder of his
great father. For the name Hattusilis harked back to something
much more ancient and venerable.
The Hatti had been a people of proud traditions. These tra­
ditions, often recited—in the old Asianic tongue—told how, be­
fore the Amorite had pushed up from the south and the Indo-
European penetrated from the north, the Hatti had been a
power to be reckoned with not merely here in central Asia Minor,