What is it about?
How did territorial integration work in ancient empires? What are the mechanisms of socio-spatial interaction set forth when imperial control is established and further expanded? This paper addresses these questions by examining the case of the Hittite Empire that rose in Anatolia and then expanded into Syria between the 17th and the 13th century BCE.
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Why is it important?
This work represents one of the very few attempts so far to address Hittite history and political geography from both an archaeological and philological perspective. This approach allows to illustrate the interplay between micro-historical events and long-term social processes. With this work I am thus able to show how imperial policies led to the coagulation of semi-peripheries into homogeneous territorial provinces, fuelling at the same time centrifugal processes of spatial disaggregation.
Perspectives
For this article I had to collect a great amount of data, that I can now use as a base to expand research in many other directions.
Alvise Matessi
Universita degli Studi di Pavia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Making of Hittite Imperial Landscapes: Territoriality and Balance of Power in South-Central Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, February 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/janeh-2017-0004.
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