L E G A C Y O F T H E H I T T I T E S
Zincirli
Zincirli, ancient Sam al, offers a contrastive example of the mixing of Aramean and Neo-Hittite traditions. Excavations at the site began in 1889 as the first move in the grand tradition of German archaeological exploration of the ancient Near East,29 which was soon to be followed by long term excavations at Babylon, Bog˘ azköy, Assur, and Uruk. The techniques of excavation used at that time can hardly be expected to meet modern standards, but a new University of Chicago project was begun at Zincirli recently, and should reveal the kind of detail that was missing in the earlier work.
The site lies in a valley on the edge of the Amanus Mountains, very near the northern end of the Great Rift that includes the Orontes Valley, the Dead Sea, and stretches through Africa to Olduvai Gorge. The city plan is striking: A somewhat oblong citadel mound, 240 × 335 m slightly off-center in an area marked out by a nearly circular double wall 720 m in diameter.30 The latter looks as if it were laid out by a draftsman using a compass—with regularly placed buttresses and three symmetrically located city gates (Figure 8.8: 1).
The architecture of the citadel is distinguished by palatial buildings of a form that has come to be designated bı¯t hila¯ ni, thanks to the use of this term in Assyrian texts for a “Hittite” palatial building (Figure 8.8: 2). Its essence is a broad porch with one to three columns or pilasters in a single row at the front, behind which is a broad room with a hearth.31 Additional rooms are grouped around this, but essentially it is a single building, not constructed around a courtyard or assembled in an agglutinative manner. The Neo-Assyrians recognized the bı¯t hila¯ ni as a Syrian or “Hittite” palace, and came to use the term as a word for “portico” in their own land. It seems to have its antecedents in the Late Bronze Age, particularly at Alalakh,32 and is as much associated with Aramean as with Neo-Hittite architecture, to the extent that they can be distinguished at all.
Zincirli is the most explicitly Aramean of the sites discussed in this chapter, so much so that a case could be made not to treat it as Neo-Hittite at all.33 Only a signet ring with hieroglyphs giving the name of Bar-Rakib attests that Luwian writing was known here,34 and even this king used Aramaic on another ring and all of his other monuments. Otherwise, the comparatively numerous inscriptions from the site are in West Semitic alphabetic scripts, including one discovered in 2008. Yet this only emphasizes the polyglot character of the cultural milieu in which Neo-Hittite principalities flourished. There are Luwian names attested at the site and Luwian inscriptions have been found not far away. Since all of the surviving documentation that we have comes from the 9th and 8th centuries, there is ample time to accommodate earlier, Luwian-speaking dynasties at the site, which have been hypothesized in the past, even if their existence is unproveable.35 In any case, the distinction between Aramean and Luwian Dynasties may well be overdrawn. The linguistic affiliation of a ruler’s personal name may say very little about what he actually spoke, and the language in which he composed his inscriptions was as likely to reflect political considerations as person ethnic ties. There is no particular reason to believe any of these elements were in conflict at Zincirli.
The styles of all of the sculptures found at Zincirli are far removed from the art of the Empire,
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but there are nevertheless echoes of the Hittite tradition in the subjects. One of the largest and earliest groups of orthostats was found on the southern outer city gate. The first chamber of the gate is guarded, as one might expect, by flanking lions. Along the faces of the entrance there are very crudely executed figures, only a little more than 1 m high, showing warriors, sphinxes, chariot scenes and representations of deities. These, and stylistically even earlier figures not found in situ, such as the horse rider carrying a severed head (Figure 8.9: 2),36 are almost like cartoons. There was more monumental sculpture as well. A 3-m high statue of a ruler on a lion base found on the citadel37 (Figure 8.9: 1) is as stiff as anything found in Near Eastern art. Later art, belonging to the 9th and 8th centuries, is much more carefully executed. The basalt portrait of a ruler who has sometimes been identified as the historically known 9th-century king Kilamuwa, although direct textual evidence for the identification is lacking, shows great detail despite its diminutive height of 50 cm (Figure 8.9: 3). A century later, Bar-Rakib’s stele (Figure 8.9: 4), carved with equal care, shows strong Assyrian influence. Incidentally, the scribe who addresses him is carrying a hinged tablet, probably with wax surfaces on the inside, and a box with writing instruments: a reminder that much of the nonmonumental writing in this period was being done on perishable materials. A final phase of Zincirli’s history is represented by a gigantic, and purely Assyrian, statue of the site’s Assyrian conqueror, Esarhaddon.
The deities worshiped at Zincirli in the 8th century include Hadad, El, the sun god Shamash, and the moon god Ba al Harran (Lord of the city Harran).38 While these deities clearly have their Hittite, Luwian, and Hurrian equivalents, the terminology here gives no hint of Anatolian traditions. In sum, Zincirli is as far as anything can be from the Hittite world, and still be considered Neo-Hittite.
Karatepe
Karatepe is a fortified hilltop overlooking the Ceyhan River in northeastern Cilicia, and essentially served as a border post on an important route crossing the Taurus and connecting the Anatolian Plateau with the south. It is heavily wooded today, and the landscape around it has been transformed by the construction of a dam on the Ceyhan, but its character as a fortress is unmistakable (Figure 8.10). The site was discovered in 1946 and priority was given to excavation of two gateways in the perimeter wall, one in the north and the other in the south. These were both decorated with orthostats (Figure 8.11) and sculptures of lions and sphinxes, executed in two different styles, both quite far removed from imperial Hittite models. It has been suggested that one stylistic group of sculptures had originally adorned a 9th-century site, Domuztepe, which lay across the river.39 The date of Karatepe itself was long disputed, but textual evidence now strongly points the late 8th–early 7th century,40 making this one of the very last sites to produce hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions.
Karatepe’s most important contribution to modern scholarship comes from these inscriptions, for they constitute part of a substantial set of bilingual texts that was of the utmost
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