İvriz rock relief

King Warpalawas (right) before God Tarhunzas

The Hittite rock relief of İvriz is located in the former village of the same name (today Aydınkent) about 17 km southeast of Ereğli in southern Turkey on a steep face in the source area of ​​İvriz Suyu, the water of which has been dammed in the area of ​​the relief in recent times.

It is the best preserved of the numerous Hittite rock carvings, 4.2 by 2.4 meters in size and dates from the second half of the 8th century BC. BC, the time of the late Hittite- Aramaic principalities. On the right you can see King Warpalawas of Tuwana , standing on a boulder with hands raised possibly in greeting or in prayer. Opposite him is the god Tarhunzas on the left, shown considerably larger . He can be recognized as a source of vegetation by the ripe ears of grain and grapes, the stalks or vines of which he holds in his hands, which reach to his feet. A sickle on his hip signals the time just before harvest. The location of the relief on the steep face of İvriz Suyu suggests that the basis of the fertility shown is not the rare rain, but the water that emerges from the rock all year round. Therefore, the relief could have been part of a spring shrine. In front of the deity's face and behind the king's back are three-line inscriptions in Luwian hieroglyphics , on which the two figures are named. Another, possibly two-line inscription at the foot of the steep face is largely weathered.

During construction work on the weir, two more finds came to light in 1986. On the one hand it is a fragment of a stele of Tarhunzas, according to the hieroglyphic inscription erected by Warpalawas and provided with a Phoenician bilingual , and on the other hand a fragment of the head of a larger-than-life round statue that probably also represented Tarhunzas. The finds give rise to the assumption that a richly decorated sanctuary of the Tarhunzas was built by Warpalawas. To the south of the rock relief, in the mountains in the Ambar Deresi valley, near the Byzantine monastery ruins of Kızlar Sarayı, there is another relief that is a copy of the first. It is not so well worked out and never quite finished, the hieroglyphs are missing.

Coordinates: 37 ° 24 ′ 37 ″  N , 34 ° 10 ′ 21 ″  E

İvriz​

Turkey

literature

• 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. 103-115.
• John David Hawkins : Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions. Vol. I: Inscriptions of the Iron Age. Part 2: text. Amuq, Aleppo, Hama, Tabal, Assur Letters, Miscellaneous, Seals, Indices. Part 3: Plates. (= Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture 8). de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-11-010864-X , pp. 516-518, 526, 529-530.
• Horst Ehringhaus : The end that was a beginning - rock reliefs and rock inscriptions of the Luwian states of Asia Minor from 12th to 8th/7 Century BC Chr. Nünnerich-Asmus, Mainz 2014, ISBN 978-3-943904-67-3 , pp. 48-61.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mustafa Şahin : New observations on the rock relief of İvriz / Konya. Not to war, but to harvest: the god with the sickle. In: A. Çilingiroǧlu (Ed.): Proceedings of the Fourth Anatolian Iron Ages Colloquium. Held at Mersin, 19 - 23 may 1997 (= Anatolian Iron Ages 4; = Anatolian Studies 49). British Institute of Archeology at Ankara, London 1999, pp. 165-176.
2. ↑ İvriz Monument Translations of the inscriptions cited from: Hawkins 2000, Part 2, p. 517, there also Transliteration. See also: Part 3, Pl. 292–295.
3. ↑ Dietrich Berges , Johannes Nollé : Tyana - Archaeological-historical investigations to the southwestern Cappadocia . Rudolf Habelt, Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-7749-2959-9 , pp. 476-474.
4. ↑ Dietrich Berges , Johannes Nollé : Tyana - Archaeological-historical investigations to the south-western Cappadocia . Rudolf Habelt, Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-7749-2959-9 , p. 101.

Web links

Commons : İvriz  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• www.hittitemonuments.com (English)