1,720,975 research outputs found
Resilient Vines? Religious Motifs and Areal Contacts Between Central Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Post-Hittite Period
No full textThroughout the Bronze Age, material and historical frameworks attest to a broad cultural interchange between Central Anatolia and the Northeast Mediterranean, superimposed on patterns of regional differentiation. After the demise of the Hittite Empire, around 1200 BCE, political unity and strong cultural interference left place to a more fragmented panorama, coupled with a conspicuous reduction in interregional contacts evidenced by archaeological, linguistic, and historical sources. This paper explores how cultural interactions were reshaped during this transition. We show that niches of cross-regional convergence existed in the 8th century BCE, as especially evidenced by the distribution of religious motifs in the Syro-Anatolian area, chiefly the Storm-god of the Vineyard. We propose that this convergence was made possible by the local diachronic resilience of cultic traditions facilitated by a limited, cross-regional, synchronic interference
Introduction to Volume 2
No full textIntroduction to a volume on language contact in 1st millennium BCE Anatolia
"Symbols of power" ittiti: considerazioni sul doppio disco solare alato (DDSA)
No full textIl Sole alato rappresenta il simbolo della regalità ittita più facilmente riconoscibile nell’iconografia anatolica, ricorrente sia sui sigilli reali sia sui numerosi monumenti sparsi nel territorio di Hatti. La forma meglio conosciuta del Sole alato è costituita da un disco solare singolo disposto al centro di un paio di ali variamente caratterizzate. Oggetto del presente lavoro, tuttavia, è una tipologia particolare di Sole alato, caratterizzata da un disco supplementare sovrapposto al motivo standard. Propongo quindi che questa variante servisse primariamente a simboleggiare l’autorità congiunta del Gran re e della Grande regina, richiamando la loro rispettiva identificazione con il dio Sole del Cielo e la dea Sole di Arinna/ Hebat
The Making of Hittite Imperial Landscapes: Territoriality and Balance of Power in South-Central Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age
No full textAbstractAim of the present work is to offer an understanding of the mechanisms informing the making and reproduction of the Hittite Empire (17th-13th BCE) in its diachronic evolution. The analysis focuses on South-Central Anatolia, an area of intense core-periphery interactions within the scope of the Hittite domain and, therefore, of great informative potential about the manifold trajectories of imperial action. Through the combinatory investigation of archaeological and textual data able to account for long- to short-term variables of social change, I will show that South-Central Anatolia evolved from being a loose agglomerate of city-hinterland nuclei into a provincial system. The region thus acquired a pivotal role in the balance of power thanks to its centrality in the communication network, and it became the stage for eventful political revolutions, as well as a new core for Hittite political dynamics. The picture of Hittite imperialism emerging, thus, is that of a set of multi-causal and multi-directional processes, not predicated on the sole centrifugal hegemonic expansion of the empire.</jats:p
The Syrian and the Anatolian: Cultural and political frontiers in the post-Hittite Eastern Mediterranean (ca. 1200-700 BCE)
Full text linkThroughout the Bronze Age, Anatolia and Syria had been deeply connected by an intense cultural and political exchange channeled by the Taurus mountains. However, after the collapse of the Hittite empire and the beginning of the Iron Age, regions on the two sides of the Taurus developed independent socio-cultural networks with limited interaction. This broad separation is generally overlooked in past research because obscured by the common cultural background that Iron Age Syro-Anatolian polities mostly inherited from the Hittite period. Warning against conceptualizations of Iron Age Syro-Anatolia as a coherent cultural complex, this paper intends to show that a “Taurus divide” affected various spheres of interaction, ranging from the cultural and linguistic landscapes to the worldviews shaping political practices of Syro-Anatolian polities. I will also argue that this divide found expression in the Assyrian “mental maps” of the area
The Farthest Cities of Phrygia: Iron Age Interactions in the Southern Anatolian Plateau
No full text“The farthest city of Phrygia”... this is how Xenophon tersely describes the city of Iconion/Konya in the Anabasis (1.2.19). Although inspired by Greek geographical conceptions of Xenophon’s own time – the 4th century BCE – these words are very apt to capture the crucial notion that, in antiquity, Konya and the Anatolian Southern Plateau represented a persistent interface between several competing political, social and cultural networks. This paper aims to offer a historical perspective to this understanding by focusing the Early and Middle Iron Ages (ca. 1200-700 BCE). I will show that during this period, the area was subject to competing cultural and political influences from Phrygia, in the northwest, and the Syro-Anatolian polities of Tabal to the east. A multifaceted frontier thus emerged, arguable from distribution patterns of material cultural features and from the politico-geographical map reflected in extant epigraphic sources, namely Assyrian and Luwian Hieroglyphic inscriptions. On this basis, I will also explore the case of possible linguistic interactions in the target area
Identities in the Making: Cultural Frontiers in Central Anatolia in the 2nd Millennium BCE
No full textThe Hittite Laws draw a separation of the Hittite domain into seemingly discrete socio-geographical entities: Hatti, Luwiya, and Pala. This distinction has inspired a long-lasting debate among Hittitologists, chiefly oriented to the definition of different ethno-linguistic spheres in Anatolia. The present paper moves on from this debate and takes the Hatti-Luwiya-Pala opposition to signify a permeable divide between Hatti and other spheres of the early Hittite administration, based on a core-periphery organisation. I propose that this divide did not emerge as an abstract feature of the Hittite administrative map, but was determined by a cultural frontier having its traceable roots in the Old Assyrian period of the early 2nd millennium BCE, when the term Hatti (attested in the form Hattum) already indicated a geographic entity clearly distinct from the rest of Anatolia. In conclusion, I propose that both Hatti and Luwiya originally derived from ethnolinguistic designations for the “Hattian” and the “Luwian” lands respectively, but these meanings were already altered by the time the Hittite kingdom emerged
Territorial administration in Alalah during Level IV
No full textSince they were first catalogued by Wiseman (1953), 1 the two corpora of tablets unearthed at Alalaḫ/Tell Açana, in the Amuq plain, one deriving from the 17th century b.c. (level VII) and the other from the15th century (level IV), have proven to be among the richest in the 2nd millennium Near East in terms of economic, political, social and demographic information. The sequence of such remarkable archives in the same place, in two relatively close periods, offers a rare occasion to observe how different political formations, in different historical contexts, built their networks of interaction within approximately the same geographical space. The territorial organization of Alalaḫ’s domain in the context of level VII has been the subject of many studies, based on both epigraphic and archaeological evidence, while, for the period of level IV, this issue has been mainly addressed by focusing on the recent archaeological data acquired under the purview of the Amuq Valley Regional Project. 2 Starting from a coherent archival group, the present paper proposes a new interpretation of some documentary sources on the territorial organization of the kingdom of Alalaḫ during the period of level IV, by providing evidence for an administrative subdivision of the state. These results will then be compared with the situation attested in level VII, viewed through the filter of previous scholarly work
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