Amanda H. Podany is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her new book, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, is a vivid tour of a thousand years of ancient Near Eastern history, from 2300 to 1300 BCE. She focuses on the establishment of international diplomacy, how the great kings of the day devised diplomacy and trade. In the excerpt below we learn about a marriage contract between two kings, one of the ways countries sealed alliances.
When Tushratta took the Egyptian envoy to Mane to see the princess whom he had selected to marry Amenhotep III, Mane “praised her greatly.” Tushratta promised the pharaoh that he would get her safely to Egypt and hoped that the gods would “make her the image of my brother’s desire.” But Tushratta was probably only in his early twenties at the time; he had only recently thrown off the oppressive rule of his regent, and it’s almost impossible that any of his daughters was yet grown. But he wouldn’t have wanted to say no to Amenhotep’s proposal. His reply was “Of course I will give her,” and, though he must have been decades younger than the pharaoh, he promptly started referring to himself as Amenhotep’s “father-in-law.” The daughter he had chosen was named Tadu-Hepa, and Tushratta seems to have been very attached to her.
It would be hard to overstate the centrality of diplomatic marriages in international relationships by this time. The Amarna letters give us much more information about these marriages than we have for any other period of ancient Near Eastern history. The letters provide fascinating details: the stages of the negotiations, the vast quantity of gifts exchanged, the kings emotions and strategies, and even the words of one princess before her marriage. It does seem that an alliance wasn’t seen as entirely complete until the kings were related by marriage, as true family members, not just fictitious “brothers.” At that point, they said, their lands were united.
Mane, on returning to Egypt, probably did praise Tadu-Hepa, but perhaps told the pharaoh tha the girl was still quite young. The Egyptian king seems to have required that his wives be “women” before marriage. The Babylonian King Kadashman-Enlil I wrote about his daughter on another occasion that “she has become a woman; she is nubile” and therefore could now be take to Egypt to marry the king. Perhaps Amenhotep wanted to be sure his wives could bear children right away. But it was not unheard of in the ancient Near East for young girls to be “married” while continuing to live with their parents, waiting until they were older to consummate the marriage. Amenhotep III himself might well have been less than fourteen years old when he married Tiy. In any event, Tushratta must have been pleased when he could write in another letter, perhaps a few years after Mane had first seen his daughter that “she has become very mature, and…has been fashioned according to my brother’s desire.”
This issue of “my brother’s desire” seems to have been important. Amenhotep III wanted the woman chosen as his wife to be beautiful. Not only had Mane been sent to see the girl and give his assessment of her for the pharaoh, Tushratta also wrote, in all four letters that led up to the sending of Tadu-Hepa, “May (the gods) Shaushka and Aman make her the image of my brother’s desire.”
Mane came back to Mittani, some time after Tushratta had given the go-ahead for the marriage, to carry out the negotiations and to anoint the princess by pouring oil on her head.