2014 Biking Turkey Daily Snippet

8 September, Boğazkale
Pansiyon Asikoğlu 60TL

Absolutely LOVED the ancient Hittite capital of Hattuşa, occupied some 4000 years ago. We spent several hours this morning walking the 5km hilly circuit around the ruined city, which in its heyday was home to over 50,000. The Hittite* kingdom stretched from Syria to Europe, and “squared up to the Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires”. A section of city wall has been recreated. The walls, some of the thickest in the ancient world and over 6km long, were constructed of timber and mud brick on stone foundations. The foundations of numerous temples remain, as do sections of the city gates and a ceremonial tunnel under the wall. It rained in the night and again as we walked to the site, so we were treated to an atmospheric morning complete with rainbow, the air fresh and cool. The earliest known peace treaty was concluded between the Hittites and the Egyptians. On the site is a large green jade cube, amazingly smooth to the touch, which some say was a gift from Ramses II... We also visited Yazilikaya, the site of an outdoor religious sanctuary where the Hittites carved images of gods and kings onto the rockface.

*Lonely Planet: While the name may evoke images of skin-clad barbarians, the Hittites were a sophisticated people who commanded a vast Middle Eastern empire, conquered Babylon and challenged the Egyptian pharaohs more than 3000 years ago. Apart from a few written references in the Bible and Babylonian tablets, there were few clues to their existence until 1834 when a French traveller, Charles Texier, stumbled on the ruins of the Hittite capital of Hattuşa. In 1905 excavations turned up notable works of art, most of them now in Ankara’s Museum of Anatolian Civilisations. Also brought to light were the Hittite state archives, written in cuneiform on thousands of clay tablets. From these tablets, historians and archaeologists were able to construct a history of the Hittite empire. The original Indo-European Hittites swept into Anatolia around 2000 BC, conquering the local Hatti, from whom they borrowed their culture and name. They established themselves at Hattuşa, the Hatti capital, and in the course of a millennium enlarged and beautified the city. From about 1375 to 1200 BC Hattuşa was the capital of a Hittite empire that, at its height, shared Syria with Egypt and extended as far as Europe. The Hittites worshipped over a thousand different deities; the most important were Teshub, the storm or weather god, and Hepatu, the sun goddess. The cuneiform tablets revealed a well-ordered society with more than 200 laws. The death sentence was prescribed for bestiality, while thieves got off more lightly provided they paid their victims compensation. Although it defeated Egypt in 1298 BC, the empire declined in the following centuries, undone by internal squabbles and new threats such as the Greek ‘sea peoples’.