Sutean Tribes on the Borders between Ḫatti and Assyria: A Case of ‘Displaced Peoples’?

The most recently published letters from the House of Urtēnu (Lackenbacher and Malbran-Labat 2016 = RSO 23) revealed a hitherto unknown battle between the Hittite army and Sutean tribes. It took place near Tuttul (modern Tell Bi’a), in the eastern periphery of the Hittite empire, a few decades before the end of the Late Bronze Age (LBA). The aim of this confrontation was to expel the Suteans from the Hittite borders. To accomplish this, several Syrian vassal kingdoms were commanded to send troops and chariots to the Hittite overlord, King Niqmaddu III of Ugarit being one of them (Cohen and Torrecilla 2022. “The Campaign against the Suteans and the Project in The Land of Mukiš: A Consideration of Letters RSO 23 28–36, and 39 from the House of Urtēnu in Ugarit.” IOSA 21: 29–49). Since the only version that we have is that of the Hittites, this paper investigates the context of the Tuttul showdown from the point of view of the Suteans, in order to understand the circumstances that led to the confrontation. With this purpose, near-contemporary texts from sites such as Emar or the Assyrian sites of Dūr-Katlimmu, Ḫarbe, or Tell Sabi Abyad mentioning Suteans and other semi-nomadic tribes such as the Aḫlamû are brought forth. The aim is discerning whether the battle was preceded by a situation of instability in or near the land of Sūḫu which might have caused a number of Sutean tribes to be displaced from their lands of origin. Incidentally, a conflict between Assyria and the land of Sūḫu – an ally of Babylonia – may have occurred not long before the battle of Tuttul, which may have also been roughly coeval with the Assyro-Babylonian conflict in which Tukultī-Ninurta I had Kaštiliašu IV deposed.