Twenty-six texts found in the Hittite capital of Hattusa dating from the fifteenth–thirteenth centuries B.C.E. contain references to a land known as “Ahhiyawa,” which most scholars now identify with the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean world. The subject of continuing study and controversy since they were first published in 1924, the letters are still at the center of Mycenaean-Hittite studies and are now considered in studies and courses concerned with Troy, the Trojan War, and the role of both Mycenaeans and Hittites in that possible conflict. This volume offers, for the first time in a single source, English translations of all twenty-six Ahhiyawa texts and a commentary and brief exposition on each text’s historical implications. The volume also includes an introductory essay to the whole Ahhiyawa “problem” as well as a longer essay on Mycenaean-Hittite interconnections and the current state of the discipline.

This work presents full translations of more than 50 documents from the files of the "foreign office" of the Hittite Empire: 21 treaties, 18 diplomatic letters, and 18 royal edicts and miscellaneous records concerning the relations of the Hittites with their Anatolian and Syrian vassals, as well as with other great powers such as Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. Originally composed in Hittite or in the Akkadian lingua franca of the day, many of these texts have never before appeared in English. A short introduction places each document in its historical and cultural context, and a general essay acquaints the reader with the diplomatic practice of the Late Bronze Age. This collection of documents is a major source book for historians of the Ancient Near East and for students of cuneiform and Biblical law. It will also prove useful for those investigating the relationship between Biblical covenant theology and its possible antecedents in older Near Eastern treaty patterns.