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Great King that we would expect. He is also the author of the six-line hieroglyphic inscription that covers the length of the opposite side of the chamber.31 While precise understanding of the text eludes us, it mentions deeds of Suppiluliuma, and includes a reference to Tarhuntassa. It can be compared to another, longer hieroglyphic text by the same king found at Yalbert, which mentions conquests in the southern part of Anatolia, although it is not clear that the Chamber 2 text is concerned with military activities.32

With its royal residence on Büyükkale, the Great Temple in the lower town and scores of temples in the upper town, awesome fortifications, funerary monuments, archives and debris of administration, Hattusa is an impressive seat of imperial authority. But was it a city in the sense of being a place where a substantial population actually lived? There clearly were residential dwellings in Hattusa, but more and more space within the walls was devoted to public and sacred architecture as the Empire matured. Even allowing that excavations have given priority to public buildings, it is hard to believe large numbers of people resided in the site. In its final years Hattusa was, in Peter Neve’s words, a city of gods and temples.33

HITTITE SITES IN THE EMPIRE’S HEARTLAND

The Late Bronze Age ceramic assemblage associated with the Hittite capital is more remarkable for its standardization than its artistic qualities. It is for the most part monochrome, with so little change in basic shapes over time that it offers archaeologists only a very imprecise dating tool. Pottery of this type was termed “drab ware” by the excavators of Tarsus because it struck a contrast with the painted and otherwise more elaborately decorated wares of other periods in the sequences they uncovered. The basic repertoire was descended from forms that are in evidence at Kültepe before the Hittites came to power. The essential point, however, is that this pottery seems to have a direct association with the Hittite government, the exact nature of which remains obscure. At Gordion, which is on the northwestern edge of the area in which this pottery is distributed, it has been noted that not just the vessel shapes, but also the techniques of pottery production are the same as those at the capital, despite the use of local clay.34 The same may be said of the Late Bronze Age pottery of Kilise Tepe in the Lower Land.35 One index of the association, is that this pottery drops out of use when the empire disintegrates. Interestingly, the local pottery traditions that emerge after it is gone resemble the painted pottery that came before the rise of the Hittites.36

Hittite texts name hundreds of settlements on the Anatolian plateau, but major archaeological exposures of the Late Bronze Age are comparatively few. One reason for the discrepancy is that most of the names probably belong to rather inconsequential places. While in many cases, the majesty of the Hittite Empire may not have made much of an impact on the daily routines of villagers living outside of the capital, we know that many places had an important cultic significance to the kingdom from its beginnings. For example, there is a group of officials designated lúAGRIG,37 each associated with a specific town where they played an important role in rituals.

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was being kept aware of what was going on in this provincial center by a number of different officials. Mas¸at lay very near the Kaska frontier, and interactions with the Kaska as laborers and prisoners of war figure prominently in the letters. Not all were written to the king or the capital however; there is also correspondence with other provincial centers.

One of the places mentioned, Shapinuwa, has now yielded an archive of its own, which is many times larger than the one found at Mas¸at. This is the site of Otraköy, at which two public buildings have been excavated. One appears to be a sort of royal residence, if the testimony of the 3000 tablets found there is interpreted correctly. The exposed portion measures 25 × 75 m and apparently had two stories. When it burned in an intense fire, the tablets fell from the upper stories. As in the case of Mas¸at, these documents appear to date to the early part of the empire, and do not directly name the king. A large proportion are again letters, but these seem to have been sent to the king from various parts of the Empire. Some of the letters are between king and queen, and this has led the excavator to assume that at least one of them was in residence here. It is also of interest that almost a third of the tablets are written in Hurrian, and it would appear that the site was important in Hurrian rituals.40

Two other important provincial sites are currently under excavation: Kaman Kalehöyük and Kus¸aklı. In both cases, there are large public buildings which served in the administration of the Empire. The general configuration of the latter is clear from survey and excavation, so we will highlight it as an example of a medium-sized Hittite provincial center. It was constructed on elevated ground and surrounded by a casemate wall enclosing 18 hectares in which there are four regularly spaced gateways (Figure 7.11).41 On the southeast side of the acropolis, which is slightly off center in the rough circle marked out by the city wall, is a major palatial building (Building C), formed around a courtyard. Other public buildings were located nearby and one of these, Building A, yielded a small archive containing texts that relate to the king’s performance a ritual in the town of Sarissa: it would appear that the local archive kept materials of local importance. Near the northeast gate there is another large temple that matches the temple plans of Bog˘ azköy with a colonnaded central court.42

Thus, recent research has shown that the bureaucratic and ideological apparatus of the Hittite state was much more widely spread throughout the countryside than what the first decades of Hittitology, with their overwhelming concentration on the capital, had indicated. Archaeologists have had little incentive to excavate hamlets and farmsteads, but documents like the Hittite law code and ritual texts make it clear that the countryside was dotted with small communities. If the Old Kingdom was not the urban age that the Assyrian trading colony period had been, one can see that the activities of the Hittite imperial government gradually became more visible in the countryside with the rise of centers of provincial control like Örtaköy, Kus¸aklı, Kaman Kalehöyük, and Mas¸at Höyük.

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Anatolian feature on display. We note here only a few of the identifiable personalities. Standing behind Hepatu, also on a lioness, is the god Sharruma. The only male on the female side, he is the son of the central pair. On the male side, there are two female attendants following one of the deities who appears to be male. They have been identified as Ninatta and Kulitta, the handmaidens of the goddess Shaushga,46 a Hurrian deity equated with the Mesopotamian Ishtar, who has both masculine (warlike) and feminine (love) qualities. She appears to be represented separately for each aspect here at Yazılıkaya, for there is another Shaushga on the feminine side. The sun and moon gods can be identified by their headressess, and two supporting gods stand on a hieroglyph for the earth and hold up a symbol of the sky (Figure 7.14: 2).

The most unexpected aspect of this representation of the pantheon is its Hurrian character. Before the hieroglyphs could be read, it was suspected that the leading goddess would be the Sun Goddess of Arinna, not the foreign Hepatu.47 Not just the names, but the way in which the procession is ordered appears to be Hurrian.48 Here, at the very center of the empire at their most sacred site known to us, the Hittites seem to have been quite open minded about whom they were worshiping.

The Hittites did not claim to inhabit a “land of a thousand gods” for nothing, and Yazılıkaya is but one of many indicators of their willingness to embrace both new and old deities of all kinds. According to Bryce:

[T]he Hittites believed that the world was populated by a multitude, indeed a plenitude, of spirits and divine forces. The whole cosmos throbbed with supernatural life. Gods inhabited the realms above and below the earth. And on the earth every rock, mountain, tree, spring, and river had its resident god or spirit. These were not mere abstractions, but vital living entities.49

There was a core group of old Hattian deities and other local deities, but as the Hittites conquered new territory, they tended to bring in the gods of their new subjects and allies as well.

One of the reasons the Bog˘ azköy archives contain so many different languages is that rituals had to be performed for these deities in their native tongues.

Let us look at the Hurrian case in a little more detail, since the Hurrians contributed a major component to the culture of the Empire. Their history begins before the Hittites appeared, their presence in northern Syria being attested by Mesopotamian documents of the third millennium BC. By the time of the Hittite Old Kingdom, the Hurrians formed a sizable percentage of the population of northern Mesopotamia and southern Anatolia as well, but it was during the growth and expansion of the Empire that they had their greatest impact in the north. Their language is unrelated to any other tongue spoken in the ancient world, except Urartian, to which we shall return in a later chapter. Much that stemmed originally from Mesopotamia came to the Hittites through the Hurrians but their influence was not limited to transmitting the works of others; many of their own myths and rituals are found in the Bog˘ azköy archives. The Hittite royal family itself seems to have been Hurrian because some of its rulers had Hurrian names

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