Harmanşah, Ömür; 2011. "Moving Landscapes, Making Place: Cities, Monuments and Commemoration at Malizi/Melid " Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 24.1: 55-83. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ways of Being Hittite: Empire and Borderlands in Late Bronze Age Anatolia and Northern Syria
Studia Orientalia Electronica, 2021
In this paper, I take identity as a characteristic of empire in its periphery, denoting the totality of: 1) the imperial strategies an empire pursues in different regions, 2) the index of empire in each region, and 3) local responses to imperialism. My case study is the Hittite Empire, which dominated parts of what is now modern Turkey and northern Syria between the seventeenth and twelfth centuries bce, and its borderlands. To investigate the identities of the Hittite imperial system, I explore the totality of the second millennium bce in two regions. First, I explore imperial dynamics and responses in the Ilgın Plain in inner southwestern Turkey through a study of the material collected by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project since 2010. Second, I explore the identity of the Hittite Empire in the city of Emar in northern Syria by a thorough study of the textual and archaeological material unearthed by the Emar Expedition. In both cases, I argue that the manifestations of the Hittite Empire were mainly conditioned by the pre-Hittite trajectories of these regions. The strategies that the administration chose to use in different borderlands sought to identify what was important locally, with the Hittite Empire integrating itself into networks that were already established as manifestations of power, instead of replacing them with new ones.
J. Ben Dov - F. Rojas (eds.), Afterlives of Ancient Rock-cut Monuments in the Near Eas, 2021
This contribution intends to discuss the afterlife of the Hittite landscape monuments after the fall of the Hittite empire at the turn of the thirteenth century bce.1 The goal is to emphasize that Hittite rock reliefs marking sacred and strategic places (e.g., springs, caves, ponds, passes, etc.) survived to the end of the empire and enjoyed a second life in the context of renewed cultic and ritual activities in classical and Medieval times. And yet, significantly, their reuse did not take place in the centuries after the fall of the empire, during the Early and Middle Iron Age (twelfth-eighth centuries bce). The first part of this contribution presents the reasons that might have prevented the reuse of the Hittite landscape monuments in the aftermath of the fall of the empire. Because of the overall lack of evidence of post-Hittite attention to and adoption of Hittite monuments, it seems worth discussing in depth the only exceptional case opposing this general tendency: that of the rock-sculpted monuments of Kızıldağ, in the Konya plain.
Bordered Places ǀ Bounded times - Interdisciplinary perspectives on Turkey, 2017
Cultural historian Elliott Colla proposed in a recent paper that ancient borders, unlike their modern versions, were often roughly hewn, both materially and conceptually. With this he not only refers to the artfully crafted and politically contested nature of borders in antiquity but also cleverly highlights their geological grounding. For the Hittite imperial landscapes, Colla's statement has special resonance, since Hittite frontiers are often discussed with respect to the making of rock reliefs and spring monuments that commemorate the kingship ideology at both politically contested border regions and appropriate local sites of geological wonder and cultic significance such as caves, springs and sinkholes. Treaties were signed and border disputes were settled at these liminal sites where divinities and ancestors of the underworld took part as witnesses. One such monument is the Yalburt Yaylasi Sacred Mountain Spring Monument that features a lengthy Hieroglyphic Luwian inscription put up by the Hittite kings in the countryside. Excavated by the Anatolian Civilisations Museum, Ankara, in the 1970s, the Yalburt Monument near Konya is dated to the time of Tudhaliya IV (1237- 1209 BC). Since 2010, the Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project has investigated the landscapes surrounding the Yalburt Monument. The preliminary results of the extensive and intensive archaeological surveys suggest that the region of Yalburt was a deeply contested frontier, where the Land of Hatti linked to the politically powerful polities of western and southern Anatolia. This paper discusses the nature of a Hittite borderland with respect to settlement programs, monument construction and regional politics.
Roosevelt, C. H., and C. Luke. 2017. "The Story of a Forgotten Kingdom? Survey Archaeology and the Historical Geography of Central Western Anatolia in the Second Millennium BC." European Journal of Archaeology 20(1): 120–47., 2017
THIS ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS AT https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2016.2 This article presents previously unknown archaeological evidence of a mid-second-millennium bc kingdom located in central western Anatolia. Discovered during the work of the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey in the Marmara Lake basin of the Gediz Valley in western Turkey, the material evidence appears to correlate well with text-based reconstructions of Late Bronze Age historical geography drawn from Hittite archives. One site in particular—Kaymakçı—stands out as a regional capital and the results of the systematic archaeological survey allow for an understanding of local settlement patterns, moving beyond traditional correlations between historical geography and capital sites alone. Comparison with contemporary sites in central western Anatolia, furthermore, identifies material commonalities in site forms that may indicate a regional architectural tradition if not just influence from Hittite hegemony.
The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean, 2015
In this chapter, I explore practices of rock carving on the Anatolian peninsula from a diachronic perspective, with special emphasis on the Late Bronze Age and Early–Middle Iron Ages (ca. 1600–550 BC). Linking together the materiality of monuments, rock-carving technologies and issues of landscape imagination, I focus first on the commemorative rock reliefs across the Anatolian landscape, sponsored by the Hittite , Assyrian and Syro-Hittite states . Rock reliefs were carved at geologically prominent and culturally significant places such as springs, caves, sinkholes, rivers sources or along the river gorges. They constituted places for communicating with the underworld, the world of divinities and dead ancestor s. I then venture into the Urartian and Paphlagonian rock-cut tomb-carving practices and Phrygian rock-cut sanctuaries of the Iron Age to argue for the broader dissemination of the idea of altering karstic landscapes for cultic and funerary purposes. I maintain that rock monuments can only be understood as always being part of a complex assemblage in the long-term history of places. Using a limited number of examples, this chapter contributes to studies of landscape and place in Mediterranean archaeology by promoting a shift of focus from macro-scale explanations of the environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of place-making.
European Journal of Archaeology, 2017
This article presents previously unknown archaeological evidence of a mid-second-millennium bc kingdom located in central western Anatolia. Discovered during the work of the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey in the Marmara Lake basin of the Gediz Valley in western Turkey, the material evidence appears to correlate well with text-based reconstructions of Late Bronze Age historical geography drawn from Hittite archives. One site in particular—Kaymakçı—stands out as a regional capital and the results of the systematic archaeological survey allow for an understanding of local settlement patterns, moving beyond traditional correlations between historical geography and capital sites alone. Comparison with contemporary sites in central western Anatolia, furthermore, identifies material commonalities in site forms that may indicate a regional architectural tradition if not just influence from Hittite hegemony.