Ermenek rock relief

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Coordinates: 36 ° 37 ′ 41 ″  N , 32 ° 53 ′ 37 ″  E

Relief Map: Turkey
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Ermenek​
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Turkey

The Ermenek rock relief was a possibly Hittite monument in southern Turkey , which is believed to have been destroyed today.

location

The relief was on the Bezciler hill , southeast of the city of Ermenek in the Karaman province . The place is in the western Taurus Mountains , about 70 kilometers southwest of the provincial capital Karaman on the road from Silifke to Beyşehir . Thus the place belonged in the 2nd millennium BC. BC to the Tarḫuntašša region .

Description and interpretation

When it was found, the relief was framed by strips, the top of which formed a gable. The badly weathered picture showed a male figure walking to the left. Apart from the short skirt, little of the clothes could be seen. Both arms seem to have been stretched away from the body, the head was round in shape.

Kurt Bittel was the first to report on the relief in a note in 1939 . He suggests - with the qualification "if the relief of Ermenek were really Hittite" - a date to the time of Muršilis II in the late 14th century BC. BC in connection with its campaigns. In 1977 Kay Kohlmeyer visited Ermenek in vain; according to Markus Wäfler , it was said to have been blown up. Kohlmeyer rejects Bittel's argumentation, referring to details of the representation such as the front view of the upper body, the straightened arms and the gable end. He suspects a much later emergence of the relief, possibly in Roman times . When Eberhard P. Rossner visited the place in 1987, with the help of a local guide he was still able to find the lower half of the relief with legs and skirt hem. He could not tell whether the rest of the picture had disappeared due to the weather or destruction. Tayfun Bilgin reports on the website hittitemonuments.com that the monument was completely destroyed in the 1980s or 1990s.

literature

  • Kay Kohlmeyer : Rock paintings of the Hittite Great Empire (= Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica. Vol. 15). Marie Leidorf, Rahden 1983, ISBN 3-88435-080-3 , pp. 102-103.
  • Eberhard P. Rossner: Rock monuments in Turkey. Volume 1: The Hittite rock reliefs in Turkey. An archaeological guide. 2nd, expanded edition, Rossner, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-924390-02-9 , pp. 233-234.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kurt Bittel : Archäologischer Anzeiger 1939 p. 126 Fig. 15