Hartapu the Raider

h/t hbdchick, another inscription of Hartapu was found.

Hartapu ruled from Türkmen-Karahöyük in the southeastern Konya Plain, arid now. This was (probably) Tarhuntassa, the province of the Luwian stormgod, in the last years of the Hittite empire. Then follows the Dark Age, enlightened mainly by outsiders.

Hartapu's floruit was "late eighth century". In this region at that time, the Bible knows of a "Tubal" which was Tabal. Tabal enters the Assyrian annals 837 BC under a Tuwati and his son Kikki: Trevor Bryce, The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms: A Political and Military History (Oxford, New York: 2012) 141-5, 306f. Assyria preferred to deal with Tabal's subject lordlings piecemeal, calling them "kings" so bypassing Tabal's palace. It happens that Tabal was prominent in the later eighth century to the point we know some kings: Hulli, and Ambaris son of Hulli. Somewhere floats also a Burutash. (A different Tuwati and Wasusarmas his son might date c. 900 BC.)

Ambaris overlapped Sargon II, 722-705 BC, and struck up an alliance. Apparently this alliance failed. Sargon invaded in 713 and unseated Ambaris... only to lose his own garrison in a rebellion the next year. Tabal then allied with the Cimmerians, an Iranian group related to the Scythians. At some point 722-710 Sargon raided Tabal's vassal city Shinuhtu, when Kiakki was Tabal's king. I take it that Kiakki was the immediate beneficiary of the rebellion and that this Assyrian victory - a kidnap raid - was the best Sargon could do. Sargon's grand-strategy, I think, was to cozy up to a rival empire Mushki, then controlling the region northwest of Tabal later known to Greeks as The Phrygia.

Sargon attacked Tabal one more time in 705. That proved... unwise.

There doesn't seem much room for two kingdoms in Tabal's area 750-700 BC. (Which already posed a problem for historians here, inspiring d'Alfonso to redate Hartapu to the Bronze Age - which we now can say was wrong.) So - assuming "late eighth century" - I'd put Hartapu no earlier than the last decade of the 700s. Maybe he was able to profit from the Shinuhtu affair.

The Cimmerians (Robert Howard aside) are chiefly famed for bringing down the Phrygian Empire - that is, Mushki controlled from Gordion. Over the 800s BC, Gordion had arisen from a sleepy little town into the capital of an empire. Hartapu's latest inscription takes credit for the attack himself, that he'd conquered Mushki and its kings. Meh. I do not hear of Anatolian languages subsequently spoken in the Phrygia. More likely it was a joint attack and Hartapu was pleased to let the Cimmerians go full El Guapo on the survivors.

Per Kealhofer, Grave, and Voigt doi 10.1017/RDC.2018.152, Gordion proper had burned down... in 800 BC, well before "the late eighth century". The "Middle Phrygians" 800-540 BC lost some ground to the Lydian Empire to their west. But did not suffer genocide, did not lose literacy in their own language, and may not have even lost their capital. They continued to use their own paraGreek alphabet, in Hellenistic times switching to the Greek alphabet proper. Others seem to have struck out east, into the Armenia, where the Persians would find them.

Maybe the Türkmen-Karahöyük have their century wrong (which explains why Assyria isn't noted). But then Hartapu doesn't claim to have destroyed Gordion, just to have subjected Mushki.