Kaskians
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- See Kaska for the First Nations people in the Yukon and British Columbia, Canada.
The Kaska (Kaška, also Kaskians or Gasgas) were a Bronze Age people of Anatolia, known from Hittite sources. They lived between the core Hittite region and the Black Sea, and are cited as the reason that the later Hittite Empire never extended northward to that area. They may have displaced the speakers of the Palaic language from their home in Pala.
When the Kaska were not raiding or serving as mercenaries, they raised pigs and wove linen.[1]
As of the reign of Tudhaliya II (about 1430 BC), the Kaska had moved into the ruins of the holy city of Nerik. "Tudhaliya's 3rd campaign was against the Kaskas." [2] His successor Arnuwanda I composed a prayer for the gods to return Nerik to the empire; he also mentioned Kammama and Zalpuwa as cities which he claimed had been Hittite but which were now under the Kaskas. Arnuwanda attempted to mollify some of the Kaska tribes by means of tribute.
Some time between the reigns of Arnuwanda and Suppiluliuma I, in Maşat Höyük, the letters note that locusts ate the Kaskas' grain. The hungry Kaska were able to join with Hayasa-Azzi and Isuwa to the east, as well as other enemies of the Hittites, and burn Hattusa, the Hittite capital, to the ground. It is probable that they also burnt the secondary capital Sapinuwa. Suppiliuma's grandson Hattusili III in the middle 1200s BC wrote of the time before Tudhaliya that the Kaska had "made Nenassa their frontier" and that their allies in Azzi-Hayasa had done the same to Samuha.
In the Amarna letters, Amenhotep III wrote to the Arzawan king Tarhunta-Radu that the "country Hattusa" was obliterated, and further asked for Arzawa to send him some of these Kaska people of whom he had heard. The Hittites too came to enlist subject Kaska for their armies.
Tudhaliya III and Suppiluliuma (c. 1375-1350 BC) set up their court in Samuha and invaded Azzi-Hayasa from there. The Kaska intervened, but Suppiluliuma defeated them; after Suppiluliuma had fully pacified the region, Tudhaliya and Suppiluliuma were able to move onto Hayasa and defeat it too, despite some devastating guerrilla tactics at their rear. Some twelve tribes of Kaska then united under Piyapili, but Piyapili was no match for Suppiluliuma.
Eventually Tudhaliya and Suppiluliuma returned Hattusa to the Hittites. But the Kaska continued to be a menace both inside and out. At one point they fielded 800 chariots.[citation needed]
In the time of ailing Arnuwanda II (around 1323 BC), the Hittites worried that the Kaskas from Ishupitta within the kingdom to Kammama without might take advantage of the plague in Hatti. The veteran commander Hannutti moved to Ishupitta, but he died there. Ishupitta then seceded from Hatti, and Arnuwanda died too.
Arnuwanda's brother and successor Mursili II recorded in his annals that he defeated this rebellion. Over the ongoing decades the Kaskans were also active in Durmitta and in Tipiya, by Mount Tarikarimu in the land of Ziharriya, and by Mount Asharpaya on the route to Pala; they rebelled and/or performed egregious banditry in each place. At first Mursili defeated each Kaska uprising piecemeal.
Then the Kaska united under Pihhuniya of Tipiya. Pihhuniya conquered Istitina and advanced as far as Zazzissa. But Mursili defeated this force and brought Pihhuniya back as a prisoner to Hattusas.
Mursili switched to a defensive strategy, with a chain of border fortresses. Even so, in the early 13th century, when Mursili's son Muwatalli II was king in Hatti, the Kaskas sacked Hattusa. Muwatalli stopped enlisting Kaska as troops; he moved his capital to Tarhuntassa to the south; and he appointed his brother, the future Hattusili III, as governor over the northern marches. Hattusili defeated the Kaska to the point of recapturing Nerik, and when he took over the kingdom he returned the capitol to Hattusa.
The Hittite kingdom fell in the general calamity of 1200 BC. The Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I recorded late in the 12th century BC that the Kaska and their Mushki allies were active in what had been the Hatti heartland. Tiglath-Pileser defeated them, and the Kaska then disappear from all historical records. When the Black Sea littoral returned to history, it was populated by the Armenians, although often overrun by Iranian peoples such as the Cimmerians.
