Day 18, (April 17, 2013) of our OAT's Turkey's Sacred lands and Ancient Civilizations Tour. We depart from Gaziantep headed to Adana. along the way we stop at Karatepe, a walled neo-Hittite city.
Dear Blog Readers, a chairde (friends),
Exhaustion, dancing "all night" at a folk music restaurant in Sofia and slow internet connections caught up with us and we have fallen behind on our blog. We are in Istanbul now prior to leaving for Ireland tomorrow. Moe and I are taking turns napping! When awake we are working like possessed persons on the blog.
Disclosure:
The sky was gray, filled with thunder and lightning. The access to the wall seemed difficult (it wasn't)--so only I took the walk. Few pictures were taken as I had one eye looking skyward and the other eye looking at the ground as I scurried toward the bus. Moe however did take some wonderful photos, shown below.
Karatepe
Karatepe is a late Hittite fortress and open-air museum in southern Turkey. It is located in the Taurus Mountains, and is contained within the Karatepe-Aslantas National Park.
Karatepe is Turkish for "Black Hill" and Aslan is Turkish for "lion". (Compare to Aslan, the lion, the lord of Narnia in C.S. Lewis' book "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".)
!!!!! Why am I so excited about Hittite sites and artifacts? Firstly, I can pronounce Hittite, unlike the names of some ancient civilizations...
The Hittite Ancient Civilization
The Hittite civilization, perhaps unknown to Americans, reached its height during the mid-14th century BC when it encompassed an area that included most of Asia Minor plus other areas.The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East.
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| Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets with a stylus.. The impressions left were wedge shaped, thus the name cuneiform from the Latin cuneus "wedge" |
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| Karatepe Hittite Cuneiform writing |
At the Karatepe-Aslantas Museum we learned about the local equivalent of the Rosetta Stone: identical, mirror inscriptions in Hittite and Phoenician that finally enabled linguists to decipher the Hittite hieroglyphics.
The Karatepe Fortress
This fortress is an archaeologically significant walled city dating from the eighth century B.C. It is in a remote and beautiful location situated in the forested foothills of the Taurus Mountains at the edge of a lake (the lake was formed by a dam recently--during Hittite times there was a river in a deep valley below the fortress). |
| We walked for 1/4 mile along the wall |
This citadel was created by King Asatiwas some time in the 8th century BC. Not much is known about King Asatiwas although he left an inscription describing himself as “the servant of the Storm God”.
Maybe that's where the thunder the lightning came from...
If you look to the left as soon as you cross the museum threshold you will be able to see a line drawing of carvings of King Asatiwas sitting at a table while servants fan him and bring in food and drink.
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| King Asatiwas sitting at a table while servants fan him |
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| Nurdan and the site archaeologist discuss King Asatiwas |
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| Underneath the King's table was a monkey |
Beneath his feet a cow is readied for sacrifice, while in front of him musicians strum lyres and bang drums in his honor. Those familiar with Ancient Egyptian art will notice immediate similarities in the figures whose faces are shown in profile while their bodies are twisted out to face the audience.
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| Line drawing of portal lion--for you Nick |
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| Ouch! This lion looks like a pieced together kitty |
I saw these these orthostats on the hike but didn't photograph... however Moe did!
A site such as Karatepe-Aslantaş is so well preserved and displayed it’s hard to believe that its very existence was once forgotten. It was only in 1946 that a school teacher from Kadırlı showed some finds to archeologists including Halet Çambel who then began work on excavating the site.
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| Goats feasting on plant |
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| Ancient ship with oars, furrowed square-rig sail and the bounty of the ocean below. |
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| Women breast feeding a child. |
Don't worry about her manly appearance. It seems to us that all the people depicted on these orthostats looked the same--like the king!
Moe's Photos
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| OAT travelers |
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| Hittite Orthostats |
The details on these are amazing--remember they are from the eighth century B.C.
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| Musicians |
Before our visit to Karatepe, before we offended the storm god, while the sun was shinning we stopped at a small local restaurant where these charming, beautiful women cooked our lunch.
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