An issue devoted to ancient Anatolia || BOĞAZKÖY: The Excavations of 1967 and 1968

BOĞAZKÖY: The Excavations of 1967 and 1968Author(s): KURT BITTELSource: Archaeology, Vol. 22, No. 4, An issue devoted to ancient Anatolia (OCTOBER 1969), pp.276-279Published by: Archaeological Institute of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41668031 .

Accessed: 23/05/2014 01:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Archaeological Institute of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toArchaeology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 24.12.178.246 on Fri, 23 May 2014 01:25:00 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aia

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41668031?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


View of Temple I at Bogazköy, from the northeast.

BOGAZKÖY The Excavations

In 1966, excavations at Büyükkale, the forti- fied palace of the great king of the Hittites at Bogazköy-Hattusa, came to a close. The expedi- tion of the German Archaeological Institute and the German Oriental Society, financed by the German Research Institute, was then directed toward another district inside the ancient city -

Temple I and its immediate vicinity in the northern part of the city. There a great structure had long been known at least in part. Indeed, more of it remained above the surface than of any of the other monuments at Bogazköy. As early as 1834, the French archaeologist, Charles Texier, had mentioned it. A number of German, French and English archaeologists and travelers had taken the structure into consideration. Finally in 1907, the German Assyriologist H. Winckler together with Th. Makridi, undertook excavations on a large scale. The German scholars Krencker and Puchstein published material from the building and interpreted it as a temple.

In 1937, we had enlarged the excavations at the pro pylon of the temple precinct and the storerooms immediately adjacent, and still the investi- gation of the very large sanctuary could only be regarded as far from complete. The excavations in the past two years of Temple I thus were un- dertaken as a result of a long standing obligation and as far as the temple is concerned, are complete.

The illustration shows the temple as far as it is preserved and the surrounding area viewed from Bü- yükkaya toward the mountain range which rises in the eastern section of the Hittite city. The plan shows the temple precinct after the present exhaustive excavations, in all its grandeur and monumentality as it stood during the thirteenth century before Christ until the fall of the Hittite capital about 1200. To the latest results belongs the confirmation of the fact that the sanctuary consisted of a double temple - therefore was set up to two divinities. In the back section directly behind the hall of pillars which closed off the courtyard, lay a large room with a base for a monumental cult statue. This formed the cella. The cella had on the left an extension, not well preserved, but equally as large, which from its plan and proportions can be nothing else but a second adyton. All of this indicates that the double temple was set up to the weathergod of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna - the most powerful Hittite divine couple.

The temple did not stand alone, but was surrounded on all four sides by structures of a different sort which, for the most part, served as storerooms for the temple wares - as the many storage jars testify which were found in situ arranged in two rows. Many of these jars bear incised signs which state their capacity; others have seal impressions with hieroglyphs. In the southeast storerooms and also in rooms 10 to 12, there were found in 1907 thousands of cuneiform texts on clay tablets which belonged either to a library brought there or to archives. Moreover, in 1967 and

27 6



Storage jars in the northwest storerooms at Temple I.

of 1967 and 1968

BY KURT BITTEL

1968 we found pieces of destroyed clay tablets through- out the whole temple precinct.

The new excavations have shown that the whole sanctuary stood on a high artificial terrace which is highest at the north, since it rests on a declivity which slopes downwards from south to north. The land formation made it possible to build the storerooms in several stories: those in the south had at least two, the storerooms on the north (19 to 32 on the plan) had three floors. The stairwells which led to the upper stories can still be traced in several places (8, 23, 35, 49 on the plan) and thus the number of storerooms can be estimated quite accurately: there were at least one hundred and seventy-six large rooms.

The main entrance to the sanctuary, shut off from the outside by the storerooms, formed the monumental gate-building which had been known for a long time at the southeast (see the plan between lc and 82). During the great religious festivals, the official pro- cessions passed through this entrance along a paved street with one sharp turn to the gate of the temple itself (opposite room 65 in the plan). The excavations of 1967 nevertheless revealed that there were three more entrances. Two of them (17 and 40) lie at the upper end of the ramps which lead up to the temple terrace. They form comparatively small pas- sages which were certainly only for the use of the sanctuary's personnel. The third entrance lies on the southwest and consists of one long, open corridor between two rows of storerooms. It ends outside in a

room of a gate with inner and outer doors (between 64 and 71a). Through this, the visitor reached a street eight meters wide, paved with large slabs of hard limestone and extending along the southwest façade of the temple precinct. On the other side of this street, and separated from the precinct of the temple only by this street, a large structure was excavated in 1967 and 1968. This building had been com- pletely unknown up to then. It is irregular in plan: its greatest length is about one hundred eighteen meters and its greatest width is fifty-five meters. A wall of varying thickness encloses it all around, broken only by a single gate which was clearly designed to be opposite the above-mentioned entrance of the temple precinct on the other side of the street. Through a broad lane of four meters wide, the visitor reached a trapezoidal inner courtyard, thirty meters long and ten and sixteen meters wide. On the south side is a blind alley, twenty-six meters long and three meters wide, leading up to the enclosure wall.

With the exception of the storerooms in the north, the inner rooms are grouped around a courtyard. They fall into two groups: small rooms on the southeast and large rooms in the northwestern half. These groups of rooms which are labeled on the plan with Roman numerals, vary greatly in respect to the number of rooms in each group. Groups XIII, XIV and XV are especially distinctive: group XIV has several rooms at the front, three rooms on each side of a large central room. This large room has a monolithic base in its northern section and a pilaster on the

277



Plan of Temple I with its outbuildings; compare with the photograph on page 276 which does not show the house and Lion Basin above, which are southwest of the temple itself.

BOGAZKÖY continued

south wall, while the six rooms (three on the right and three on the left) each have two sandstone bases along their long sides. Was it a counting house or a scriptorium or a courtroom with a chapel in the mid- dle? Among the finds, there is unfortunately nothing which is directly connected to the original use of this group of rooms. We are, however, chiefly concerned with the question of what the whole building complex was to which we had given the non-committal name "South Area." The South Area clearly appears to be- long in a wider sense to the temple precinct. This is shown by its position in the immediate vicinity and directly opposite the gates set here and there - facts which allow us to suppose that the buildings are re- lated to the precinct. We believe, therefore, that this building complex served some purpose connected with the religious and administrative activities of the whole sanctuary. The almost complete isolation from outside - broken only by one easily controlled entrance - strikingly recalls Egyptian arrangements from which the so-called "Settlement of the Workers" de- rives its name at Tell el- Amarna and also at Deir el- Medineh (Thebes-West) . According to the testimony of numerous ostraca, artisans of all kinds, priests and other religious personnel were settled there. The use of the complex excavated at Bogazköy could not be much different from that in Egypt. In the group of rooms numbered XIV, a half -preserved cuneiform tablet was found. It has one col- umn with a list which reads: ''Altogether two hundred and eight persons of the É GIS KIN-TI, of which eighteen are priests, twenty-nine musicians, nineteen scribes of clay tablets, thirty-three scribes of wooden tablets, thirty-five priests of div- ination, ten singers in Hurrian." This list totals one hundred and forty-four persons. We may as- sume that the occupations of the sixty-four other men who were listed on the lost half fall into categories corresponding to those of the present half. Although the clay tablet was found in destruction rubble, the tablet, together with the uniqueness of the building plan, seems to me strong proof that the complex of the South Area is a E GIS KIN-TI - a house for religious workers in which the workers of the temple, priests and scribes, so far as their duties were not performed in the temple itself, practised their professions and possibly also lived.

The excavation of the great temple precinct - the temple, its storerooms and the South Area - sets, it seems to me, many new standards for Our understand- ing of Hittite architecture. We may begin to appreciate better what the architects of the thirteenth century before Christ could do. A new consideration must be taken into account: the possible foreign connections in architectural forms with the XVIIIth and XlXth Dynasties of Egypt. Before all, however, it is neces- sary to become acquainted with the full scope of the ancient temple precinct. It is certain that the whole of the important area was enclosed by a temenos (sanctuary) wall of which, even now at least a part is known (see the plan). It is also clear that the precinct con- tains numerous other structures some of which still remain (see the plan). They are in part badly preserved, but during the time when they were first un- covered, we were able to form conclusive ideas about the largest building site which at least in the thirteenth century b.c. formed the religious center of the Hittite capital.

Professor Kurt Bittel has been President of the German Archaeological Institute, Berlin since I960 and Hon- orary Professor at the Free University of Berlin since 1962. He was born in Heidenheim (Württemberg) Germany in 1907. He studied archaeology and ancient history at Heidelberg, Berlin and Marburg. He has excavated in Egypt and Turkey where he has been Director of the German Archaeological Institute, Istan- bul during 1938-1944 and 1954-1960.

278



/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']



Documents

An issue devoted to ancient Anatolia || BOĞAZKÖY: The Excavations of 1967 and 1968