Life and Society in the Hittite World - Tapa dura

Trevor Bryce is the most successful - and responsible - popularizer of Anatolian studies active today. An authority on the Luwians of the second millennium and Lycia of the first, he has already produced a highly readable history of the Hittites and has now presented us with a survey of Hittite culture. (Bryn Mawr Classical Review)

Combining lucidity with scholarly rigour and displaying an informed and thoughtful response to the topic, this well-written book will be of particular value to university students and ancient historians. It deserves also to find a place in the wider market. (Times Higher Education Supplement)

A readable and up-to-date synthesis which can introduce the wider public to the Hittites as a human society, the author has provided this in a masterly way ... Bryce gets behind the mask of the official records, and gives us the Hittites' inner thoughts ... thoughtful and informative book. (John Ray, Times Literary Supplement)

In dealing with a wide range of aspects of the life, activities, and customs of the Late Bronze Age Hittite world, this book complements the treatment of Hittite military and political history presented by the author in The Kingdom of the Hittites (OUP, 1998). It aims to convey to the reader a sense of what it was like to live amongst the people of the Hittite world, to participate in their celebrations, to share their crises, to meet them in the streets of the capital or in their homes, to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a healing ritual, to attend an audience with the Great King, and to follow his progress in festival processions to the holy places of the Hittite land. Through quotations from the original sources and through the word pictures to which these give rise, the book aims at recreating, as far as is possible, the daily lives and experiences of a people who for a time became the supreme political and military power in the ancient Near East.