ABSTRACT
Early in the thirteenth century, the Hittite Great King Muwattalli drew up a treaty with a man called Alaksandu, ruler of the kingdom of Wilusa. We have identified Wilusa with Ilios/Troy. On the understanding that this identification still lacks firm proof, we will use it as our starting point for investigating Troy’s role in the history of the Late Bronze Age Near East and its relations with its Near Eastern contemporaries.1 The treaty makes clear that Wilusa was a vassal state of the Hittite empire, and one of four western Anatolian kingdoms called the Arzawa Lands.2 The other three were MiraKuwaliya, the Seha River Land and, further to the east, the kingdom of Hapalla. A fifth Arzawan state, Arzawa ‘Minor’, had probably been eliminated some three decades earlier by Muwattalli’s father Mursili.3
