Dynastic History | Boğazköy Museum — The Gate Sphinx Came Back After Ninety-Four Years

Two sphinxes once faced inward at the Sphinx Gate on the Yerkapı rampart, at the high southern edge of Ḫattuša. They were found in 1907, in an excavation conducted under Ottoman authority with German participation, and between 1915 and 1917 the fragments were sent to the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin for cleaning and restoration, along with roughly ten thousand Hittite clay tablets. One sphinx went back to Istanbul between the wars. The other stayed in Berlin.

Turkey asked for it in 1938 and filed formally in 1986 with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property. The case ran for a quarter of a century. Both sides later acknowledged that the paperwork which might have settled ownership had been lost in the Second World War, so neither could prove title; the Art-Law Centre's case note records that Turkey pressed the matter by threatening German excavation permits. On 13 May 2011 the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz agreed to hand the sphinx over, calling it a gesture of German-Turkish friendship rather than a legal concession, with a transfer deadline of 28 November 2011 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hattuša's World Heritage inscription.

The sphinx reached Turkey at the end of July and went on show late that November in the village museum at Boğazkale, next to the one that had come home from Istanbul. The pair now stands in a single glass case, a few minutes' drive from the gate they were cut for.

📸 Cover: the two Sphinx Gate sphinxes displayed together in the Boğazköy Museum, both restored. Ingeborg Simon, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons