Bureaucracy and Bureaucratic Change in Hittite Administration.

Abstract

The Hittite civilization, which flourished in mid-second millennium BCE for a period of approximately five hundred years, developed from a small Anatolian state into a multiethnic empire. The administrative needs of the state grew parallel to the expansion of its territory, but nevertheless its governmental structure remained a patrimonial system where the authority of the king remained constant. Textual sources from the period provide the names and titles of a large group of officials who were active within the administrative system. This study inspects the Hittite administrative system from the beginning of the state’s formation until its collapse, and evaluates the changes in the system through a prosopographic analysis of the high-level administrative officials, offices, titles, and the specific genre of administrative documentation. Growth in number of offices more or less parallels the growth of the state into an empire, and therefore it is a sign of enlarging bureaucracy. However, the rationality of this bureaucracy is questioned through the analysis of various feature , particularly kinship, hierarchy, and specialization. This investigation reveals that the extent of the royal family’s involvement in all levels of the organization was high. Visible rules of hierarchy seem to be related the court protocol, the order of which was determined by the personal ties of the individuals with the king, rather than the offices they occupy. There is also no clearly visible division of duties among the high officers, who had overlapping areas of responsibilities in administrative, military, religious, and judicial domains. Particularly in the higher circles of the administration, examples of training, regulation, fixed amounts of compensation, and regular promotions are few and insufficient to demonstrate the existence of a properly functioning bureaucracy. Instead the state possesses a multitude of features that are expected to be present in a system that tries to preserve its patrimonial system. Overall this analysis of the high offices and officials of the Hittite administration portrays it as an organization more in line with the features of a patrimonial organization as described by Weber.