The part of Hattusa located at the foot of the Royal Citadel (tr. Büyükkale) is known as the Lower Town (tr. Aşağı Şehir). In this area, it is possible to see the ruins of the Grand Temple, the remains of an Assyrian trade colony, and the traces of residential houses and offices. This temple is the largest one in Hattusa, after the Temple of the Weather God in Kuşaklı, the second largest known in the Hittite Empire. The Grand Temple is currently marked with number 1 for guidance.

History of research

In 1834, the Frenchman Charles Texier was the first western traveller to visit the area of Hattusa, where he discovered the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya and the ruins of a city that he believed to be the Median Pteria. There he also saw and drew the only slightly overgrown remains of the temple and interpreted them as the Temple of Anaitis, an Iranian goddess.

Just two years later, in 1836, William John Hamilton made imaginative drawings of the Grand Temple, believing the site to be Tavium. The first excavations were carried out in 1893/94 by the French archaeologist Ernest Chantre and his wife, who, however, described the temple as a palace. He also drew up a plan.

Then, in 1906, Theodor Makridi from the Ottoman Museum in Istanbul and the German orientalist Hugo Winckler began systematic excavations in Boğazköy. Winckler then assigned the site to the hitherto little-known Hittite Empire and identified it as its capital. In the course of this work, Otto Puchstein and Daniel Krencker investigated the temple area from 1907 onwards on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute.

The building researcher Krencker had not been concerned with completely clearing the entire masonry of all rubble, but rather exposing the individual walls and floors only as far as necessary. Krencker measured the temple area including the outbuildings and made a drawing according to which, according to Puchstein, Texier's plans were outdated. Puchstein also began to describe the building.

After an interruption due to the First World War, Kurt Bittel took over the direction of the excavations in 1931, which were in turn interrupted by the Second World War. During Bittel's excavation period, another, more comprehensive drawing of the area was made, which also included the residential areas to the north up to the adjacent section wall.

Under the following excavation director (1978–1993), Peter Neve, the area west of the cult room was examined and uncovered in more detail. This confirmed the assumption that the temple had a second adyton here, which suggested that it was a temple of the two main Hittite gods, the weather god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. In the following years of excavation, Jürgen Seeher was in charge of the excavation between 1994 and 2005 and Andreas Schachner from 2006 to 2023. Under Schachner, knowledge about the structure and construction history of the temple rooms and the surrounding magazines was continuously expanded through targeted follow-up excavations.

History of the area of the Grand Temple

In this area, the traces of settlement date back to the predecessors of the Hittites - the Hattians. They lived here in the late third millennium BCE. At the beginning of the second millennium BCE, there was an Assyrian trade colony (karum). Assyrian merchants established small colonial settlements next to Anatolian cities. Their most important export was copper, and import - tin and clothing. During the excavations in Hattusa, the ruins of houses and offices of the Assyrian merchants were discovered. The names of some of these merchants are known because of the tablets found there.

From the 17th century BC, the city was settled by Hittites and a ruler by the name (or title) Labarna made the place the capital of his empire and named himself Hattusili, "the one from Hattusa".[9] The construction of the Grand Temple began in the early 16th century BCE at the latest. Nothing is known about possible later construction work on the temple complex.

When the Hittite Empire collapsed in the early 12th century BCE, the temple and the surrounding buildings were also abandoned. The fact that only a strikingly small number of finds could be recovered from the rooms indicates that the buildings were cleared out, possibly by the residents leaving them or the invaders looting them.

The only numerous finds were cuneiform tablets that were of no value to the later residents. Traces of fires were found in almost all the rooms in the warehouses except in the southern area, although these did not necessarily occur at the same time. This fire burned the cuneiform tablets, which had originally only been air-dried.

Numerous traces of an Iron Age settlement were found throughout the temple, the warehouses, and the southern area. It consisted of one- to two-room houses with simple, single-shell walls. A number of spolia from Hittite buildings were found in the walls, and some of the houses were built directly on the existing foundations from the Hittite period.

This abundance of building material may also be the reason for the intensive new construction at this site. Finds from this period included clay vessels as well as bronze and iron tools. The clay vessels included simple household utensils such as cloverleaf jugs, bulbous pots, and large kraters, including a two-handled jug with Old Phrygian painting of geometric patterns.

Among the bronze finds, there are six bow brooches, three of which were recovered in a bronze handled cup. The iron objects include three arrowheads that were found in a wall in the temple area. They may be evidence of a violent end to this settlement.

A total of 88 graves of various types from the Hellenistic and Roman periods were also discovered throughout the site. These include pithos graves, skeleton burials, stone boxes with and without stone circles, pithos coffins, brick slab graves, and a cremation burial. They can be dated from around the 3rd/2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE.

Grand Temple plan and design

The temple complex is located in the north of the urban area of Hattusa, in the so-called Lower Town, which is the older part of the capital. For the construction of the temple complex, an artificial terrace was created that towers up to eight meters above the surrounding area and straightens the slightly sloping terrain to the north. The area measures about 200 meters from southwest to northeast, and 130 meters from northwest to southeast.

A road about eight meters wide, which leads to the so-called south gate in the section of wall to the north of the temple, divides the complex into two parts. The northeast part is made up of the temple with the magazine wings surrounding it; southwest of the road is the building known as the south area or house of labour.

The northern area with the temple and magazines is usually entered through the main entrance in the southeast. A path came from the ruler's residence on Büyükkale, which roughly corresponded to the modern road. The gate building consisted of two guard chambers and a pillared hall on the inside. From there, the temple road leads to the entrance of the actual temple. It continues to circle the entire temple, separating it from the warehouse buildings. Another simple gate building can be found in the southwest through the south warehouses from the road to the south gate.

Halfway along the wide road from the main entrance to the temple, the visitor passes a monolithic water basin made of limestone in a bend in the road, which is set into the pavement. It played a major role in religious rituals, just like another water tub located outside the temple area. The pavement is heavily warped, which is due to the sewer running underneath having collapsed.

The temple is oriented from southwest to northeast and measures 42 by 65 meters. Since there are no remains of staircases except for a staircase in a room next to the entrance that led to the roof, the building appears to have been one-story. The entrance is in the southwest and, like the main entrance to the site, has two side chambers for the gatekeepers.

In contrast to the main entrance, however, it was equipped with a pillared vestibule on the outside and inside. Traces of the hinges and the drag marks of the doors are still visible on the door thresholds. At the western corner of the building there is a side entrance with an open drain channel. Both entrances lead to the once paved and uncovered courtyard, measuring 27 by 20 meters. Remains of its paving are still preserved in the eastern corner. On special ritual occasions, numerous priests and servants gathered in the courtyard for cult acts with music, songs, and incense. Such acts are described in detail in numerous Hittite texts.

To the northeast of this is the area of ​​the cult rooms. A five-columned portico was located in front of this. In the eastern corner of the courtyard, the base of a small rectangular building can still be seen, and the archaeologists believe it to be an altar building. Behind it, there is a series of small, interconnected anterooms, behind which were the actual cellae. Only the king and queen and a few temple priests were allowed to enter these two rooms.

The two cult rooms were probably dedicated to the highest deities of the Hittite pantheon, the weather god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. The right of the two rooms measures about 8 by 10 meters, the left has similar dimensions. Both cult rooms are characterized by pilasters in the middle of the walls. The left, northwest cella is badly damaged. In the right, in the middle of the northeastern narrow side, a pedestal has been preserved, which probably carried the statue of the deity worshipped there. In this wall and in the adjacent corners, there were four windows that reached almost to the floor. They were most likely closed with wooden shutters, but could bathe the deity in bright daylight if necessary.

Religious activities of the Hittites

Thanks to the numerous cult texts on cuneiform tablets, a lot of information is known about the religious activities of the Hittites on various occasions. There are also images, for example on the relief vases of Hüseyindede, İnandıktepe and Bitik or the stone reliefs of Alaca Höyük. However, most of the texts and images do not give any indication of where the cult acts in question took place.

At least the inner courtyard, the windows, and the roof are documented as sites of rituals. It is also known that the most sacred rooms, the Holy of Holies, were only allowed to be entered by a few priests, which certainly included the ruler.

The religious acts included songs, recitations, and invocations of the gods as well as processions, some of which took place outside the temple. The offering of sacrifices to the deities was also an important part of the sacred acts. These included the often depicted animal sacrifices such as bulls, goats, and sheep, but also libations.

The sacrifices probably took place in the temple as well as outdoors. The large ritual festivals such as the festival for the New Year in March, the harvest festival in autumn, and the monthly rituals at the full moon were associated with processions, but also with musicians, dancers, and jugglers. The latter are also depicted in Alaca Höyük as well as on the relief vases. On the Hüseyindede vase, for example, one can see the artistic performance of the bull-leaping, but also musicians and dancers. Naturally, less is known about the sequence of the cult acts in the Holy of Holies.

The festivities, which were held at uniform dates throughout the year, had social and political functions in addition to their religious significance. On the one hand, they structured the year and formed the centre of social life, where large numbers of people met. In addition, the king demonstrated his superior position, especially since some of them were also travel festivals, where the ruler, usually with his wife, visited various cities of the empire in a fixed order and held corresponding ceremonies there.

Warehouses

The four main and side entrances divide the magazine rooms surrounding the temple into four wings. Staircases show that, in contrast to the temple itself, these were multi-storey. This meant that more than 200 storage rooms were available.

The individual wings could be entered from the outside through a few doors, while inside the rooms could be accessed via corridors or connecting doors. The massive, monolithic thresholds of the connecting doors are still clearly visible, particularly in the south-western part. The use as storage rooms is attested to by individual, in situ finds.

These include mainly clay vessels (pithoi) with a capacity of up to 2000 litres, which were mainly found in the north and south areas. Foodstuffs such as grain, pulses, oil, and wine were stored in them. Since they were embedded in a thick clay pack on the floor, they could only be kept on the ground floor. At the mouths of the vessels, signs indicated the quantity with units of measurement, the type of content and the owner. Since 2020, some of the pithoi in the northern magazine wing have been restored.

In other rooms in the western and northern wings, the traces of wooden shelves were found in which other objects were stored. Fallen stone bases of shelf supports show that the upper floors were probably used in a similar way. Several thousand cuneiform tablets were found in the eastern wing. From this, it can be concluded that the temple's clay tablet archive was housed there, perhaps also on the upper floors. Numerous clay tablets were also found in the northern wing.

Green Stone of Hattusa

The famous Green Stone of Hattusa was found in one of the rooms in the southern magazine wing, at the southern end of the street leading from the gateway. However, by comparison with the door sills, the stone now sits below ground level, suggesting that this was not its original position. It remains there until today, unprotected from the weather.

The Green Stone is a block of nephrite, a dark green nephrite-like form of jade which is common in this region of Turkey. It was carved into the form of a cube about 70 cm per side and weighing about 1000 kg. The stone's purpose remains unknown, but it might have had some religious purpose because of its location within the temple. However, none of the sacred stones often mentioned in Hittite texts are explicitly described as green. It is also possible that it served as a base of some statue. Importantly, this stone is the only one of its kind found at Hattusa.

The local inhabitants call the Green Stone a "wish stone" and its magical reputation and the mystery of its origins draw many tourists all over the world to visit it. Various legends surround it; when touched, it is said to bestow fertility and wealth.

Residential area

In the northwest, a densely built-up residential quarter borders the temple area. It extends to the northwest-running section wall with the restored section. This continues west to the south gate and from there south, where it meets the postern wall northwest of Kesikkaya, which once completely enclosed the lower town. In the south, the excavated area extends to the street that leads from the eastern forecourt of the temple to the south gate, and in the north to the modern street, the course of which corresponds to that of a Hittite street.

The remains of a settlement from the Karum period were found under the floor plans of the Hittite houses. Like their houses, the houses of the Hittite population probably followed ancient Anatolian models. The Hittite development of the area followed the use of the Karum period without interruption.

Due to the fluid development of the development, the floor plans are mostly oblique. Their main feature is a large, central room, which is usually located on one side and can only be entered from other rooms. Originally, it was assumed that it was an open courtyard, which is why the term "Anatolian courtyard house" was introduced. However, the excavation director Andreas Schachner ruled this out. Numerous clay tablets were found in the interior rooms from the Karum period. Although they were burned by a fire when the settlement was destroyed, they were originally only air-dried. Since these were important documents for the residents, they could not be exposed to the weather in an open courtyard, as they would have dissolved in the rain. This means that this room must also have been covered. Schachner therefore suggested the term "central room house".

Some of the buildings outside the Grand Temple, in the Lower City, most likely served as the offices of officials and artists, and as their school. The other buildings were residential houses. They were constructed of bricks dried in the sun, laid on a wooden structure and covered with a flat wooden roof covered with mud. They had many rooms and were equipped with stoves and fireplaces, and sometimes even clay baths and sewer system.

Lion Basin

East of the temple grounds, about 40 meters south of the main entrance, stands the so-called Lion Basin (tr. Aslanlı Tekne). It is a base at least 5.5 meters long, originally made from a block of limestone, with a basin-like depression on the surface.

All four corners were decorated with lion figures. The heads of the animals were fully sculpted, the bodies on the sides in relief. In the style of later Assyrian depictions, the lions have five legs so that they can be viewed both from the front and from the side.

The state of preservation is relatively poor, as the individual parts were never underground. It is now strongly doubted that it was actually a water basin. There is neither an inflow nor outflow, and the water would have had to be brought in vessels from a relatively long distance.

Instead, it is now suggested that it was the base of a colossal statue standing in front of the temple. Although it is not certain whether it is still in its original location, due to the size and weight of the pieces found, they cannot have been moved too far. Tool marks on the pieces found indicate that the block was split into several pieces for secondary use during the Roman imperial period. As part of the 2017 excavation campaign, the existing parts were restored and reassembled on a partially reworked base made of rubble stone and cement mortar.