I was never much of a photographer, before I came here…

FWIW, I tried Flickr free for a year and liked it so much that I upgraded to the pro account. It’s $25 but you have unlimited storage and unlimited sets. I feel like it’s a perfect companion to work with a blog, and of course you can easily send album links to friends and family. Of all the photo sites I’ve tried, it’s by far my favorite.

xo!

But neither seems to begin with the story that first grabbed me about the Hittites: the living history recorded by the royal scribe, of the moment when Suppiluliuma I received a letter from (probably) King Tut’s widow saying, “My husband is dead. I have no sons. But you, they say, have many sons. If you were to send me one of your sons, he would become my husband. I will not marry a servant!” Because the scribe recorded the Hittite king’s reaction, too: sitting bolt upright and declaiming, “I have never heard of such a thing in my entire life!”

Turns out, as the author goes on to explain, that the Hittites and Egyptians had previously been at war for a century. And the prince that the Hittite king swiftly sent died of a plague on the way to Egypt, though his attendants apparently carried the plague back home with them, because it then ravaged the Hittites for more than a decade. And King Tut’s widow? Swiftly married to the vizier Ay, who she would have regarded as a servant.

The whole story stuck with me as the first proof that people, from other cultures and times, no matter how strange (seriously, who came up with the name Suppiluliuma?!), were, in their emotions, not so different from people today. Too, the Hittites used the first recorded Indo-European language, which fascinated me way back when I was only a budding amateur linguist.

I frankly wasn’t as impressed with the Assyrians. Nasty, violent people. I much prefer the Babylonians. And I’m sure there’s plenty of good works out there on them both, but I can’t remember anymore what I read.