After the Collapse
At some point the mentions of Hayasa disappear from the Hittite annals, suddenly and completely. And then the implacable roller of history passes over the Hittites themselves, in the form of the Late Bronze Age collapse.
The end of a world
In the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC the old powers of the eastern Mediterranean come down. The Hittite empire ceases to exist. Mycenaean civilisation goes under, into the Greek Dark Ages. Cities across Syria and Palestine are reduced to rubble. And even Egypt, which beat off the Sea Peoples, never recovered its former strength: it survived, but lost for good its standing as a great power of the region.
Scholars are inclined to place in this same period both the events behind Homer’s Iliad and the Exodus.
The causes are tangled: the movement of those same Sea Peoples, internal crises and revolts, the exhaustion of economic systems, and the shift to iron—a cheaper and more available metal. (Anyone wanting a readable book-length treatment should look up Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C., which has done more than anything else to put this catastrophe into general circulation.)
The collapse ended the world of the Bronze Age and cleared the ground for the new societies and states of the Iron Age.
Diauehi
In north-eastern Anatolia, in the country where the Hittites had formerly been colliding with Hayasa, quite different formations appear in the Early Iron Age. One of them was Diauehi, a proto-state in the valley of the upper Kura and Araxes.
Assyrian sources mention them repeatedly from the ninth century BC onwards, recording campaigns against the chieftains of Diauehi, prisoners taken and tribute levied. It was probably a confederation of local tribes, inheriting the traditions of the region’s Late Bronze Age cultures and drawn first into the orbit of Assyrian and then of Urartian politics.
One such campaign is the subject of a famous inscription of King Menua, cut into a rock face at Yazılıtaş, in the Horasan district of Erzurum province. The name Yazılıtaş is simply Turkish for “the written stone.”
Menua recounts a campaign into the lands of Diauehi, listing the territories taken, the plunder and the number of captives—a formula characteristic of Urartian royal annals, in which a ruler’s authority is expressed in victories and trophies. The stone at Yazılıtaş is therefore both a document and a monument: an official chronicle, set in rock almost three thousand years ago.
Urartu and its imitators
Which brings us to Urartu proper, with its capital at Tushpa—modern Van—flourishing from the ninth to the sixth centuries BC. Among the characteristic Urartian objects found around Erzurum, the finest are the worked bronzes: those celebrated belts with their multi-figured scenes. The Erzurum Museum has good examples of the technique—fine, symmetrical, with a rhythm honed by professional workshops.
But the more interesting pair of exhibits is something else. Two plaques, evidently made after Urartian models. The lines are unsure, the figures simplified, the composition unbalanced. This is no longer the work of a royal centre’s workshop but an imitation—local, in all probability, and popular.
And it is precisely in these rough but sincere copies that another layer of culture becomes visible: the way a great style was refracted and domesticated at the periphery, becoming part of the everyday world of Iron Age people.
The phenomenon has a name in a quite different context. In third-century Britain, when the supply of Roman coin dried up, local workshops turned out vast quantities of crude imitations—shrinking, blurring and eventually garbling the imperial portrait until it was barely a face at all. Numismatists call them barbarous radiates, and museums display them next to the originals for exactly the reason these two plaques deserve their case: the official version tells you what an empire wanted to look like, and the copy tells you what its neighbours actually saw.
