---
title: "Hittite (Hattusian) army colours"
subtitle: "A little research goes a little way"
author: Seth
publish_date: 2025-03-06 08:00
date: 2025-03-06 08:00
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hero_image: miniature-hattusa-1600x800.webp
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tag: [gaming, meta, settings, wargame ]
---
In previous blog posts, I've lamented the lack of historical miniatures where I live and how that forced me to use a Carthaginian army as my Romans, and an Ancient Egyptian army for my Ptolemaic army.
Very recently, a local mini reseller added a proper Roman army, so I sent my Carthaginians back to Carthage and bought actual Romans to be their enemy.
That meant I had to choose an army for the Ancient Egyptians to fight, and after reading about the Battle of Kadesh, I chose the people of Hattusa (also called Hittites, possibly due to misidentification, and anyway it's not what they called themselves.)
I had no mental image of common fashion (military or otherwise) in Hattusa, so I did a little armchair Internet research.
The short version, in case you need to paint an army of Hattusa in a hurry:
* Blue: loyalty and protection
* Red: honour and truth
* Black, green, and yellow: disease, filth, rot
* White: abjuration or neutralisation
For the long version, read on!
## Uniformity
First of all, as with most ancient armies, the people of Hattusa probably didn't have military uniforms.
The concept of a uniform didn't arise until well into the common era because ancient "militaries" were really just all able-bodies men in the region.
When there was a threat to your people, you showed up to fight, and hopefully you brought some kind of weapon and some food for yourself.
You didn't enlist, and you certainly didn't get assigned a uniform.
There's evidence that even the Romans wouldn't have dressed uniformly, although there's also evidence that the Imperial army might have provided standardised garments.
Because I'd already painted my Carthage army non-uniformly, I decided to paint the Romans in a way that would contrast that.
I leaned into the possibility that the Roman Empire, or even the late Republic, may have been organised and extravagant enough to provide similar clothes to every soldier.
I painted my Romans with popularly stereotypical white tunics and red cloaks.
## Colours (and numbers) in Hattusa
I'm no scholar (on the contrary, I'm happily a high school and university dropout!) but the Internet has a bunch of scholarly papers on it and you can read them if you want.
Unsurprisingly, it seems we don't know much about which colours the people of Hattusa dyed their textiles.
Surviving sculptures and paintings have faded or discoloured, and I get the sense that none of the texts found in modern day Anatolia are focused on the fascinators of military dress.
Eventually, I came across a research paper by Yusuf Kiliç and Serkan Başol called [Number And Colour Symbolism In Hitite Magics](https://turkishstudies.net/turkishstudies?mod=makale_ing_ozet&makale_id=17899) from 2014, which describes significant colours in ritual incantations of Hattusa's priests.
Charmingly, I guess these are called "spells", which I gather is distinct from a prayer because a spell is imperative, while a prayer is solicitous (but don't quote me on that, because I'm guessing).
The people of Hattusa, like many ancient cultures (and amazingly many people today) would have believed that magic was a real force in the world, and so there would have been strong associations made with a colour and a beneficial or harmful mystical force.
According to the paper:
* Blue was a colour of loyalty and protection
* Red was a colour of honour and truth
* Black, green, and yellow were colours of disease or rot
* White was associated with abjuration or neutralisation. The paper provides this quote from historic texts: "Just as this [white wool] calmed the fierce hostility, so shall this white wool remove this sorcery and filth!"
Confusingly, all 6 colours ultimately had both good and bad connotations.
Blue was the colour of protection against the "evil eye" but also the evil eye is said to be blue.
Red, yellow, white and blue were each also the names of diseases.
## Translating this knowledge to paint
The negative connotations of the colours aren't useful to me.
It seems that the culture of Hattusa didn't have a single colour that would have been resoundingly reviled, so I decided that the 6 colours mentioned in the paper would be my options for highlighting each miniature.
Blue (loyalty and protection) and red (honour and truth) felt like the most obvious choices.
My initial impulse was to divide different troop types into specific colours, entirely for easy tabletop identification.
The ranged slingshot unit could be blue, the sword and spear units could be red.
I decided against that because I had a few commanders and banners that I wanted to be able to swap between units, depending on the battle scenario.
Instead, I used blue to highlight everyone but the commanders and banner, and used red to mark commanders.
All shields are blue, because that's an easy way to get a big splash of regimental colour into the army.
As a subtle way to suggest non-uniformity, I used a variety of brown like Citadel Skeleton Horde, Vallejo Pale Sand and Vallejo Green Ochre (it's more brown than green, to my eye).
I also tried a variety of skin tones, painting some dudes with Citadel's Guilliman Flesh, others with Cadian Flesh, and still others with Catachan Flesh.
I purchased both Cadian and Catachan online, not realising they weren't Contrast paints, but I'm mostly happy with the end results.