Zalpuwa , traditionally also thought to be Zalpa , was a still-undiscovered Bronze Age city in Anatolia of around the 18th century BC. Its history is largely known from the Proclamation of Anitta , CTH 1. It has now been proposed that the Zalpa mentioned in the Annals of Hattusili I , CTH 4, was a different city located at Tilmen Höyük , in the Karasu River Valley south of the Taurus Mountains by Tubingen and Chicago Universities recent excavations.
25-526: Zalpuwa is the setting for an ancient legend about the Queen of Kanesh , which was either composed in or translated into the Hittite language : "[The Queen] of Kanesh once bore thirty sons in a single year. She said: 'What a horde is this which I have born[e]!' She caulked(?) baskets with fat, put her sons in them, and launched them in the river. The river carried them down to the sea at the land of Zalpuwa. Then
50-469: A kārum , but the largest was Kaneš, whose important kārum was inhabited by soldiers and merchants from Assyria for hundreds of years. They traded local tin and wool for luxury items, foodstuffs, spices and woven fabrics from the Assyrian homeland and Elam . The remains of the kārum form a large circular mound 500 m in diameter and about 20 m above the plain (a tell). The kārum settlement
75-598: A small soundage in 1906. In 1925, Bedřich Hrozný excavated Kültepe and found over 1000 cuneiform tablets, some of which ended up in Prague and in Istanbul . In 1929 the site was visited and photographed by James Henry Breasted of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. There had been much digging for fertilizer, which had destroyed a quarter of the mound. Modern archaeological work began in 1948, when Kültepe
100-556: Is an archaeological site in Kayseri Province , Turkey . It was already a major settlement at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC (Early Bronze Age), but it is world-renowned for its significance at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC (Middle Bronze Age). The archaeological site consists of a large mound (also known as höyük, tepe or tell ), and a lower city, where a kārum (the Assyrian word for trading district )
125-403: Is recorded in Assyrian and Hittite sources. In cuneiform inscriptions from the 20th and the 19th century BC, the city was mentioned as Kaneš (also transcribed as Kanesh); in later Hittite inscriptions, the city was mentioned as Neša (sometimes transcribed as Nesha, Nessa or Nesa. Neša derives from [Ka]neša). The site is divided into two main areas: the circular mound (tepe, höyük) and
150-519: Is the kārum , a portion of the city that was set aside by local officials for the early Assyrian merchants to use without paying taxes as long as the goods remained inside the kārum . The term kārum means "port" in Akkadian , the lingua franca of the time, but its meaning was later extended to refer to any trading colony whether or not it bordered water. Several other cities in Anatolia also had
175-578: Is the result of several superimposed stratigraphic periods. New buildings were constructed on top of the remains of the earlier periods so there is a deep stratigraphy from prehistoric times to the early Hittite period. The kārum was destroyed by fire at the end of levels II and Ib. The inhabitants left most of their possessions behind, as found by modern archaeologists. The findings have included numerous baked-clay tablets, some of which were enclosed in clay envelopes stamped with cylinder seals . The documents record common activities, such as trade between
200-401: Is typical of Anatolia rather than of Assyria, but the use of both cuneiform and the dialect is the best indication of Assyrian presence. At Level II, the destruction was so total that no wood survived for dendrochronological studies . In 2003, researchers from Cornell University dated wood in level Ib from the rest of the city, built centuries earlier. The dendrochronologists date the bulk of
225-539: The line of Hittite kings . The inhabitants thus referred to the Hittite language as Nešili 'the Neša tongue'. By 1880, cuneiform tablets said to be from Kara Eyuk ('black village') or Gyul Tepé ('burnt mound') near Kaisariyeh , had begun to appear on the market, some being thus bought by the British Museum . In response the site was worked by Ernest Chantre for two seasons, beginning in 1893. Hugo Grothe dug
250-529: The 18th century BC, Uḫna the king of Zalpuwa invaded Neša , after which the Zalpuwans carried off the city's "Sius" idol. Under Huzziya 's reign, the king of Neša, Anitta , invaded Zalpuwa. Anitta took Huzziya captive, and recovered the Sius idol for Neša. Soon after that, Zalpuwa seems to have become culturally and linguistically Hittite. Arnuwanda's prayer implies that Zalpuwa was laid waste by Kaskians, at
275-472: The Assyrian colony and the city-state of Assur and between Assyrian merchants and local people. The trade was run by families rather than the state. The Kültepe texts are the oldest documents from Anatolia. Although they are written in Old Assyrian, the Hittite loanwords and names in the texts are the oldest record of any Indo-European language (see also Ishara ). Most of the archaeological evidence
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#1732771934107300-485: The Middle Bronze Age—yielding significant written records, totaling around 22,200 and 560 tablets, respectively. In contrast, only forty scattered tablets were found on the mound, where palaces and temples were uncovered, indicating that there are no surviving archives from the local authorities, if such archives ever existed. This kārum appears to have served as "the administrative and distribution centre of
325-500: The Zalpuwans carried off the city's Šiuš idol. Pitḫana, the king of Kuššara , conquered Neša "in the night, by force", but "did not do evil to anyone in it". Neša revolted against the rule of Pitḫana's son, Anitta , but Anitta quashed the revolt and made Neša his capital. Anitta further invaded Zalpuwa, captured its king Huzziya , and recovered the Šiuš idol for Neša. In the 17th century BC, Anitta's descendants moved their capital to Hattusa , which Anitta had cursed, thus founding
350-464: The entire Assyrian colony network in Anatolia". A late record, from circa 1400 BC, recounts the story of a king of Kaneš called Zipani, with seventeen local city-kings who rose up against Naram-Sin of Akkad , who ruled circa 2254–2218 BC. During the kārum period, and before the conquest of Pitḫana , these local kings reigned in Kaneš: The king of Zalpuwa , Uḫna , raided Kaneš, after which
375-470: The fall of Assur, other nearby kings and eventually to Hammurabi of Babylon. To date, over 22,000 cuneiform tablets have been recovered from the site, mainly from the kārum , with only 40 found in the Upper city. Subsequent excavations attested the following stratigraphy of Kültepe: Recently, in "a small cell-plan structure cutting the walls of the monumental building [o]f Kültepe [Level 13], dated to
400-583: The gods took them up out of the sea and reared them. When some years had passed, the queen again gave birth, this time to thirty daughters. This time she herself reared them." The river at Kanesh (Sarımsaklı Çayı) drains into the Black Sea , which seemingly supported the argument that the city was located near the Black Sea. "Zalpuwa" is further mentioned alongside Nerik in Arnuwanda I 's prayer. Nerik
425-545: The lower town to its northeast. The mound was inhabited (with discontinuity) from the Early Bronze Age through the Roman Empire, while the lower town was occupied only from the last decades of the third millennium to the early sixteenth century BCE. The lower town displays four levels of occupation, with only levels II (approximately 1945–1835 BCE) and Ib (approximately 1832–1700 BCE)—which roughly correspond to
450-571: The same time that Nerik fell to them, in the early 14th century BC. İkiztepe on the Kızılırmak Delta near the Black Sea coast was suggested as a possible location for Zalpuwa. In 1990, J. M. Córdoba identified Zalpa with Tell Hammam et-Turkman , on the Balikh river , and this proposal was commented as possible by French scholars Nele Ziegler and Anne-Isabelle Langlois in 2016, as well as Eva von Dassow in her (2022) essay. The city of Zalpa
475-434: The second half of the 3rd Millennium BC, statuettes made of alabaster with various attributes and ritual vessels in unprecedented forms were found in situ," and inside a "monumental building [d]iscovered in 2018 [which] contains a room called the 'idol room,' [a] collection of the largest number of idols and statuettes ever discovered in the ancient Near East [was found]." The quarter of the city that most interests historians
500-566: The wood from buildings of the Waršama Sarayi to 1832 BC, with further refurbishments up to 1779 BC. In 2016 new research using radiocarbon dating and dendrology on timber used in this site and the palace in Acemhöyük show the likely earliest use of the palace as not before 1851–1842 BC (68.2% hpd) or 1855–1839 BC (95.4% hpd). In combination with the many Assyrian objects found here, this dating shows that only middle or low-middle chronology are
525-508: Was a Hattic language speaking city which had fallen to the Kaskians by Arnuwanda's time. This portion of the prayer also mentioned Kammama, which was Kaskian as of the reign of Arnuwanda II . The conclusion until recently, was to locate Zalpuwa in a region of Hattian cities of northern central Anatolia: as were Nerik , Hattusa , and probably Sapinuwa , and Zalpuwa was thought to have been founded by Hattians, like its neighbours. Around
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#1732771934107550-879: Was called Zalwar in Old Babylonian texts. The military exploits of Hattusili I , a Hittite king who reigned in the latter part of the seventeenth century BC, are described both in Hittite and Akkadian in clay tablets, now in the Catalogue of Hittite Texts , excavated in Hattusa, the Hittite capital, and mention that he destroyed the city of Zalpa (written Za-al-pa in Hittite and Za-al-ba-ar in Akkadian). Kanesh Kültepe ( Turkish : lit. ' ash-hill ' ), also known under its ancient name Kaneš (Kanesh, sometimes also Kaniš /Kanish) or Neša (Nesha),
575-516: Was established in the beginning of the 2nd Millenium BC. So far, 23,500 cuneiform tablets recovered from private houses constitute the largest collection of private texts in the ancient Near East. In 2014, the archaeological site was inscribed in the Tentative list of World Heritage Sites in Turkey . Kültepe is located about 20 km northeast from the modern city Kayseri . Its ancient name
600-573: Was excavated by a team from the Turkish Historical Society and the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums. The team was led by Tahsin Özgüç until his death, in 2005. After 2005 the excavation was directed by Fikri Kulakoğlu. Some attribute Level II's burning to the conquest of the city of Assur by the kings of Eshnunna , but Bryce blames it on the raid of Uhna . Some attribute Level Ib's burning to
625-726: Was formerly equated by scholars with Zalpuwa in Anatolia, located to the north of Ḫattuša near the Black Sea. But the Zalpa mentioned in the Annals of Hattusili I has now been proposed as being at the site of Tilmen Höyük, in the Karasu River Valley south of the Taurus Mountains , which had a palace and temple that were violently destroyed near the end of the Middle Bronze Age II. This North Syrian Zalpa
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