Dynastic History | The Lower City, Hattuša — Thirty-Two Sealed Chambers of Other People's Grain

Behind the postern wall on the north-western slope below the citadel, the Hittite state sank a rectangular pit complex about 118 metres long and 33 to 40 metres wide and divided it into thirty-two chambers. Each could be sealed airtight, and each could be filled and emptied on its own. Published capacity estimates run from seven to nine thousand cubic metres. Fire destroyed twelve of the chambers in the early sixteenth century BCE, not long after the thing was finished — Anatolian Bronze Age dates of this kind follow the conventional middle chronology and carry decades of play — and the charring is the only reason the contents survived to be examined. The complex was dug in 1960 and 1961 and again in 1999, the later season under Jürgen Seeher for the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

What was in it was hulled barley and the hulled wheats emmer and einkorn, with lentil, bitter vetch and grass pea among them. Stable isotope work by Charlotte Diffey and colleagues, published in Antiquity in 2020, found that the cereals in each chamber had grown under different conditions and different land management, which is to say in different places. Their reading is that the silo collected and pooled taxed arable produce from farming communities across the city's hinterland.

The palace grew none of this. Villages did, and the pit is the receipt.

📸 Cover: storerooms along the north-west side of the Great Temple in the lower town, with two of its storage jars — representative of the city's storage, not the silo itself; the mudbrick wall behind is a modern reconstruction. Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons