Kahramanmaraş Archaeological Museum

The Kahramanmaraş Archaeological Museum is located south of the center of the Turkish provincial capital Kahramanmaraş on the Azerbaycan Bulvarı . It shows finds from the excavation sites in the area, including Domuztepe and the Direkli cave, and has a rich collection of late Hittite stone objects.

history

At the instigation of Colonel H. Nuri Yurdakul, a first museum was opened in Kahramanmaraş in 1947 in the 15th century building known as the Taş Medrese . It served as a memory of the Turkish Liberation War and initially mainly showed pictures of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his colleagues. From 1957 the collection was expanded to include archaeological and ethnographic objects. Due to lack of space, the museum moved to a building in the citadel of Kahramanmaraş in 1961. On November 29, 1975, the new building on Azerbaycan Bulvarı in the Yenişehir Mahallesi district was finally moved, with the ethnographic exhibits being relocated to the Maraş Kültür Evi ve Etnografya Müzesi (Maraş House of Culture and Ethnographic Museum). From February 2008 the building underwent a renovation.

exhibition

The exhibition space of the museum is spread over seven halls, which can be visited on a given tour. In the first room the skeleton of a mammoth and other mammoth bones found in the lake Gavur Gölü in the district of Türkoğlu are exhibited in showcases . In the second room, a part of the prehistorically significant Direkli cave is reconstructed, which is located near the village of Döngel and was excavated by İsmail Kılıç Kökten in 1959 . The finds go back to the 14th millennium BC. BC back. The third room shows exhibits from the Neolithic Domuztepe excavation site near the village of Kelibişler in the Pazarcık district and reconstructions of a hut and a camp site. The site was discovered by Elizabeth Carter in a survey in 1995 and has been explored since 1998 by the University of Manchester and the University of California under the direction of Stuart Campbell and Elizabeth Carter. The finds date from the time between 6500 and 5500 BC. Chr.

Mammoth skeleton
Domuztepe room

The fourth room contains an extensive collection of late Hittite sculptures from the area around the city. Noteworthy include a portal lion , which was discovered in 1883 by Carl Humann and Otto Puchstein on the citadel of Kahramanmaraş, several steles with depictions of the weather god Teššup , steles with dining scenes, statues, a sphinx and an orthostat that is worked on three sides. One side shows a woman, the second the weather god and the third was used in Roman times and bears an inscription in ancient Greek.

Hall of Hittite Art
Portal lion from the citadel
Stele from Kürtül with a representation of the weather god
Image of a woman on a three-sided processed orthostat
Second use of the same object with Roman inscription
Statue Maraş 13
Dining scene Maraş 12

In the fifth room you can see mosaics from Germanicia, the Roman predecessor city of Kahramanmaraş. Some of them were excavated during unauthorized excavations in Dulkadıroğlu and during rescue excavations by the museum in the Çağlayancerit district . In the sixth room, the Stone Works Hall (Taş Eserler Sergi Salonu), there are statues, grave steles , milestones and other stone artefacts, mainly from Roman times. This also includes an Assyrian boundary stone, which is written in cuneiform on the obverse about the deeds of Adad-nīrārī III. and on the reverse of his son Shalmaneser IV . He came to light in the village of Kızkapanlı south of Pazarcık. The seventh room contains further archaeological finds from the area around Kahramanmaraş from all periods from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age and the Byzantine to the Ottoman era. In the outdoor area of the museum, other stone monuments from different times and locations can be viewed, including a portal lion from Sevdilli, which probably comes from the same workshop as the two free-standing lion sculptures from Arslantaş .