A Good Day to Join the Hittite Army, Chapter Three: A Surprise Sea Voyage

Previously: You could imagine a pretty successful world without sheep in it, I mean, but you couldn’t imagine the same without grain, because when you get right down to it, sheep are really just an intermediary between people and grain. I mean a sheep is really just an elaborate way of making something new and exciting out of grain.

Since our last meeting I had found myself slightly further from my intended destination of Hattusa, namely at sea. I wonder if you are from one of those port-happy civilizations that are forever building boats and launching them in every direction? I would be sorry to bore you with a lot of colorful background about rigging and descriptions of what a helmsman does, for example, if you had been brought up to discern all the niceties of rigging from birth, and were nephew to a distinguished line of helmsmen stretching back to Bansabira the Minoan. I mean, if I were to say “we kept the late-setting Andromeda to our left-hand side as we sailed east,” when you knew it was the late-setting Boötes that is kept to the left-hand side on eastward voyages, and moreover thought it was a pretty clumsy sort of beginner’s mistake to have confused the two, it would be like trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. As it happens, I come from a long line of landlocked villagers — what my fellow-oarsmen tell me is correctly termed a “tellurocracy.” And of course I haven’t had much time to acquaint myself with the location of either Andromeda or Boötes, much less the time of their respective rising and setting. To be scrupulously honest, I have not had even a single sight of the sea since the time of my being brought aboard this vessel, as I have remained almost exclusively in the rowing-hold.

I was brought aboard the Dispute (for such is the name of the ship) in a rather spur-of-the-moment arrangement. You may remember that when last we spoke I was both hungrier and less aware of my surroundings than I might have been in my search for the Hittite army, having accepted the offer of their recruiting sign (“It’s always a good day to join the Hittite Army”) hung outside the trading-post of Naram the trader in my home village. But there’s a funny thing about the Hittite army — and, I suppose, any army, Hittite or otherwise — which is that while they might have asked you to sign up, and you might have decided to accept, the consolidation isn’t considered in any way finished until you manage to find them. The very first fellow I met on the road after five days of wandering had the advantage of carrying a sword and having had recently eaten something besides grass, and as a result of these military advantages made me his prisoner.

The fact that I was as good as, or very soon to be, a fully-fledged member of the Hittite Army did not matter to my captor, who was a Middle Assyrian and considered the Hittite Empire generally to be a lot of Johnny-come-latelies. The Middle Assyrians being direct descendants of the Old Assyrians, and before that the Early Assyrians, tend to look down on any civilization emerging after the Third Dynasty of Ur as arriviste. I did not try as hard as I might have to persuade Tiglath-Anni (for this was what my captor’s parents decided to name him, presumably after a long and heated discussion about the respective merits of Tiglath-Ninurta and Tiglath-Esharra) of the venerable antiquity of my own lineage, because captors are generally responsible for feeding their prisoners, at least if they hope to get any work or ransom out of them, and as I mentioned I was quite faint with hunger at the time.

It is true that I could not tell you the name of any of my ancestors any further back than Grandfather Alaksandu, who ate horses and considered smelting a sign of moral degeneracy and cultural decline, and who as far as I knew was still living back at home, but without going so far as definitively naming names, it was my understanding that our people had dwelled in our village since the first lighting of the sun, which ought to have been old enough to suit anybody. But as they say, the stomach has no ears, so I kept my lineage to myself and consoled myself over my sudden change in social status with a return to my old custom of lunch and dinner.

As it happened, Tiglath-Anni had some business in the city of Tarsus, about six days’ march from our present location. Tarsus, Tiglath-Anni informed me, had recently been sacked by the great king Salmanu-Ašared, before him are cities and behind whom only ash and dust remain, and had blinded as many as 14,400 Mitanni citizens. I had not known there were so many as 14,4000 people in all the world, and told him so (Tiglath-Anni did not expect to stand on ceremony as long as there were only the two of us in the wilderness and my hands and feet were securely bound). Tiglath-Anni said there were in fact 144,400 people in the world, at least one-tenth of whom the great king Salmanu-Ašared had already blinded and brought home in chains to Aššur, “And he will blind and bring home in chains thousands more, until the last mina of Aššur’s gold and silver has been redeemed from the rubble of Washukanni,” Washukanni being the capital of the Mitannites, the same people the great king Salmanu-Ašared had recently chased out of Tarsus.

Through our talk, I was also given to understand that until the recent ascent of the great king Salmanu-ašared, times had been rather hard in Aššur, and in fact the city had been made vassal to the Mitannites in Washukanni for seventy hateful years. So Tiglath-Anni grew merrier and merrier on our march to Tarsus, as we passed more and more travelers with bandaged grows on the road down to the sea, where he sold me to a group of gentlemen from Tyre, and from there returned home ninety shekels heavier but considerably lightened in spirits. The last sight I had of the good green world, Tiglath-Anni assured me that on his return journey he would certainly pray our ship might veer off-course and run aground in Hittite lands, but that I would likely fare just as well as Tarshish (for Tarshish was the ultimate objective of the gentlemen from Tyre.

Perhaps it was the effect of all my recent lunches, but I found myself similarly optimistic about the voyage, even shut up as I was in the galley-hold. From the man to my left I learned the name of this mighty black-timbered ship, the Dispute, her earlier ports of call along the route from Tyre, and the riches he and the rest of his fellows hoped to find in Tarshish; tin, copper, and silver, resin of the terebinth, cobalt glass and blackwood, agate and sard, which is also called carnelian, heads of bronze and excellent-wrought swords, and more besides. I should say that this man — Eshmouniaton we called him — was, like the rest of the oarsmen in the hold, a free man and a partial investor in the voyage, myself being the only prisoner on board. I was surprised to learn that sailors do not usually like to employ galley-slaves. I cannot say exactly where, but somehow I had gotten the idea that most ships were powered, if not by wind, then by the backs of galley slaves, who must be forever whipped by someone burly and unpleasant if they want to get anywhere. But Eshmouniaton said that in Tyre there are free men enough eager to put to sea that no one need to capture them aforehand, only it so happened that just before coming into port the Dispute had been caught in an unexpected storm, one the augurs had not foreseen before their setting-out, and the company quickly decided to draw lots and throw overboard the unlucky man who had brought the wrath of Athirat, Lady-of-the-Sea, whose wrath Eshmouniaton assures me it is no laughing matter to incur, and it so happened that the lots fell upon Zimri the Amorite, who Eshmouniaton seized with his own hands and threw into the cloud-sick waters, at which point the skies relented and the sea exhaled vapors of peace, and the ship sailed safely into Tyre, where the Dispute’s quartermaster almost immediately came upon Tiglath-Anni and came into possession of myself “for less than half of what we would have paid for any other galley-slave,” Eshmouniaton said, “and I do call that lucky.” So it was that all the other fellows agreed that I was a good omen, and it was very unlikely they would have to throw me into the sea too, Athirat Lady-of-the-Sea being very reasonable and easily satisfied between sacrifices.

Moreover, Eshmouniaton assured me, there was nothing the Hittite Army could have offered me that the Tyrian Navy could not match or even better. Indeed he spoke so well of the bright sea, of the dark prow of the ship ploughing the fields of the deep as we charted our westerly course, wrapped in sea-mists like a cloud and flinging them behind us in our wake, drawn forward by the perfect order of the sun by day and the white-cold stars by night, I felt as if I could see it myself. There were no portholes belowdecks, but the rest of the fellows assured me that Eshmouniaton described the Dispute just as she was. So it was that I came to judge my lot as a reasonably good one. It is true that I was still a prisoner, and not an expensive one at that, but as the only prisoner aboard I was on fair rations of date-palm wine, bread made with good red wheat, and turtle meat twice a day. Moreover I was going to travel, which had been part of my original aim, and they always say that travel broadens people. And if I had stayed any longer in Tarsus I would have almost certainly been blinded, but the gentlemen from Tyre assured me that as they were not in the business of empire but trade, they only ever blinded people who deserved it, and as I had neither lost them treasure nor lost my oar I had nothing to fear, so I call that lucky too.

My own oar (which had formerly been the oar of Zimri the Amorite before me) was a little more than nine cubits long, which passed through an oarport just wide enough to admit it, before coming to rest against the strap hung beneath the rowlock in front of me. Besides myself I counted twenty other oarsmen on the left-hand side of the boat, but as I can’t count any higher than that, I couldn’t tell you precisely how many men we had aboard with us. So it was that we set off for Uluburun.

[Image via]