- Kültepe
-
- For the village in Azerbaijan, see Kültəpə.
Coordinates: 38°51′N 35°38′E / 38.85°N 35.633°E Kültepe (Turkish: Ash Hill) is a modern village near the ancient city of Kaneš or Kanesh (Hittite: Neša, occasionally Anisa), located in the Kayseri Province of Turkey's Central Anatolia Region. The nearest modern city is Kayseri, about 20 km southwest.
Kültepe Location in Turkey
KültepeCoordinates: 38°51′00″N 35°38′00″E / 38.85°N 35.6333333°E Contents
History
Kaneš, inhabited continuously from the Chalcolithic period down to Roman times,flourished most strongly as an important Hattic/Hittite/Hurrian city, which contained a large merchant quarter (kârum) of the Old Assyrian kingdom, from ca. 20th to 16th centuries BC. A late (c 1400 BC) witness to an old tradition includes a king of Kaneš called Zipani among seventeen local city-kings who rose up against the Akkadian Naram-Sin (ruled c.2254-2218 BC).[1] It is the site of discovery of the earliest traces of the Hittite language, and the earliest attestation of any Indo-European language, dated to the 20th century BC. The native term for the Hittite language was nešili "language of Neša".
Kaneša
The king of Zalpuwa, Uhna, raided Kanes; after which the Zalpuwans carried off the city's "Sius" idol. The king of Kussara, Pithana, conquered Level Ia Neša "in the night, by force"; but "did not do evil to anyone in it".
Neša revolted against the rule of Pithana's son Anitta, but Anitta quashed the revolt and made Neša his capital. Anitta further invaded Zalpuwa, took its king Huzziya captive, and recovered the Sius idol for Neša.[2]
In the 17th century BC, Anitta's descendents moved their capital to Hattusa (which Anitta had cursed); thus founding the line of Hittite kings. These people named their language Nešili, i.e. "the language of Neša".
Archaeology of Kültepe
Vestiges of the merchant colony of Kültepe ("Karum" of "Kanesh") with Mount Erciyes (20 km) distinguishable in the background.
In 1925 Bedric Hrozny excavated in the Karum area of Kultepe finding over 1000 cuneiform tablets, some of which ended up in Prague and some in Istanbul. [3] [4] Modern archaeological work began in 1948 when Kültepe was excavated by a team from the Turkish Historical Society and the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums led by Tahsin Özgüç until his death in 2005. [5]
- Level IV-III. Little excavation has been done for these levels, which represent the site's first habitation. No writing is attested, and archaeologists assume that both levels' inhabitants were illiterate.
- Level II, 1974 BC - 1836 BC (Mesopotamian Middle Chronology according to Veenhof). Craftsmen of this time and place specialised in earthen drinking vessels in the shape of animals, often for religious rituals. During this period, Assyrian merchants established themselves in a merchant colony (kârum) attached to the city, which was by now called "Kaneš". Bullae of Naram-Sin of Eshnunna have been found toward the end of this level (Ozkan 1993). This level was burned to the ground.
- Level Ib, 1798 BC - 1740 BC. After an interval of abandonment, the city was rebuilt over the ruins of the old, and again became a prosperous trade center. This trade was under the control of Ishme-Dagan, who was put in control of Assur when his father, Shamshi-Adad I conquered Ekallatum and Assur. However, the colony was again destroyed by fire.
- Level Ia. The city was reinhabited, but the Assyrian colony was no longer inhabited. The culture was early Hittite. Its name in Hittite became "Kaneša", but was more commonly contracted to "Neša".
Some attribute Level II's burning to the conquest of the city of Assur by the kings of Eshnunna; but Bryce blames it on the raid of Uhna. Some attribute Level Ib's burning to the fall of Assur to other nearby kings and eventually to Hammurabi of Babylon.
In total, over 20,000 cuneiform tablets have been excavated from the site. [6][7]
Kârum Kaneš
The quarter of the city of most interest to historians is the Kârum Kaneš, "merchant-colony city of Kaneš" in Assyrian. During the Bronze Age in this region, the Kârum was a portion of the city set aside by local officials for the early Assyrian merchants to use without paying taxes, as long as the goods remained inside the kârum. The term kârum means "port" in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time, although it was extended to refer to any trading colony whether it bordered water or not.
Several other cities in Anatolia also had kârum, but the largest was Kaneš. This important kârum was inhabited by soldiers and merchants from Assyria for hundreds of years, who traded local tin and wool for luxury items, foodstuffs and spices, and, woven fabrics from the Assyrian homeland and from Elam.
The remains of the kârum form a large circular mound 500m in diameter and about 20m above the plain (a Tell). The kârum settlement site is the result of several superposed stratigraphic periods. New buildings were constructed on top of the remains of the earlier periods, thus there is a deep stratigraphy from prehistoric times to the early Hittite period.
The kârum was destroyed by fire at the end of both levels II and Ib. The inhabitants left most of their possessions behind to be found by modern archaeologists.
The findings have included enormous numbers of baked clay tablets, some that were enclosed in clay envelopes stamped using cylinder seals. The documents record common activities such as trade and legal arrangements. They record trade between the Assyrian colony and the city-state of Assur, as well as trade between Assyrian merchants and local people. The trade was run by families, not by the state of Assyria. These Kültepe texts are the oldest written documents from Anatolia. Although they are written in Old Assyrian, the Hittite loanwords and names in these texts are the oldest record of any Indo-European language (see also Ishara). Most of the archaeological evidence found is typical of Anatolia rather than Assyria, but the use of cuneiform writing as well as the dialect are the best indications of Assyrian presence.
Dating of the Waršama Sarayi
At Level II, the destruction was so total that no wood survived for dendrochronological studies. In 2003, researchers from Cornell University dated wood in Level Ib from the rest of the city (which was built centuries earlier). The dendrochronologists dated the bulk of the wood from buildings of the Waršama Sarayi to 1832 BC, with further refurbishments up to 1779 BC.[8]
See also
Notes
- ^ Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, rev, ed, 2005:10.
- ^ http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/hitol-1-R.html
- ^ Julius Lewy, Die altassyrischen Texte vom Kültepe bei Kaisarije, Konstantinopel, 1926
- ^ Veysel Donbaz, Keilschrifttexte in den Antiken-Museen zu Stambul 2, Freiburger Altorientalische Studien, 1989
- ^ Tahsin Özgüç, The Palaces and Temples of Kultepe-Kanis/Nesa, Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1999, ISBN 9751610664
- ^ E. Bilgic and S Bayram, Ankara Kultepe Tabletleri II, Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1995, ISBN 9751602467
- ^ K. R. Veenhof, Ankara Kultepe Tabletleri V, Turk Tarih Kurumu, 2010, ISBN 9789751622358
- ^ http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/TUBA-ARCaptured.pdf
References
- Tahsin Özgüç, Kültepe, Yapi Kredi, 2005, ISBN 9750809602
- KR Veenhof, Kanesh: an Old Assyrian colony in Anatolia, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East ed. by J. Sasson, Scribners, 1995
External links
- Cuneiform tablet case - Metropolitan Museum of Art
- kultepe.org.tr
- Kultepe article at Turkish Airlines
Categories:- Hittite sites in Turkey
- Hittite cities
- Former populated places in Turkey
- Archaeological sites in Turkey
- Populated places in Kayseri Province
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