An ancient Hittite king wrote the first known moral self-justification for power

Evidence

Even more remarkable is an autobiographical inscription from a Hittite king, Hatusilis, who felt called on in about 1275 b.c. to provide a justification for his accession to the throne. He felt, almost uniquely among ancient and indeed more recent rulers, that having obtained power to the disadvantage of other members of his own family, he had to provide a moral and legal justification for what he had done. So we have this rather strange spectacle of an ancient Hittite king saying in effect, “Well, I had to do this. It’s true he was my brother …” — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1882

Categorization

• XREF: The Hittite king justifying fratricide to his audience resonates with the ruthless-politics threads in A Game of Thrones or with Machiavelli-adjacent questions of legitimacy the reader has tracked before.
• SEED: A cross-cultural essay on rulers who felt obliged to defend their usurpations versus those who never did — ‘kings who apologized’ — could open on Hatusilis.