Eflatun Pınar

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The water comes up cold and clear out of the ground at the foot of a low ridge in the lake country west of Konya, and it has never stopped. Three thousand years ago, masons came to the place where it rose and did not divert it or cap it. They built around it. They laid huge blocks of trachyte to make a rectangular pool, set the spring to well up inside the enclosure they had made, and along the northern edge they raised a wall of stone carved with the gods — so that the divine order would stand over the water at the exact point where the water entered the world. The pool is some thirty-four meters by thirty, and the relief wall above it rises more than six. The Turks who later found it called it Eflatun Pınar, “Plato’s spring,” after the philosopher whose name drifted into Anatolian legend; the men who built it had never heard of Plato. They were subjects of the empire of Ḫatti, and what they made was a sanctuary of the spring.

The spring in the lake country

Eflatun Pınar lies in the hilly, half-arid uplands near Lake Beyşehir, roughly a hundred kilometers west of Konya, in the region the Greeks would later call Pisidia. This was the southwestern marchland of the Hittite world — far from the capital at Ḫattuša in the bend of the Halys river, out toward the lands the Hittite scribes named Tarḫuntašša and Arzawa, where the Luwian-speaking populations of the south and west shaded into the empire’s reach. The monument belongs to the imperial age, the second half of the thirteenth century BCE, the last great century of the kingdom before its collapse around 1200. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which placed Eflatun Pınar on its Tentative List in 2014, dates the construction to about that time and describes it plainly as “a major water cult site of the Hittites.”

The name is the strangest thing about the place to a modern arrival and the least important to its history. Eflatun is the Turkish form of Plato’s name; pınar is “spring.” By a chain of medieval association — the philosopher had become, in the Islamic and Anatolian imagination, a sage and a worker of wonders, and Konya was a city thick with such legends — the cold spring with its uncanny carved wall was attached to him. The attribution is a folk-etymology, centuries removed from the monument’s making, and it tells us about the afterlife of a Greek name in Seljuk Anatolia, nothing about the thirteenth century BCE. The thing itself is Hittite to its foundations.

What survives, fully cleared by excavation, is a built basin of large ashlar blocks with the spring rising within it and a sculpted screen along one side. The reconstruction proposed by the excavators is that the relief wall did not stand alone in the open but formed the back of a closed fountain-house, a roofed structure of huge dressed stone over the source — so that the carved cosmos was not merely set beside the water but enclosed with it, the gods and the spring sharing one built room. Nearby, a few kilometers off at Fasıllar, lies a colossal unfinished monument of the same workshop tradition — a standing storm-god on his mountain and lions, never moved to its intended site — which the early surveyor James Mellaart studied together with Eflatun Pınar as the products of a single Late Bronze Age sculptural milieu in the Beyşehir region.

The relief facade of Eflatun Pınar, raised over the spring-fed pool. Photograph by Rigorius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The cosmos set over the water

The wall reads from the ground upward, and it reads as an ordered world. At its base stand the mountain-gods — five figures in the characteristic scaled or skirted garment that marks the mountains in Hittite art, the powers of the high country from which the rivers and springs descend. They are not ornament. Several of them are hollowed, channeled so that the spring water was made to issue from their bodies and run down into the pool: the water of the sanctuary was shown to come out of the mountains themselves, the carving and the hydraulics made into one statement. The mountains give the water, and at Eflatun Pınar the carved mountains literally gave it.

Above the mountain-gods sits the divine couple at the center of the wall — a seated male and a seated female deity, recognized by most readers as the storm-god and the sun-goddess, the head of the Hittite pantheon and his consort. The storm-god of Ḫatti is Tarḫunna, the lord of the weather who gives the rain and the thunder and warrants the king; in the imperial theology shaped by Hurrian influence his Hurrian counterpart Teššub stands at the head of the same office. His consort here is the great solar queen, the Sun-goddess of Arinna — Arinniti in her Hittite name — who in the imperial pantheon was identified with the Hurrian Ḫebat. The pairing is exact for a spring sanctuary: the storm gives the rain that fills the sources, the sun gives the warmth and the days, and between the two of them stands the water of life that the mountains carry down.

Between and above the seated pair rise the winged sun-discs — the great solar symbols of Hittite kingship and of the heavens — held aloft by a file of hybrid bearers: bull-men and genii, the composite supporting figures of Anatolian and Mesopotamian art, who lift the sun-disc the way such beings lift the sky elsewhere in the ancient Near East. The whole composition is a hierarchy in stone. The mountains at the bottom with the water flowing from them; the storm and the sun enthroned in the middle; the sun-disc upheld at the top by the powers that bear the heavens. It is a built diagram of the order of the world, set deliberately over the living source — the divine order shown presiding at the very place where the water comes up out of the earth.

Detail of the sculpted screen at Eflatun Pınar. Photograph by Bluetime93, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One further sculpture belongs to the complex but no longer stands where it was meant to: a great triple bull-protome, three forequarters of bulls carved from a single block, the largest single piece from the site. It was found reused as filler in a later dam built across the southwest side of the pool in the Roman period — the cult-image dragged from its place and built into a waterwork by people who no longer kept the cult. The dam, in its way, confirms the place: the spring kept being valuable for its water long after the gods over it had been forgotten.

The holy spring in the Hittite world

The significance of Eflatun Pınar lies in what it makes visible. The Hittite religious texts — the enormous cuneiform archives recovered from Ḫattuša, the thirty thousand tablets and fragments of the Boğazköy collections — speak constantly of holy springs and sacred waters. Rivers, springs, and pools were divine, addressed and offered to; the storm-god’s gift of rain and the welling of the springs were a single circuit of divine generosity; ritual texts list the springs of the land as recipients of cult, and the king and queen made offerings to the waters as to gods. The sacred spring is everywhere in the written record. It almost never survives in stone. Springs are made of running water and the ground around them; they leave little for the spade. Eflatun Pınar is the rare case where the cult of a holy spring was built into masonry heavy enough to last — where what the texts describe a thousand times can actually be stood before.

That makes the monument a southern counterpart to the rock sanctuaries of the heartland. At the capital, the open-air shrine of Yazılıkaya carries the imperial pantheon in procession across living rock, the Hurrianized gods of the thirteenth-century state ranked and named in their long files. Eflatun Pınar does in the south, over a spring, what Yazılıkaya does at the capital over a natural cleft in the rock: it fixes the divine order to a particular sacred place in the land and builds the cult into the stone of that place. The two are the great surviving sanctuaries of Hittite imperial religion outside the temples — one a rock-cut gallery of the gods, the other a built pool with the gods raised over the water.

The likeliest historical anchor draws the monument toward the very top of the state. A bronze tablet treaty recovered at Ḫattuša, sworn between the Great King Tudḫaliya IV and Kurunta, the king of the appanage realm of Tarḫuntašša, names among its boundary landmarks a “spring pool” in a place read as Arimatta — and several scholars have proposed that this royal spring-pool is Eflatun Pınar itself, set in or near the lands of Tarḫuntašša in the thirteenth century. The reading is not certain; the geography of these treaties is much argued. But it places the monument in the right age, the right region, and the right register: a spring grand enough to be a landmark in a treaty between Great Kings, built in the reign of a king who was also the builder of Yazılıkaya’s most ambitious phase. The Firenze University Press study of Tudḫaliya IV, the Eflatunpınar monument, and the “river of the watery abyss” sets the spring in exactly this frame — a royal water-sanctuary of the late imperial age, the king’s hand visible in the cult of the source.

The religion built into the wall belongs to the layered world of Ḫatti. The Hittites were Indo-European newcomers who built their state over an older Anatolian stratum, taking up the gods of the Hattians whose land they had inherited and, in the imperial centuries, drawing the Hurrian pantheon of the south and east into the official cult. The southern marches where Eflatun Pınar stands were Luwian country, and the storm-god worshiped here would have been known to its people under his Luwian name as readily as his Hittite one — the same office of the lord of the weather, the giver of rain and grain, whose Iron-Age successor would later be carved giving the harvest at the İvriz relief not far to the east. The divine couple over the spring is thus not the cult of one people but the imperial synthesis itself, the merged storm-god and solar queen of a state that had gathered many nations’ gods into one order. To set that order over a spring in the Luwian south was to mark the place as Ḫatti’s, claimed for the empire’s gods at its very water.

What the monument teaches, then, is the shape of Anatolian piety toward the spring. The water that rises from the ground was not neutral; it came from the mountains, which were gods, sent by the storm, which was the king of gods, under the sun, which ruled the day — and the men who built Eflatun Pınar wrote that whole chain into the wall above the pool. To come to the spring was to stand at the meeting point of the water from below and the powers above, with the divine order carved over the source to make the meeting plain. The monument is a theology a worshiper could walk up to and drink at — the abstraction of the texts, the springs honored as gods, given a place and a face and a flow of real water.

Rediscovery, study, and standing

The monument was never entirely lost — a spring that runs cold in an arid country is not the kind of thing a region forgets — but for long centuries it was a half-buried wall by a pool with a stranger’s name attached to it. The American archaeological photographer John Henry Haynes (1849–1910) recorded it in the late nineteenth century, and his print is among the earliest images of the site; nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travelers and scholars noted the carved screen and puzzled over its iconography.

Eflatun Pınar photographed by John Henry Haynes (1849–1910). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The decisive work came late. James Mellaart’s survey of the 1960s set Eflatun Pınar beside Fasıllar and read the two as a Beyşehir-region group of Late Bronze Age monuments. Then, from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, rescue excavation and clearing directed by the Konya Museum — published most fully in the study Das Quellheiligtum Eflatun Pınar by Martin Bachmann and Sırrı Özenir — uncovered the lower courses of the wall, the mountain-gods at the base, and the full extent of the basin, and established that the relief was the back of a built fountain-house rather than a freestanding screen. The excavation turned a famous half-seen carving into a coherent sanctuary with a plan. Votive ceramics recovered from the pool, of types known from Ḫattuša, confirmed that this was a place of cult and not merely a decorated reservoir.

Study of the iconography has settled the broad reading while leaving the particulars debated. That the base figures are mountain-gods and that water was led to flow from them is secure; that the seated central pair are the storm-god and the sun-goddess is the consensus, though the precise identification of every smaller figure — which genii, which lesser deities flank the couple — is argued from the worn stone. The proposed link to the spring-pool named in the Tudḫaliya IV–Kurunta bronze tablet remains a hypothesis rather than a proof, resting on the contested historical geography of the southern Hittite lands. What is not in question is the kind of place this is, and the rarity of its survival.

It is read now, by the archaeologists who work the Anatolian landscape, as one of the very few survivals of a whole class of Hittite holy place — the sanctuary at a water source, the cult of the living spring that the tablets attest so often and the ground so rarely keeps. Ömür Harmanşah’s study of the Anatolian rock and water monuments, Place, Memory, and Healing, sets Eflatun Pınar among the springs and rock-cut shrines where the Hittite and post-Hittite landscape was made sacred at its sources — places chosen because the water was there, and marked because the water was holy. The monument carries its tentative World Heritage standing on exactly that ground: not as a curiosity with a philosopher’s borrowed name, but as the rare built witness to how an empire honored the place where its water came into the world.

The spring still runs. The triple bulls were hauled out of the Roman dam; the mountain-gods stand cleared at the base of the wall; the storm and the sun keep their seats above the pool. The water that filled the basin three thousand years ago for the offering still rises through the same stones, cold out of the same ground, under the same carved order of the gods who were thought to send it.

→ Related: Hattusa · Yazilikaya · Ivriz Relief · Tarhunna · Teshub · Arinna Sun Goddess · Telipinu · Kumarbi · The Hurrians · The Luwians · The Hattians · Hittites · Hittite Empire · Phrygia