Rethinking the Hittite system of subordinate countries from the legal point of view.

The Hittite combination of parts to form a whole of subordinate countries is better known to us than any other similar a whole that existed in the ancient Near East. Thanks to the relatively rich corpus of Hittite subordination treaties and related documents, we have a fairly profitable general picture of the rights and obligations of vassal kings toward their Hittite overlords and vice versa. (1) This picture also discloses significant differences among these vassal kings (2) in limits of rights and obligations, suggesting different horizontals of subordination. There are, however, still more [i]or[/i] less serious gaps in this picture, and the available data allow solitary a partial reconstruction ...