Hattusa

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A traveler crossing the high plateau north of the Kızılırmak comes on it before he can name it: a flank of bare rock rising out of the grassland, ridged with the gray lines of foundation walls, and above them a saddle of stone where a citadel once stood. The site climbs. From the lower ground, where the largest temple lies open to the sky, the ruins run uphill for more than a mile, gate after gate set into a rampart that once ringed the whole, until the wall meets the crags at the summit. This was Ḫattuša, the seat of the Great Kings of Hatti, and the city is buried under itself — for under the floors of its temples and its palace lay the clay tablets that, when they were dug out and read, gave back an empire and its gods.

The modern village at the foot of the slope is Boğazkale, in the province of Çorum in north-central Turkey; until the twentieth century it was called Boğazköy, and the cuneiform records found here are still known to scholars by that name, the Boğazköy tablets. The ancient city sits at roughly 40.01° north, 34.62° east, on the central Anatolian uplands inside the great loop of the Kızılırmak — the river the Greeks would call the Halys. It is a hard country of cold winters and rock outcrops, and the Hittites built into the rock rather than against it, running their walls over the spurs and quarrying their gateways from the living stone.

A city older than its kings

Hattusa was not first a Hittite place. The plateau belonged to the Hattians, the indigenous people of central Anatolia who held the land before the Indo-European speakers arrived, and the city took its name from theirs: Ḫattuš, the settlement of the Hatti. When the Hittites made it their capital they kept the older name, calling themselves after it the people of the Land of Hatti, and they kept, too, a great deal of what the Hattians had worshiped — the gods, the festival calendar, even a liturgical tongue, Hattic, that the scribes preserved in bilingual ritual texts long after it had stopped being spoken.

The city’s early history is one of destruction and refounding. In the records of Anitta, a king of Kuššara whose deeds survive in one of the oldest texts recovered from the archive, Ḫattuš is taken and burned, and Anitta lays a curse on whoever should resettle it: that the storm-god strike down any king who builds there again. Within a few generations a king did exactly that. Around the middle of the seventeenth century BCE, Ḫattušili I — “the man of Ḫattuša,” who took his royal name from the city — made it the seat of the kingdom, and from his reign forward, through the Old Kingdom and the imperial centuries that followed, Hattusa was the center of the Hittite world. The curse, the Hittites evidently judged, had been overruled.

At its height the city was vast for its age. A wall more than six kilometers long enclosed two great districts — a Lower City on the gentler ground to the north, around the largest temple, and an Upper City climbing the slope to the south, dense with shrines. The rampart was a double skin of masonry packed with earth, eight meters thick, set on a high stone-faced embankment and topped, where the German excavators have reconstructed a stretch of it, with mud-brick battlements and towers rising more than ten meters. Through this wall the Hittites cut their monumental gates, and the gates they guarded with gods.

The gates, the temples, and the citadel

Three gateways survive in the southern arc of the wall, each named for the figures carved into its jambs. At the southwest stands the Lion Gate, its two flanking lions hewn from the stone of the doorposts — heads, chests, and forelegs thrust outward, mouths open, set at the threshold to turn back whatever should approach the city with ill intent. At the southeast is the Sphinx Gate, where sphinxes once stood at the highest point of the wall, on an artificial rampart pierced by a long corbelled tunnel running out beneath it. And on the eastern side is the gate the excavators called the King’s Gate, for the figure carved on its inner jamb — a striding warrior in a short kilt and a horned helmet, axe at his shoulder, long taken for a king and now read as a god, a divine guardian set to keep the gate. The relief now standing there is a cast; the original is in Ankara.

The Lion Gate in the southwest wall of Hattusa, the lions hewn from the gateposts to guard the threshold. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.

Inside the walls the city was, above everything, a city of temples. More than thirty have been traced within the circuit, the great majority of them packed into the Upper City, which the excavators read as the sacred quarter of the capital — twenty-six temple foundations or more cleared on that slope alone. The largest of them all lies apart, down in the Lower City: Temple I, the Great Temple, raised in the fourteenth century BCE and dedicated to the two highest powers of the state, the storm-god of Hatti and the Sun-goddess of Arinna, who reigned together as the king and queen of the gods. The Great Temple was not a single shrine but a precinct: a stone-built sanctuary at its core, set within courts and surrounded by ranges of storerooms whose great pithoi for grain and oil still stand in rows, the whole served by the apparatus of a working cult and the estates that fed it.

The cleared foundations of Temple I, the Great Temple of the storm-god and the Sun-goddess of Arinna, in the Lower City. Wikimedia Commons.

The storm-god whose house this was is named in the texts as Tarḫunna, the Hittite-Luwian weather-god who rules the gods and warrants the king; in the Hurrianized theology of the empire’s last centuries he is also Teššub, the storm-king of the Hurrians, and at the height of empire the two offices were drawn together. Among the thirty-some temples of the city the lesser shrines housed the lesser members of a pantheon the Hittites themselves called the thousand gods of Hatti — among them Telipinu, the vanishing god whose anger drained the life from the land and whose recall restored it.

Above the Lower City, on a high ridge of rock at the eastern edge of the wall, sat Büyükkale — “the great fortress” — the royal acropolis. This was the king’s own ground: the palace, the audience halls, the residences of the court, set behind their own fortifications on a height that commanded the city and the country beyond. And it was here, in the archive rooms of the citadel and in the buildings around the Great Temple below, that the excavators came on the find that has made Hattusa what it is.

The buried archive

Some thirty thousand clay tablets and fragments have been lifted from the soil of Hattusa, and they are very nearly the whole of what is known of the Hittite world. The Hittites wrote in cuneiform, the wedge-script of Mesopotamia, pressed into wet clay with a reed and then dried or baked; the fires that destroyed the city at the end hardened thousands of these tablets and so preserved them. Stored in rooms on Büyükkale and in the temple precincts, shelved and cataloged by the scribes — some tablets carry colophons that name the text, the scribe, and where the work stood in a series — the archive is a state library, recovered where its keepers left it.

What it holds is the documentary spine of an empire. There are the laws of Hatti, a code of some two hundred clauses. There are the royal annals, the year-by-year campaign records of the Great Kings. There are the treaties — the sworn agreements by which the king bound his vassals and his rivals, each closed with a long roll-call of the gods invoked as witnesses and avengers of the oath, so that the treaties are themselves among the richest lists of the Hittite pantheon. One of them is the peace concluded with Egypt after the battle of Kadesh, around 1259 BCE, between Ḫattušili III and Ramesses II — a sworn settlement of which both the Hittite version, on clay from this archive, and the Egyptian version, carved on temple walls at Thebes, survive, the earliest international peace treaty whose two parties’ texts can be set side by side.

And there is the religion. The prayers of the kings and queens survive — among them the long prayer of Queen Puduḫepa, who pleads with the Sun-goddess of Arinna for the life of her husband, addressing the goddess in her own voice as the one who governs kingship and the land. The ritual texts survive in their hundreds: the festival programs of the great state feasts, and the evocation rites — the mugawar, the calling-back of an offended deity, by which the priests sought to draw Telipinu home and so end the blight. The myths survive: the combat of the storm-god with the dragon Illuyanka, recited at the purulli festival of the new year; the vanishing and return of Telipinu; and the great Hurrian cycle of the kingship in heaven, in which Kumarbi, the elder god, is overthrown in his turn — a succession of the generations of heaven that scholars have long read as the eastern antecedent of the Greek succession-myth in Hesiod’s Theogony, with Kumarbi standing where Kronos stands, though the route by which the story traveled west is still argued. Much of this Hurrian material the Hittite scribes preserved in translation, so that a Hurrian theology is read today through Hittite clay.

It was from these tablets, too, that the language itself was recovered. When the Boğazköy archive came to light in the early twentieth century the script could be read but the tongue could not, until in 1915 the philologist Bedřich Hrozný demonstrated that Hittite was an Indo-European language — the oldest such language attested in writing, and the first member of the Anatolian branch to be identified. An Indo-European speech and the imperial religion it carried were lifted together out of the baked clay of a single city.

A reconstructed stretch of the fortification wall, rebuilt by the German Archaeological Institute on the ancient stone foundations to show the mud-brick rampart and towers. Wikimedia Commons.

The gods carved on the rock

The cult of the capital did not end at the wall. A little under two kilometers to the northeast, where a natural recess of rock opens in the hillside, lies the open-air sanctuary of Yazılıkaya — the “inscribed rock,” so named for the reliefs that cover its walls. In two roofless chambers cut by nature into the limestone, the gods of the empire are carved in procession: in the main chamber, two long files of deities advancing toward a central meeting, the storm-god and his consort Ḫebat at the point where the lines converge, with the king himself shown in attendance; in the inner chamber, the Great King Tudḫaliya IV beneath the protecting arm of his patron god Šarruma, and the twelve running gods, and the strange figure of the sword-god planted hilt-up in the floor. The pantheon ranged across that rock is largely Hurrian in its names and order — the imperial theology of the kingdom’s last great century, made permanent in stone outside the capital it served. The Great Temple held the cult; Yazılıkaya gave it a face.

Recovery, ruin, and reading

The city’s own end came around 1200 BCE, in the wide collapse that brought down the powers of the Late Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. Hattusa was abandoned and burned — whether by an enemy, by the kingdom’s own people withdrawing, or in the disorder of a failing state is debated — and the Great Kings of Hatti pass from the record. The plateau did not stay empty; later peoples, Phrygians among them, settled on the ruins, and to the south and east the smaller Neo-Hittite kingdoms of the Iron Age carried on the storm-god’s cult in a new script. But the capital itself lay forgotten under the grass for three thousand years, its very name lost, until the tablets it had buried restored it.

The ruins were brought to scholarly notice in 1834, when the French traveler Charles Texier surveyed the site without knowing what city he had found. Systematic excavation began at the start of the twentieth century under German direction, and in 1906 Hugo Winckler opened the archives and the first tablets came up by the thousand. The work has continued, with interruptions, ever since, under the German Archaeological Institute — the gates cleared, the temples planned, a stretch of the wall rebuilt to its full mud-brick height, and the immense corpus of texts edited and published volume by volume. The tablets, dispersed between the museums of Istanbul and Ankara and Berlin, are now drawn back together in digital form, the whole Boğazköy corpus assembled and made searchable in the scholarly portals that carry the Hittitological work forward.

What was recovered has been recognized at the highest level twice over. Hattusa was inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1986, as the capital of the Hittite Empire and a masterpiece of Bronze-Age planning, fortification, and monumental art; and in 2001 the Boğazköy cuneiform tablets — the archive itself, taken as a documentary whole — were entered on the Memory of the World register, the catalog of the documentary heritage of humankind. The first honors the stones; the second honors the clay.

The standing of the site is singular. There are larger ruins of the ancient Near East and more famous ones, but there is hardly another city whose archive is so nearly the whole of what its civilization left. The treaties and the laws, the annals and the prayers, the rituals and the myths of the storm-god and the Sun-goddess and the vanishing god and the kingship in heaven — almost everything the gods of Hatti now possess was carried out of the ground at Boğazkale and read off the baked clay of their own capital. The city kept its dead religion the way it kept its dead — sealed under the floor, waiting to be raised.

→ Related: Hittites · Hittite Empire · Tarhunna · Arinna Sun Goddess · Teshub · Kumarbi · Telipinu · Yazilikaya · Eflatun Pinar · Ivriz Relief · The Hurrians · The Luwians · The Hattians · Phrygia · Assyria · Babylon · Ishtar · Anu