3,200-year-old shrine in Turkey could be an ancient vision of the cosmos

Through Michael marshall

A shrine built over 3,000 years ago in what is today Turkey could be a symbolic representation of the cosmos, according to a new interpretation.

It has now been suggested that the elite of Hittite society, an empire that dominated what is now Turkey between 1700 and 1100 BC until its destruction, created the Yazılıkaya Shrine to embody their ideas on how the universe was organized.

Yazılıkaya contains many rock relief images, and the researchers behind the new interpretation argue that these have symbolic meanings related to the underworld, earth and sky, as well as cycles of nature such as seasons.

“There are many connotations with the names of deities, arrangements and groups, and in retrospect, so it is quite easy to understand it,” says Eberhard Zangger, president of Luwian Studies, an international non-profit foundation. “But we worked on it for seven years.”

“They can be on to something,” said Ian rutherford at the University of Reading in the UK. “I’m not convinced of all the details, but very interested in the whole.”

Yazılıkaya is an open-air sanctuary and was one of the most important sites of the Hittite Empire. The remains of the Hittite capital Ḫattu cana can be found near the modern village of Boğazkale in central Turkey. Yazılıkaya is within walking distance of the ancient capital.

In Yazılıkaya, the Hittites carved and altered natural rock outcrops to create two roofless spaces, decorated with rock relief images of their deities. They have used the site for centuries; its current form dates from around 1230 BC.

It is not known why the Hittites built Yazılıkaya or what they used it for. Many ideas were proposed – for example, that one of the spaces was used for New Year’s ceremonies, and the other was a mausoleum for a Hittite king.

In 2019, Zangger and his colleague Rita gautsch at the University of Basel in Switzerland suggested that some of the sculptures of gods could be a calendar, capable of tracking both solar years and lunar months. Such a calendar would have been centuries ahead of its time, and the interpretation has been met with skepticism.

Now the couple and their colleagues have taken a new direction. Instead of focusing on the possible uses of the engravings, the researchers looked at what they might have meant to the Hittites.

“They had a certain image of how the creation happened,” Zangger says. He says the Hittites imagined the world started in chaos, which was organized into three levels: “the underworld, then the earth we walk on, then the sky.”

In this context, Zangger says that the Hittites would have highlighted the circumpolar stars, which never descend below the horizon. He argues that a large group of deities in Yazılıkaya represent the circumpolar stars. “There are images like that in Egypt,” he says, and the Hittites were influenced by many neighboring societies, including Egypt. Other sculptures may have links to the earth and the underworld.

The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was the “recurring renewal of life,” Zangger says – for example, day after night, the black moon turning into a full moon and winter into summer. The calendar-shaped sculptures reflect this cyclical view of nature, he argues.

“As an idea, it’s not far-fetched,” says Efrosyni Boutsikas at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. Other cultures, ranging from neighboring Mesopotamia to distant Mesoamerica, have used religious monuments to connect life on earth with the larger universe. “Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does. It responds to universal concerns and to the place of people in the world, ”she said.

However, Boutsikas is concerned that many of the team’s interpretations of the images are not based on Hittite texts, which say little about astronomy. Instead, researchers often used texts from Mesopotamian societies, which influenced the Hittites but were also distinct. She says the evidence would be stronger if similar links between gods and astronomy could be found on other Hittite sites.

Journal reference: Skyscape Archeology Journal, DOI: 10.1558 / jsa.17829

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