Bronze Age superpowers signed their biggest treaties in precious metal. Almost all of it is gone. One tablet survived.

We know the famous Egypt-Hittite peace treaty after Kadesh was engraved on silver tablets. The silver is lost, melted or looted millennia ago, and the text survives only in clay copies.

Then in 1986, at the ruins of the Hittite capital Hattusa, excavators found this. A complete bronze treaty, chains still attached, recording King Tudhaliya IV's guarantee of the kingdom of Tarhuntassa to his cousin Kurunta around 1235 BC.

It is the only Hittite metal tablet ever discovered, and one of just three Hittite diplomatic documents believed to be true originals rather than copies. An entire class of documents, the metal originals of ancient diplomacy, survives in exactly one specimen. This is it.

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