A Good Day To Join The Hittite Army: At Last, Hittites

Since 2023, The Chatner has been following the adventures of a Bronze Age shepherd named Hani looking to join up with the Hittite Army. So far he has been unable to locate them, although he has managed to be taken hostage, serve as a galley-slave, narrowly escape the Uluburun shipwreck, and descend to the Underworld. And of course hope springs eternal.

“It seemed like a good day to join the Hittite army. I’d seen the advertisements at the trading-post – “Every day is a good day to join the Hittite army!” – and we were all great joiners at home. I come from a long line of persuadable men. My great-grandfathers had joined up with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Amorites, the Old Babylonians, and the Hurrians, depending on whomever was sweeping down out of the mountains with terrible swift swords, or flashing unexpectedly out from the sea on terrible white ships, or flaring out of the desert on lightning raids, at the time.”

A Good Day to Join the Hittite Army, Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three. Chapter Four. Chapter Five. Chapter Six. Chapter Seven.

I think I have mentioned before that I come from a long line of persuadable men. My family are sheep herders by trade, but as it happens our herds often graze in a small corridor of the world which comes under the periodic and careful attention of Empire. Sometimes the specifics tend toward the Sumerian, sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Old Babylonian and sometimes New, but they are always Empire, if you know what I mean.

So it is not at all uncommon for one or more of us to leave off sheep-herding for a generation and take up soldiering instead, while in their absence the women of the family take up sheep-herding. Then the servants do the women’s work, and the dogs do some of the servants’ work. Although for the most part the servants’ work just piles up until the soldiers return, and if they do not return in ten years the women usually hire new servants.

But for some time it had become apparent to those of us living in the village that even Empire was no longer what it was. Kings sent one another fewer tablets, both in peace and in war. Hardly anyone heard from Pylos. Copper was nowhere to be found. Even Hittites were scarce. I myself had been chasing the Hittite army all around the World Sea for several years without seeing either hide nor hair of them. You will never be hard pressed to find men who will tell you that we are living in a degraded age, but even the most optimistic seemed lately to agree that nothing was any good anymore.