History and temporality in Bronze Age Anatolia: the King of Battle narrative in archaeological and historical tradition

Recent developments in Anatolian studies modify our understanding of one of the earliest stories said to have taken place in Anatolia: the šar tamḫari narrative, or ‘King of Battle’. On the one hand, archaeological evidence is accumulating to provide a plausible context for events like those described in the text. On the other, incorporation of the social significance of local cultural logics of time and history allow us to think of the narrative in a new light: less as a historical puzzle to be solved in a positivistic sense, and more as a window into the practice of reshaping and compressing past events into newly valuable narratives. More productive than ‘protohistory’ and related terms is a recognition that instead of linear historical transformations marked by events like the adoption of writing, we should be concerned with different modes of history marked by heterogeneous approaches to past events.