The İvriz Relief

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A cliff face stands above the spring of the İvriz Suyu, southeast of Ereğli, where the water comes up out of the southern edge of the Anatolian plateau and runs all year. Into that rock, near the place where the spring rises, a panel a little over four meters high was cut: two figures, the one on the left far larger than the one on the right, both turned to face each other across the stone. The taller is a god. He wears a horned crown and a short belted tunic, and in his hands he holds not weapons but the produce of the land — a sheaf of grain in one hand, a heavy bunch of grapes in the other. The smaller figure, opposite him, is a man in an elaborate fringed robe, his hands lifted in worship. Three short lines of hieroglyphic-Luwian writing stand between them, naming the god and naming the king.

This is the İvriz relief, the most celebrated of the rock monuments of the Luwians in the Iron Age, and one of the finest carvings left by any of the small kingdoms that rose in southern and eastern Anatolia after the fall of the Hittite empire.

The Rock by the Spring

The relief lies near the village of Aydınkent — formerly İvriz itself — in Konya Province, about seventeen kilometers southeast of the modern town of Ereğli, where the foothills of the Bolkar range meet the plain. The main panel, known to scholars as İvriz 1, measures about 4.2 meters high by 2.4 meters wide, cut into the living rock of a slope above the head of the spring (the İvriz relief at Wikipedia records both the dimensions and the setting). It is not the only carving at the site: an unfinished copy of the same composition was begun on the rock face near the Ambar Deresi gorge, at a place called Kızlar Sarayı, and never completed; and in 1986, during work on a weir, a separate inscribed stele — İvriz 2 — came to light, bearing text in both hieroglyphic Luwian and Phoenician and set up by the same king.

The setting is the whole point of the monument. The plateau of central Anatolia is dry country, and the harvest there depends less on the uncertain rains than on the springs that feed the fields below. The İvriz Suyu is one of the great springs of the region, and the relief was cut where its water comes out of the ground. To carve the storm-god holding the grain and the grapes directly above the source of the water that makes the grain and the grapes grow is to read the meaning of the place in stone: here is where the increase of the field begins, and here is the power that grants it.

The work belongs to the second half of the eighth century before the common era. The man in the fringed robe is named in the inscription as Warpalawas, king of the land of Tuwana — a Luwian-speaking kingdom in the region the Assyrians called Tabal, in the southern part of the plateau. He is a well-documented figure: the Assyrian royal annals know him as Urballa of Tuhana, a tributary king under Tiglath-Pileser III, and his reign is generally set in the decades around 738 to 710 BCE. The relief can therefore be dated with unusual confidence for an ancient monument, to the lifetime of a king who appears in the records of two writing systems at once.

The İvriz relief: the storm-god Tarhunza (left), much larger, holds ears of grain and a bunch of grapes; King Warpalawas of Tuwana (right) stands in the attitude of worship. Photograph by Klaus-Peter Simon, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The Kingdoms After the Empire

To understand the relief one has to understand the world it comes from. For most of the second millennium BCE the Anatolian plateau had been ruled from Ḫattuša, the capital of the great kingdom of Hatti, whose archives preserve the religion of the Bronze Age in tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets. Around 1200 BCE that kingdom collapsed, as did much of the eastern Mediterranean world, and the central archive fell silent. But the collapse was not the end of Anatolian civilization. In the south and southeast — in Tabal, in the region of Karkamish on the Euphrates, in Malatya, in the Amuq plain — a constellation of small successor states carried on. They spoke Luwian, the language closely related to Hittite that had long been the everyday tongue of much of the empire’s south and west. They built in the old manner, carved reliefs in the old style, and wrote in the hieroglyphic-Luwian script, the picture-writing that had stood beside cuneiform in the imperial age and now became, for these kingdoms, the main monumental hand.

Modern scholarship calls these states Neo-Hittite, or Syro-Hittite, and the term is apt: they were the afterlife of Hatti. Their kings took old titles, their sculptors kept the old iconography, and above all their gods were the gods of the empire, carried forward under new names and into a new age. The Tarḫunna of the Hittite tablets — the storm-god, the head of the pantheon, the warrant of the king — survives in these reliefs as the Luwian Tarhunza, written in hieroglyphs and worshiped from Karkamish to Tabal. Tuwana, Warpalawas’s kingdom, was one such state, centered on the old city of Tyana in the plain below the Taurus passes. The İvriz relief is its great monument, and Warpalawas its most visible king.

The God Who Holds the Harvest

The figure on the left is named in the three-line hieroglyphic-Luwian inscription set before him. The reading, established in the modern study of the script, identifies him plainly: this is the great Tarhunza of Warpalawas — the storm-god, claimed as the personal and dynastic god of the king of Tuwana (the inscription and its reading are described by the epigrapher Tayfun Bilgin’s Hittite Monuments catalog of İvriz). The carving that names him as the king’s was itself the work of a man called Tiyammaradu, recorded as Warpalawas’s favored servant.

The name Tarhunza is the Luwian form of a divine name that runs across the whole Anatolian world and back into its Indo-European root. It is built on a verb meaning to overcome or to conquer; the storm-god Tarḫunna of the Hittites, the Luwian Tarhunza, the Lycian Trqqas all descend from a single Proto-Anatolian figure, the conquering one, the power in the thunder. In the Bronze Age this was a warrior-god above all: the king of the gods, the slayer of the dragon Illuyanka, the lord whose victories warranted the king’s throne and whose name stood at the head of the long god-lists that sealed the treaties of Ḫattuša. He rode the storm; the bull was his beast; the thunderbolt and the axe were his weapons.

At İvriz the storm-god holds no axe. He carries grain and grapes. This is what makes the relief remarkable. The horned crown still marks his divinity, and the curved weapon at his hip — its pommel carved in the shape of a bird’s head, probably a vulture — keeps something of the old warrior. But the hands are full of the harvest. In his one hand are ripe ears of wheat or barley; in the other, a great bunch of grapes hanging from the vine. The sickle worn at his side belongs to the same register: it is the tool of the reaping, the sign of the moment just before the grain comes in. The whole figure is the storm-god turned toward the field and the vineyard — not the king of heaven enthroned in his victory, but the lord of the increase, the one who gives the bread and the wine.

This aspect of the god is not a local invention of Tuwana. The study of the Luwian texts has recovered a specific title, “Tarhunza of the Vineyard,” attested in vineyard rituals as far back as the sixteenth century BCE; in the Iron Age the same vineyard-god comes forward in the reliefs of Tabal, and the İvriz monument is its grandest image (the continuity of this fertility aspect is traced in the article on the Luwian storm-god Tarḫunz). The storm-god had always been the giver of rain, and rain is the increase of the field; the move from the rain to the grain it brings, from the thunder to the harvest beneath it, is a short one. What İvriz does is to make that aspect the whole of the image. Set above the spring, the god of the storm becomes the god of the water that never fails and the crops it raises.

The King in Worship

Opposite the god, and made markedly smaller, stands the king. The disproportion is deliberate and traditional: in the art of Hatti and its heirs the god is shown larger than the mortal, the difference in scale carrying the difference in station. Warpalawas wears a long fringed and patterned robe, a rounded cap, and a fibula at the shoulder of a type known from the period; his hands are raised, palms forward, in the gesture of greeting and prayer that the same art uses for a worshiper before a deity. He stands, in some descriptions, on a low platform or base, set apart from the rough ground as the god is set apart by his crown.

The composition is itself a statement. It is not a battle scene, not a hunt, not a procession of tribute. It is an audience: the king of Tuwana, alone, before his god, with nothing between them but the lines of writing that name them both. The king does not give the offering; the god gives — the grain and the grapes are in the god’s hands, held out above the worshiper. The relief reads from the divine side downward: the increase descends from Tarhunza to Warpalawas and, through the king, to the land he holds. To stand before it at the spring, in the eighth century, was to see the source of the kingdom’s food shown as a gift, and the king shown as the one who received it on the people’s behalf.

Detail of Tarhunza: the horned crown of divinity, the grain and the grapes, the curved weapon at the hip. Photograph by Klaus-Peter Simon, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The second monument from the site, the stele İvriz 2 found in 1986, deepens the picture. Its inscriptions, in Luwian and Phoenician, were set up by Warpalawas as well, and recent work on the Luwian text has recovered for the first time the ancient name of the spring itself — read as Sallusa — together with further detail of the king’s piety toward the storm-god (the discovery is reported in Arkeonews). That the king should record both the god and the name of the water is of a piece with the great relief: the cult here is a cult of the spring, and the storm-god as giver of the harvest is its lord.

The Storm-God from the Bronze Age to the Iron

The İvriz relief is read today, above all, as a witness to continuity. The religion of Hatti did not die with the empire. Its central figure, the storm-god, passed intact into the Iron Age, and İvriz shows him there, named in the script of the successor kingdoms, worshiped by a king the Assyrians knew. The Tarḫunna of the cuneiform archives and the Tarhunza of the rock relief are the same god across six centuries and two writing systems — the clearest single demonstration that the Neo-Hittite states were the genuine heirs of the Bronze-Age sacred world, not merely its imitators.

What shifted, in the passage, was emphasis. In the imperial age the storm-god’s office was kingship and victory: he stood at the head of the “thousand gods of Hatti,” he warranted the treaties, he was paired with the Sun-goddess of Arinna as the divine couple at the summit of the state. The same god, in the Hurrian theology absorbed at the imperial sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, appears as Teššub, the storm-king who won the kingship of heaven. At İvriz the storm-god’s warlike office has receded behind his role as the giver of fertility. This is not a different god but the same god seen from the side of the field rather than the side of the throne — the lord of the rain attending to what the rain produces. The continuity is in the figure; the development is in which of his powers a small agricultural kingdom by a great spring chose to set in stone.

That development has a long reach. In the centuries after İvriz, as the Luwian states were absorbed and the religious world of Anatolia was reshaped by Phrygians, Persians, and Greeks, the Anatolian storm-god did not simply vanish. In the Roman period the god of the Commagene town of Doliche — a storm-god standing on a bull, holding the thunderbolt and the axe — was carried across the empire as Jupiter Dolichenus, a soldier’s god whose iconography preserves the ancient Anatolian weather-god in Roman dress. The line that runs from the thunderbolt-wielding Tarḫunna of Ḫattuša, through the grain-and-grapes Tarhunza of İvriz, to the bull-riding Jupiter of the legions is one of the longest unbroken threads in the religious history of the region.

Rediscovery, Reading, and Heritage

European travelers reached the İvriz relief well before its meaning could be read. An account by Jean Otter in 1748 relied on earlier reports; Major von Fischer, in 1837, is recorded as the first documented European visitor to describe the monument from the rock itself. For a long time the carving could be admired but not understood: the figures were plainly a god and a worshiper, the grain and the grapes plainly the gifts of fertility, but the writing was mute. The hieroglyphic-Luwian script — the picture-writing of the Neo-Hittite world — was deciphered only across the twentieth century, in a long collaborative effort that built on the recovery of the Hittite language itself and culminated, for the Iron-Age inscriptions, in the comprehensive corpus assembled by the British scholar J. D. Hawkins. Only with that work could the lines at İvriz be read as the naming of Tarhunza and of Warpalawas, and the relief set firmly in the reign of a king already known from Assyrian records.

The relief in an older photographic record — a glass lantern slide of the İvriz panel, king and god face to face. Public domain, KU Leuven collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

The monument has not had an easy survival. It stands in the open, above running water, and the spring that gives it its meaning has also been its slow enemy: damp, salts, the growth of lichen, and in modern times the rise and fall of an associated reservoir have all worked at the rock. Conservation studies of recent decades have documented both the natural weathering and the human pressures on the panel, and have argued for the careful management of the water and the visitors around it. Today the site is approached as a cultural landscape rather than a single carving: the relief, the unfinished copy at the gorge, the spring, and the recovered stele are read together. Turkey has placed the “Ivriz Cultural Landscape” on its tentative list for inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the formal recognition of a monument long counted among the masterworks of Neo-Hittite art (the listing is held by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre).

What remains, when the dating and the decipherment and the conservation reports are set aside, is the image itself, and it has lost none of its directness. A king stands at a spring, his hands open before his god. The god stands over him, larger, crowned, and in place of the weapons of the storm he holds out the grain and the vine. Above them the water comes out of the rock and runs down to the fields, as it did in the eighth century and as it does now. The bread and the wine of a small Anatolian kingdom are shown, in the most lasting medium its sculptors had, as the gift of the storm-god — and the storm-god is shown giving them, face to face, to the one man who stands for the land.

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