Hattusha: Hub of the Hittite Empire

by Peter Starr

photos: James Woods

The most recent of our articles on Turkey’s nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites, published in October 2005, took us to Troy. The proud ancient Aegean city inspired the first great story of Western literature. Yet at one time, it had to pay tribute to the Hittite Empire of Inner Anatolia – or so the cuneiform tablets appear to tell us. This month, we journey back in time to Hattusha, the once-mighty Hittite capital, located just 150 km east of Ankara.

You are walking on sacred ground: a terrain chosen not just for the seat of an empire, but also for the worship of the “thousand gods” of what the Hittites called “the Hatti land”. The ruins occupy the northern slopes of a range of hills and rocky outcrops, bounded on one side by a gorge, through which a stream runs down to the wheat and sugar-beet of a fertile plain. From the “Lower City”, the city reaches upward amid massive rock faces. Each one of these must have had its own significance for the Hittites - whose writings frequently refer to “rock-crest houses” with ritual functions - before their empire mysteriously collapsed in around 1180 BCE.

The gorge (‘boğaz’ in Turkish) has given its name to the adjacent village of Boğazköy (or Boğazkale). The area is easily reached from Ankara by car – or by coach to Sungurlu and a 20-lira taxi ride. The visitor’s appreciation of the dramatic setting is only enhanced by the four-kilometre walk around the site.

Diplomatic history

It was on this spot in 1906 that Hugo Winckler made one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of all time, digging up 1,500 cuneiform tablets containing the archives of the Hittite kings. Historians reading Latin and Greek already knew much about the ancient cities of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Yet the ancient Greeks did not venture far beyond the mountains or across the plateaus of Anatolia. There is nothing in Ancient Greek about Hattusha. The Boğazköy tablets ushered a vast empire into a gaping hole in the jigsaw of history – and mainly in its own language, the earliest well-documented Indo-European tongue.

One of the cuneiform tablets, now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, is of particular interest to diplomats. It is the Hittites’ version of a treaty dating back to around 1259 BCE. “It is concluded,” the text begins, “between Reamasesa-Mai-Amana (Rameses II), the Great King, the king of Egypt, and Hattusili (Hattusili III), the Great King, the king of the Hatti land, his brother,… in order to establish a good peace and fraternity forever among them…” A copy of the tablet hangs on the wall of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. It is reputedly the earliest peace accord in history.

Gods and kings

The foundations of the largest building in Hattusha, the Great Temple, are to be found in the Lower City. The Great Temple would have contained statues of Teshub, the storm god, and his consort Hepatu, a matronly figure who came to be identified with the sun goddess, in sanctuaries beyond a central courtyard. Numerous storerooms and impressive pottery storage jars show that the temples played an important role in the Hittite economy, with a priestly class owning farmland and administering offerings.

Close behind the leading gods in importance was the king and the royal family. Hittite records describe the king as “favourite of the storm god”. He would command his officials and army to ensure that proper devotion be paid to the gods in all outposts of the empire, from the arable lands of the Anatolian plateau in the west to Carchemish and the rich pickings of the fertile crescent to the south; on this depended the success of the Hittite military campaigns.

The king’s palace (‘Büyükkale’) has an outer courtyard, once home to officials and the “bearers of the golden lances” - the royal bodyguard. Before arriving at the royal chambers, one passes a square hall, where grand court ceremonials would have taken place. Crows now perch on the remains of the twenty-five columns which formerly supported its wide roof. Similarly, little remains of the viaduct which would have allowed the king to ride his chariot home.

The Upper City

Up the hill beyond the palace stands the Upper City. In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, extensive walls were built in order to incorporate this higher land into the capital. In contrast to the fragmented city wall below, the fortifications of Yerkapı, on the crest of the hill, and the walls running down to the Lion Gate and the King’s Gate on either side, are well preserved and very memorable. The gates are named after the fine carved figures which guard them. At Yerkapı the visitor can pass through the characteristic Hittite ‘postern’ tunnel, then climb steps over a massive rampart to the Sphinx Gate.

This whole expansion into the Upper City was intended for divine inhabitants. It was a cult site, enclosing the foundations of thirty temples. These temples were for the main gods; other members of the crowded Hittite pantheon were worshipped at sacred pillars or groves.

Engineers and artists

What remains of the temples, palace and administrative buildings today are low stone walls, often built of ten-ton limestone blocks precisely fitted together by Hittite engineers. In the top course of the stones are tell-tale holes into which wooden dowels were inserted to brace the mud-brick upper walls. The latter, and the timber roofs they supported, have long since disappeared. Within the last few years, however, researchers studying building techniques have made an impressive reconstruction of a section of the Lower City fortifications.

Hattusha never disappoints. Those whose appetite has been whetted by Hittite bas reliefs at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations will enjoy the beautifully preserved carvings of gods and Luvian hieroglyphs in situ in one of two chambers which stand near the city’s reservoir, between the palace and the Upper City. A two-kilometre walk or drive eastwards leads to the rock-cut temple of Yazılıkaya (Turkish for “inscribed rock”). Dating from about a century after the Upper City, Yazılıkaya served as a private royal temple. The innermost part of this temple contains two galleries carved into fissures in the rock. And arrayed along the walls are all the chief gods of the Hittites, standing upon the backs of lions or straddling the rocky mountaintops of the Hattusha landscape.

What’s in store?

Hattusha and Yazılıkaya together constitute one of Turkey’s nine UNESCO-certified World Heritage Sites. Some pottery and metal finds from the excavations, as well as later Phrygian, Roman and Byzantine artefacts, are on display in the small Boğazköy Museum and the larger one in Çorum. Current research at Hattusha concentrates mainly on its economic foundations: underground grain silos excavated along the ridge to the east of the city were airtight, proof against fire and vermin - and large enough to sustain the empire through years of drought or war.

The German Archeological Institute has consistently recorded major finds in this area. 2006 has already witnessed the announcement of the discovery near Sivas of new tablets relating to Hittite and Assyrian trading colonies. Yet Hattusha’s burial grounds have yet to be located and excavated. Nor will the story of fourteenth century BCE power politics be complete until some 21^st century Winckler stumbles in northern Syria upon the cuneiform archives of the Hittites’ great rivals, the Mitanni.

(DIPLOMAT  -  January 2006  -  Ankara)