Hattusas - Bogazkale, Turkey - World Heritage Sites on Waymarking.com

The historical site of Hattusas/Hattusa is located near city of Bogazköy around 200 km from Ankara. It was the capital of the Hittite empire around 2000 BCE. The city is located on a mountain slope at the southern end of a small fertile plain. It lay between two deeply-cut streams which converged on the plain, forming the northernmost point of the city. In some places the eastern valley narrows to a deep gorge. It seems surprising that such a remote city could have been the capital of an empire, but besides tradition there were the factors of plentiful water and good natural defences that kept the Hittite kings there. The first settlement at the site dates from the Early Bronze Age, but no documents exist that could identify the people who built them. They lived on the top and northwest foot of the high hill which dominates the east side of the city, called Büyükkale ("Great Fortress") or Acropolis. The first writing from the site are clay tablets with Old Assyrian cuneiform. These demonstrate the presence of Assyrian merchants at the city, then called Hattus, around 1800 BCE. The early settlers of Hattus spoke a language with the same name. It belongs to no other known family and scholars call it Hattic to distinguish it from Hittite. Hittite is an Indo-European language and probably arrived with Indo-European conquerors, although details of this "conquest" are lacking. The merchants lived in the lower part of the city, which extended up to the great hill, whereupon the king's palace was probably located. The entire
city was destroyed, probably by a King Anittas
of Kussara sometime after 1800 BCE.

Source: www.hattusas.com/hattusas.html

Type: Site Reference number: 377

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Date Logged Log User Rating   11/28/2013 Castor007 visited it