Pancarlı Höyük
Coordinates: 37 ° 5 ′ 30.5 ″ N , 36 ° 41 ′ 6.3 ″ E
Pancarlı Höyük is a flat hill in southern Turkey , on which numerous finds from the Iron Age and later eras have been discovered.
location
The hill is in the province of Gaziantep , about one kilometer south of Zincirli , the site of Sam'al , the capital of the Aramaic - Late Hittite city-state of the same name . It measures about 300 × 200 meters and consists of a flat terrace in the west and a slightly higher hill in the east. In the northwest of the hill there is a modern cemetery, next to it a small pond. An irrigation canal was created at the north end. No archaeological excavations have yet been carried out on site; the finds were all on the surface of the cultivated field, mostly integrated into the field boundaries. It is still unclear whether Höyük is a late Hittite settlement or a place from Roman times. According to this, the Iron Age finds from Zincirli may have been dragged here.
Finds
The German archaeologist from the Near East, Hans Henning von der Osten, reported as early as 1930 about several blocks of stone that had been brought to the surface by farmers while plowing. This included the Pancarlı stele , a relief of a hero in a short skirt with a sword and an ax-like weapon holding up a captured lion. He also describes the fragment of another stele, which shows the lower half of a man with a short skirt and a belt with tassels, and a sculpture with the head of a lion in high relief. Later on, architectural elements from Roman times were found, including a piece of a fluted column and a grain mill in the shape of an hourglass. The Pancarlı stele is now in the Archaeological Museum of Adana , the whereabouts of the other pieces are unknown.
In October 2006, Mehmet Kaya, a resident of Zincirli, found a fragment of a hieroglyphic Luwian inscription on the edge of a field . It was brought to the Archaeological Museum of the provincial capital Gaziantep, where it was given inventory number 850. There it was later examined and published by Virginia R. Herrmann and Theo van den Hout. The stone has roughly the shape of a column drum with the inscription on one half of the round outside. It has a width of 62, a depth of 46 and a height of 32 centimeters. The stone block was later worked almost rectangular on the back and was probably part of a wall in the Roman settlement. Although the part is referred to as a stele in the text, its shape and thickness are more reminiscent of the lower part, i.e. the long skirt of a statue that perhaps represented an early ruler of Sam'al. Three lines of the Boustrophedon inscription have been partially preserved. The beginning of the first line to the left is missing, the end of the second line to the right. The third line is only preserved in the upper part and can no longer be read. The text probably describes regulations regarding sacrificial acts at the statue. In the opinion of the investigating scholars, the piece dates from linguistic and stylistic points of view to the 10th or - more likely - the early 9th century BC. To date.
literature
- Hans Henning von der Osten : Explorations in Hittite Asia Minor 1929 In: Oriental Institute Communications 8 . The University of Chicago Press 1930 pp. 62-63, fig. 63.
- Virginia R. Herrmann, Theo van der Hout, Ahmet Beyazlar: A New Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscription from Pancarlı Höyük: Language and Power in Early Iron Age Samʾal-YʾDY In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies 75 , 2016 pp. 53–70.