Dynastic History | Büyükkale, Hattuša — The Year the State's Own Files Came Out of the Hill

In 1906 Hugo Winckler, digging for the German Oriental Society with the Ottoman museum official Theodore Makridi, opened the citadel that the villagers of Boğazköy called Büyükkale and came out with clay. Thousands of tablets, baked hard by the fire that ended the building, lay in what had been storage rooms on the acropolis of Ḫattuša. Most were in a language nobody could read. A few were in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, and one of those carried the treaty Ḫattušili III made with Ramesses II, whose Egyptian version had been published for decades. That overlap fixed the hill: this was the Hittite capital.

The unreadable language was shown to be Indo-European by Bedřich Hrozný in a book printed in Leipzig in 1917. What it opened was not a literature so much as an administration: treaties, land grants, oracle reports, festival calendars, standing instructions to officials, letters between courts. Nearly everything that can be said about these kings therefore comes from files their own scribes kept, and where a second voice survives it usually belongs to another king. The districts that sent up the grain and the labour left no archive of their own. Between 1915 and 1917 some ten thousand of the tablets travelled to Berlin for study, in the same shipments as a pair of stone sphinxes from the city gate.

Büyükkale now is footings, grass and a modern stair, with the coach park at the bottom of the slope.

📸 Cover: Büyükkale, the royal citadel, seen from the south — area view, not the archive rooms. Rita1234, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons