Who ruled Hattusa?

Hattusa was the capital of the Hittites, the Bronze Age power that ruled much of Anatolia and northern Syria in the second millennium BC. Its ruins lie on a rugged hillside beside the small town of Boğazkale, formerly Boğazköy, in Çorum province in central Turkey, inside the great bend of the Kızılırmak River. The clay tablets found there made it possible to recover the Hittite language and history, and the site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

The earliest traces of settlement go back to the Chalcolithic period in the sixth millennium BC. Towards the end of the third millennium BC the Hattians, the older population of the region, built a town here that they called Hattush. In the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BC merchants from Assyria, whose main base in Anatolia was at Kanesh, modern Kültepe, kept a trading post in a quarter of their own in the lower town; about forty of their business documents have been found.

Around 1700 BC the town was burned, and a layer of charred debris marks the destruction. The deed appears to have been the work of Anitta, king of Kussara, who boasted of it in an inscription and laid a curse on any later king who might resettle the place. The curse did not hold, and the city was rebuilt.

The Hittite king Labarna transferred his seat to Hattusa around 1650 BC and took the name Hattusili, meaning "the one from Hattusa". The capital did not stay there without interruption. Raids by the Kaskians from the north twice struck the city, and King Tudhaliya I moved the court north to Sapinuwa; later Muwatalli II moved it south to Tarhuntassa, leaving his brother, the future Hattusili III, to govern Hattusa. The seat of government returned in the thirteenth century and remained there until the end of the kingdom.

At its greatest the city covered about 1.8 square kilometres. The massive double walls, more than six kilometres long, were built under Suppiluliuma I in the fourteenth century BC. The royal citadel stood on the ridge now called Büyükkale, above an inner city of temples and administrative buildings; to the south an outer city held four more temples and was entered through gates decorated with reliefs of lions, sphinxes and warriors. Modern estimates put the population at around 10,000. Close to the city lay the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, where reliefs of a procession of gods were carved, mostly in the late thirteenth century, during the reigns of Tudhaliya IV and Suppiluliuma II.

The palace archives held about 30,000 clay tablets: letters, treaties, laws, rituals, oracles and literature, mostly in Hittite but also in Akkadian and other languages. Among them is the peace treaty between the Hittites and Ramesses II of Egypt, concluded in 1259 or 1258 BC, years after the Battle of Kadesh; a copy of it is displayed at the United Nations in New York as one of the earliest known peace treaties.

Hattusa fell together with the Hittite state around 1190 BC, one casualty of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Excavation suggests that the royal family, the elite and the government left the city gradually over several decades, perhaps in the face of drought, and that the fire which burned parts of it came after they had gone. As early as the twelfth century BC farming communities with a different material culture were living among the ruins.

The French explorer Charles Texier came upon the ruins in 1834, and later visitors included the geographer Heinrich Barth. Georges Perrot dug there in 1861 and was the first to propose, in 1886, that this was the Hittite capital. Tablets found by Ernest Chantre in the 1890s, and thousands more uncovered by Hugo Winckler from 1906 for the German Oriental Society, settled the question, since the few legible Akkadian texts named the city. Excavations by the German Oriental Society and the German Archaeological Institute, led successively by Kurt Bittel, Peter Neve, Jürgen Seeher and Andreas Schachner, have continued with interruptions for the two world wars. Notable later finds include a bronze treaty tablet discovered in 1986 and a Mycenaean-type sword dedicated by a Hittite king. The two sphinxes from the southern gate, separated for most of the twentieth century between Istanbul and Berlin, were brought back together in 2011 in the museum at Boğazkale, a town of about 1,200 people.