Yazılıkaya

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A short walk northeast of the walls of Hattusa, where the plateau breaks into a cluster of standing rocks, the limestone has split along its bedding into a pair of high, roofless recesses. The two clefts open to the sky; their inner faces, dressed and smoothed, are covered with carved figures. The Turkish name for the place is Yazılıkaya — the inscribed rock — and the inscription is a procession of gods. There is no roof and there was never meant to be one: the sanctuary is the natural stone itself, opened along its grain and made into a chamber, with the weather and the seasons passing over the heads of the carved divine.

The opened rock and the temple before it

The outcrop stood within the cult-landscape of the capital long before it was carved. Pottery and traces of use carry the site back into the older centuries of the Hittite state — it had been a holy place, in some form, since at least the late sixteenth century before the common era — but the reliefs that give it its meaning belong to the empire’s last great age. They were cut and dressed in the second half of the thirteenth century, under the Great Kings Tudḫaliya IV and his son Šuppiluliuma II, the closing reigns of the kingdom of Hatti. The work is the most extensive open-air monument the Hittites left, and the fullest single statement of the imperial religion preserved anywhere in stone.

Two natural galleries run back into the rock. The larger and shallower, opening to the southwest, is the chamber the excavators label A; a narrow passage at its inner end leads to the second, deeper cleft, Chamber B. Both are roofless, and both were approached not directly off the hillside but through a built structure raised across the front of the rocks. Of that structure only foundations survive, but they show a gatehouse and a sequence of buildings — a temple front in the ordinary Hittite manner, with a portal and forecourts — set against the cliff so that the worshiper entered not a cave but a sanctuary, passing out of the built world of stone walls and through the gate into the unroofed chamber where the gods stood. The architecture framed the rock; the rock held the cult. What at first looks like a wild place of carved crags was, in its working life, a temple whose innermost rooms had no ceiling but the sky.

The rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, near Hattusa: the natural limestone clefts opened to the sky and carved into chambers. Photo by Murat Özsoy 1958, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

That this great work fell in the empire’s final century is not incidental to what it shows. The thirteenth century was the age in which the state religion of Hatti was recast in Hurrian dress. The line of Hattusili III and his queen Puduḫepa — herself the daughter of a Hurrian priest from the southeastern marches — drew the gods of the Hurrians fully into the heart of the royal cult, and their son Tudḫaliya IV, the king whose name and figure dominate Yazılıkaya, presided over the result. The sanctuary is the monument of that recasting: when the empire wished to set down, permanently and in order, who ruled in heaven, it carved a Hurrian pantheon onto the rock outside its capital.

The procession of the thousand gods

What the chambers hold is an assembly. The Hittites spoke of “the thousand gods of Hatti” — the vast company of powers the state had gathered out of every land and people it ruled, named by the hundred in the treaties and the prayers — and Yazılıkaya is the nearest thing to a portrait of that company. Along the two long walls of Chamber A some sixty-four divine figures advance in two converging files, carved in low relief in the local manner: each god in profile, in motion, one foot before the other, the whole assembly walking inward toward a single point.

The order is by sex. Down the left, or western, wall comes a file of male gods, striding in short kilts and upturned shoes, each wearing the tall conical horned cap that marks divinity and carrying the weapons and emblems of his office. Down the right, or eastern, wall comes a file of goddesses, robed to the ankle in long pleated skirts and crowned with the high cylindrical polos, their hands raised before them. The two processions move toward the back wall of the chamber, where they meet. At that meeting-point — the climax of the whole design, and the panel toward which every figure in the sanctuary is in motion — the storm-god Teshub stands upon the bowed shoulders of two mountain-gods, and toward him comes his consort, the goddess Ḫebat, riding upon a panther; behind her stand their son Šarruma upon a smaller cat, a daughter, and a granddaughter, so that the converging files resolve into the meeting of the divine family at the head of heaven.

Part of the procession of goddesses on the eastern wall of Chamber A, in long pleated robes and high crowns. Photo by Mark Landon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

Beside the leading figures, carved small in the field by their heads, are their names — and the names are written not in the cuneiform of the archives but in the hieroglyphic script of the Luwians, the picture-writing of seal and monument, the only script the Hittites used on their public stone. Read out, the names are overwhelmingly Hurrian. The head of the procession is Teššub, the Hurrian storm-king, with Ḫebat his queen; behind them come the sun-god Šimige, the moon-god Kušuḫ, the war-goddess and lady of love Šauška, and the long train of the lesser powers, each labeled in the picture-script that the modern reading of hieroglyphic-Luwian has made legible. This is the decisive fact about Chamber A, and it is a matter of scholarly record rather than interpretation: the pantheon ranged across the rock is the Hurrian pantheon, set in Hurrian order, raised over the central sanctuary of a Hittite king. The gods named by the thousand in the cuneiform tablets of the capital are here given faces, costumes, emblems, and a procession — the archive turned into stone, and the state theology of the empire’s last age fixed where it could be walked through and seen.

Set apart from the files, on a panel of its own in Chamber A, stands the king. Tudḫaliya IV is carved larger than the gods around him, robed in the long mantle and skullcap of the priest-king, his name written above him in a hieroglyphic cartouche framed by the winged sun-disk that marked the Hittite Great King. He stands among the divine company not as a worshiper outside it but as a figure belonging to the assembly — the living king set into the procession of the powers he served, his bond with them carved at the same scale and in the same stone as the gods themselves.

The dagger-god and the gods of the dead

The passage from the bright open gallery of Chamber A into the narrow inner cleft of Chamber B changes the key of the place entirely. The second chamber is tall, close, and shadowed, a slot of rock barely wide enough to stand in, and its reliefs are fewer, larger, and more guarded in feeling. It is the strangest and most concentrated part of the sanctuary, and the reading of it has fixed how the whole place is understood.

Three images govern the chamber. Along one wall march twelve gods of the underworld in lockstep — a single running figure, sword sloped on the shoulder, repeated twelve times in a tight file, the multiplied warriors of the lower world. On the wall opposite stands a great single figure with the head of a lion-demon and a body that descends into a sword driven hilt-up into the rock: the so-called sword-god or dagger-god, the deified blade planted point-down into the floor of the chamber, identified with Nergal, the lord of the underworld in his Hurrian dress. And on a third face the Great King Tudḫaliya IV appears again — but here not robed and apart, as in Chamber A. Here the god Šarruma, Teššub’s son, stands behind the king with his arm flung protectively about the king’s shoulders, the divine son larger than the man, leading him by the wrist, a god escorting his mortal charge. The relief is dated to about 1250 to 1220 before the common era, the span of Tudḫaliya’s reign.

Chamber B: the sword-god or dagger-god (left), the deified blade planted into the rock, beside the cartouche and figure of the Great King Tudḫaliya IV. Photo by Mark Landon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The gods of the dead, the blade of the underworld lord, the king in the embrace of his protector: the gathering of motifs has led most scholars to read Chamber B as a place of the royal funerary or ancestor cult. On the most widely held reading, the inner chamber was finished by Šuppiluliuma II as a memorial for his dead father Tudḫaliya IV — a chapel where the king who had carved the procession of the gods was himself honored after death, set under the arm of his divine patron and surrounded by the powers of the lower world, his passage into the company of the gods made permanent in the rock. This is an interpretation, and it should be held as one: it rests on the iconography of the chamber rather than on any inscription declaring its purpose, and the connection between the embraced king, the underworld file, and the blade is read rather than stated. But it is the reading the chamber’s program most readily supports, and it gives Yazılıkaya its double character — the bright assembly of all the gods in the open gallery, and the shadowed passage of the one king into their number in the cleft behind it.

The underworld god, identified with Nergal, carved in the inner Chamber B. Photo by Dosseman, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The calendar set into the rock

Why the gods should have been gathered here, in this open rock and not within the thirty-odd roofed temples of the capital, is a question the design itself seems to answer. The sanctuary stands open to the sky, and the procession runs toward a meeting; an assembly of all the powers, walking in order toward a single union, is the natural image of a great seasonal festival, the gathering of the gods at a turning of the year. The reading that Yazılıkaya served the cult of the new year — that the company of the divine was brought together here at the spring festival, when the king renewed his bond with the gods and the year turned over — is long-established, and it fits both the open form of the place and the converging movement of the files.

A bolder version of the same intuition has been pressed in recent scholarship. In a study of 2019 the researchers Eberhard Zangger and Rita Gautschy argued, in the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, that the very arrangement of the figures encodes a working lunisolar calendar: that the gods of Chamber A fall into groups of twelve, thirty, and five — the lunar months of the year, the days of the month, the intercalary days that bring the lunar count to the solar three hundred and sixty-five — with a further group of nineteen answering to the cycle by which the moon and sun are kept in step. A second study, published in 2021, extended the proposal to read the whole sanctuary as a model of the cosmos in its three tiers — the bright sky-gods of Chamber A above, the earth and its seasons in the procession, and the underworld of Chamber B below — the carved rock standing as a diagram of heaven, earth, and the dead, and of the day, the month, and the year cycling through them.

These are readings, and contested ones, set out in the scholarship as proposals rather than established fact; not every specialist accepts that the carvers intended so exact an astronomy. What is not in dispute is the impulse behind them. A sanctuary open to the sky, where the gods process toward a meeting and the king stands among them, was a place where the order of the powers and the order of time were felt to be one thing — the kingship, the calendar, and the company of the gods set together into the living stone, so that to walk the chamber was to walk the year and the cosmos at once.

Texier’s Amazons, and the recovery of the gods

When the Hittite state fell at the close of the Bronze Age the sanctuary went silent, and the gods on its walls stood unread for some three thousand years, their names in a script no living person could sound and their procession assigned to no remembered people. The rediscovery began in 1834, when the French traveler and architect Charles Texier, the first Western visitor to the ruins, was led by local farmers up to the carved clefts. He saw the two files of figures and could make nothing true of them: he took the great ruined city below for the Median Pteria, named the carvings a temple of an Iranian goddess, and read the two converging processions of gods and goddesses as a meeting of Amazons and Paphlagonians. His drawings, published a few years later and freely exaggerated, set the rock before the learned public of Europe under entirely the wrong description — but they set it before them, and other visitors followed with more careful copies and, before the century was out, with photographs. Only in the 1880s did scholars identify the buried capital, and the gods of its sanctuary, with the Hatti known from Egyptian and Assyrian record; only in the twentieth century, after the cuneiform archive of the capital was excavated and the Hittite language deciphered, could the Hurrian names beside the carved figures be read and the procession recognized for what it is.

That recovery turned Yazılıkaya into something the Hittites themselves could not have seen it as: a key. The tablets of the capital name the thousand gods of Hatti in their lists and treaties and prayers; the rock gives many of those names faces, and ranks them, and shows how the late imperial theology ordered the whole company under the Hurrian storm-king and his queen. For the study of the religion it is the fullest visual witness there is — the one place where the pantheon of the archives can be looked at rather than only read, the Hurrianizing of the state cult in the thirteenth century made plain at a glance, the abstract company of the lists resolved into a procession with costumes and emblems and an order. No other Hittite monument shows so much of the divine world at once.

The sanctuary was inscribed, together with the capital it served, on the World Heritage List in 1986 under the name Hattusha: the Hittite Capital, and it stands today as it has stood since the empire’s last century — the rock open to the weather, the files of the gods worn but legible along the dressed stone, the dagger driven into the floor of the inner cleft. The thousand gods of Hatti are nowhere else gathered in one place as they are here, walking inward across the living rock toward the meeting of the storm-king and his queen, in the order an empire gave them in its final age.

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