Stele Maraş 11
The Maraş 11 stele is a late Hittite monument from the area around Maraş in southern Turkey . It is exhibited in the Adana Archaeological Museum and has the inventory number 1721.
exploration
The stele was discovered in 1929 by the German Near Eastern archaeologist Hans Henning von der Osten in the area of the Kara Maraş Hüyük hill near Maraş, today's provincial capital of Kahramanmaraş. He also wrote the first publication. Next, in 1958, Helmuth Theodor Bossert published a description of the stele. The German archaeologist Winfried Orthmann described it in 1971 in his research on late Hittite art under the number Maraş B / 5 ; the British Hittite scientist John David Hawkins included it in his Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions in 2000 under the name Maraş 11 .
description
The basalt stele, rounded at the top, is broken horizontally roughly in the middle. It is 1.05 meters high and 0.56 meters wide and in poor condition. On the front, a weather god is shown in a typical pose in flat relief. He is shown turned to the right with a beard and pigtail. His clothing consists of a horned helmet, a short tunic with a belt that ends above the knees, and pointed shoes. He carries a sword at belt height. The right hand holds a three-pronged bundle of lightning in front of the body, the left a double ax to the rear. A winged sun hovers over the head .
The back of the stele bears a four-line inscription that continues over the rounded edge to the narrow right side. The heavily blurred text begins at the top right in line 1 and continues bustrophedon , taking up only the upper half of the stone. The eight centimeter high lines are separated by horizontal lines, nothing can be seen of the top line. The rest of the inscription can only be read fragmentarily due to its very weathered condition. There are Tarhunzas and the moon god Halpawassus mentioned as well as a victim of three sheep to the former God.
Due to the condition of the work and the poor legibility of the text, dating is difficult. Orthmann assigns the stele to the Late Hittite II / IIIa period , which dates from around the 9th century BC. Chr. Corresponds.
literature
- Winfried Orthmann: Studies on late Hittite art. (= Saarbrücker contributions to antiquity, vol. 8) Habelt, Bonn 1971 pp. 236, 524, plate 44e ISBN 978-3774911222
- John David Hawkins: Corpus of hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions . Vol. 1: Inscriptions of the Iron Age . Part 1: Introduction, Karatepe, Karkamiš, Tell Ahmar, Maraş, Malatya, Commagene. de Gruyter, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-11-010864-X , pp. 270-271, plates 120-121.