Ancient Peace Treaty Fragment Identified at Hittite Capital Hattusa

On September 21, the International Day of Peace, Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that a small clay fragment unearthed at Hattusa is a piece of the world's oldest known peace treaty. The peace treaty fragment was found near Building E on Buyukkale, the hill that held the Hittite royal palace, and researchers spent about a year studying its inscription before confirming where it belonged, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

The text is written in Akkadian cuneiform, the diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age, and experts identified the peace treaty fragment as part of the Hittite copy of the Kadesh Peace Treaty. The agreement was struck in the mid-13th century B.C.E., around 1269 B.C.E., between the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III, ending more than two centuries of intermittent war. This peace treaty fragment joins other pieces of the same Hittite copy recovered at Hattusa during the site's earliest excavations in 1906.

The fragment's message is about refugees

The text on the peace treaty fragment matches sections 12 through 20 of the treaty, which set the rules for people who fled from one kingdom into the other during the fighting. The clauses say refugees had to be returned, and they forbid destroying the homes of the people sent back. Announcing the find on social media, Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the lines about homes carried a message from thousands of years ago to the present day, and added that everyone deserved to live in safety, peace and tranquility, per a translation by the state-run Anadolu Agency.

Two empires fought over Syria for two centuries

Egypt and the Hittite Empire were the two great powers of the Late Bronze Age, and both wanted control of Syria and the Levant, the territory between them. The worst single battle came around 1275 B.C.E. at Kadesh, near what is now Homs in Syria. Ramses II marched north with part of his army after Hittite spies fed him false intelligence, and the Hittite king Muwatalli II answered with a massed chariot attack. Tens of thousands of soldiers fought, and neither side could claim a real victory. Egyptian monuments present it as Ramses II's triumph, while the Hittites held the field and kept the city.

The fighting went on for about 16 more years. Then Ramses II and Muwatalli's successor, Hattusili III, signed the treaty that finally closed the war. It pledged eternal friendship, lasting peace, territorial integrity, nonaggression, extradition and mutual help, according to the United Nations. It also promised that each side would send help if the other was attacked by a third party. The newly identified peace treaty fragment comes from the part of the deal that handled what happened to ordinary people once the fighting stopped. Both sides also had new dangers rising on other borders, Assyria threatening Hatti and the Sea Peoples pressing Egypt, which gave each ruler a reason to stop spending armies on the old front.

Silver originals are gone, but the copies survive

The treaty was apparently first cast in silver, and those originals are lost. What remains are copies made by each side. Two hieroglyphic versions were carved into the walls of temples at Thebes, in what is now Luxor, and translated in the 19th century after Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Hittite versions were written in cuneiform on clay tablets at Hattusa. The pieces dug up in 1906 are now displayed at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, and a copper replica of the treaty hangs in the United Nations building in New York. Every peace treaty fragment found at Hattusa since then has helped scholars piece together more of the Hittite version of the text.

Cuneiform is not an alphabet. Its signs, somewhere between six hundred and a thousand of them, stand for syllables or whole words, so reading a broken peace treaty fragment well enough to place it inside a known document can take months. Researchers at Hattusa hope further digging will turn up more segments of this copy of the treaty, and each new piece makes the text a little more complete.

A translated passage has the two rulers calling each other brother, declaring that they are at peace and united, and saying their bond of friendship is better than any that came before between the lands of Egypt and Hatti. The treaty reads like a deal between two tired empires that had finally accepted war had failed, and it spelled out the practical business of former enemies living side by side. The new peace treaty fragment keeps the part about the people caught in between, the ones who fled and needed a way home.

For more on the discovery, see the Biblical Archaeology Society's report on the find. For more archaeology coverage, read about the Roman-era wall recently found beneath Paris and browse the Old World topic page.