The Luwian conquest of Cilicia

The Cilician plain, in the Bronze Age, was dominated by the city Kummaha on a road connecting that with classical Adana and Tarsus, "Adaniya" and "Tarza" in those days. Kummaha knew its holdings as "Kizzuwadna". I don't know if the people here had a literature as such, but the Hittite empire transcribed a lot of local tradition for its own palace - like 19th century AD ethnographers among the fuzzy wuzzies. The Hittite empire did the same for a region to Kizzuwadna's west.

Billie Jean Collins in "Religious Convergence" argues that Hittite interest in the west wasn't continuous, but came in pulses. Two such pulses were defensive. To whit: Tudhaliya I was interested in sorcery; Mursili II, in plague. Plague had carried off the great king Suppiluliuma I and his heir Arnuwanda II, forcing Mursili to redo all they had done. In between, the Hittite regime tottered, even switching capitol a few times: Hattusa-Samuha-Sapinuwa-Hattusa. To the extent we even have documents, as in Sapinuwa, the scriptorium was more for the army than for the healthcare system.

In the Bronze Age mindset, demons and disease were usually about the same. (The Jews held on to this thought for rather longer than they should have. Not that Greek humour-theory was much improvement.) Collins notes a nuance in Arzawa: here, exorcism was womens-work and defence against plague the province of men. Another nuance is that the palace adapted Arzawan rituals into Hittite with no transliteration, unlike with general Luwiana whose rituals (as we've noted) are recorded there in the original.

The Hattusa palace cared about sorcery in Kizzuwadna too. If the Hittite ethnography of the west was as two snapshots, one in 1400 BC and one 1300; then I expect the same for Kizzuwadna.

What was calamity for the Hittites in the 1300s was opportunity for the kingdoms surrounding it. I do not hear that Kizzuwadna did well. I do hear that of the west - under Arzawa. This Luwian speaking empire even had the nerve to send correspondence to the Amarna court in Egypt, albeit in Knesian since Arzawa knew no Akkadian.

Over the 1200s, Ugarit and Hatti knew Kizzuwadna's coast and near-coast as rife with Luwian towns like Luwanda. If these were simple organic Lycian and Carian entrepôts, they could have come there at any point. That they pop up between the two snapshots suggests Arzawan colonies.