Stele Samsat 1
The stele Samsat 1 is a late Hittite monument from Samosata in the vicinity of Adıyaman in southeastern Turkey . It is exhibited in the Adıyaman Archaeological Museum . The site is now flooded by the Ataturk reservoir .
Research history
The stele was discovered on June 3, 1883 by the German archaeologists Carl Humann and Otto Puchstein in a field between the former village of Samsat and the acropolis hill of ancient Samosata. They made photographs, redraws the inscription and copies for the Berlin museums and described the stele in their travelogue Reisen in Asia Minor and Northern Syria. Shortly afterwards, the British John Garstang and the participants of the Cornell expedition to Asia Minor and the Assyro-Babylonian Orient in 1907 were able to see the stone in the same place , as was the German ancient orientalist Helmuth Theodor Bossert in 1958 . In 1969 it was lying with the relief side down in the courtyard of the Yatılı İlk Okul school in Adıyaman, where the British Hittist John David Hawkins visited it in the summer of 1969 . The German ancient historian Friedrich Karl Dörner was able to photograph her erect there in 1970. Then she was taken to the Adıyaman Archaeological Museum. It was broken into several parts and has been restored, today the lower part with the figure's feet seems to have been lost.
Further publications of the relief or the inscription were made in 1900 by the German ancient orientalist Leopold Messerschmidt , in 1971 by the German Near Eastern archaeologist Winfried Orthmann and in 1975 by the Italian philologist Piero Meriggi . The German archaeologist Wolfgang Messerschmidt finally provided a detailed review of the stele in 2011.
description
The stone is made of black basalt and - including the lost foot part, but without the tenons - had a preserved height of 1.53 meters, a width of 0.61 meters and a thickness of 0.41 meters. The depiction is not very well preserved, it showed the lower part of a standing, left-facing figure, probably a ruler, up to shoulder level, the head is no longer there. She is dressed in a long coat, which ends in a fringed border at the bottom and runs diagonally towards the back. The front hem is also sloping backwards. Pointed shoes peek out from below. Body shapes under clothing are not worked out or not recognizable. In the right part you can see the rolled up part of a lituus that the person holds in the left hand. When the stele was used a second time as a door jamb, a vertical groove was carved in the middle of the depiction, while the left half of the depiction was largely removed. Due to the lost lower part, the lower hem of the coat and the feet can no longer be seen today, and the front hem is also difficult to see.
Hardly recognizable traces of an inscription can be seen on both sides. There are no traces on the roughly smoothed back. The left side shows the remains of probably nine lines with incised line separators, on the left side only four lines can be seen in the lower part. If the back was also provided with an inscription, as Meriggi assumes, this ran over all three sides. Otherwise it could have been two separate texts on the two side surfaces. Bossert believed he read the word “Malstein” at one point, Meriggi the name of the goddess Kubaba . JD Hawkins, who treats the stele in his Corpus of hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions , describes the attempts of his colleagues to read the text as over-optimistic and takes the view that the inscription has been irretrievably lost.
Winfried Orthmann sees stylistic similarities in the relief to the sculptures of the Malatya 1 group and then dates them to the Late Hittite II period , thus around the 9th century BC. According to Messerschmidt, this group goes to the 12th and 11th centuries BC according to a corrected chronology. BC, which would also apply to the Samsat stele. He sees in it the representation of a king of the kingdom of Kummuḫ , whose capital was Samosata.
literature
- Karl Humann, Otto Puchstein: Travels in Asia Minor and Northern Syria. Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1890. pp. 182-184, 392.
- Winfried Orthmann: Studies on late Hittite art. (= Saarbrücker contributions to antiquity, vol. 8) Habelt, Bonn 1971, ISBN 978-3774911222 , pp. 100-101, 533.
- 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 , p. 352 plate 179.
- Wolfgang Messerschmidt: Grave stele of a ruler of Kummuḫ - on the late Hittite roots of the Commagenic king and ancestor cult In: Asia Minor Studies 64 From Kummuḫ to Telouch. Historical and archaeological research in Kommagene . Rudolf Habelt, Bonn 2011 ISBN 978-3774936461 pp. 283-307. ( PDF )
Individual evidence
- ^ Karl Humann, Otto Puchstein: Travels in Asia Minor and Northern Syria. Published by Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1890. p. 184
- ^ John Garstang: The Land of the Hittites; An Account of Recent Explorations and Discoveries in Asia Minor, with Descriptions of the Hittite Monuments. EP Dutton and Company, 1910, pp. 130-131
- ↑ Benson Brush Chades, Hittite Inscriptions (Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor) Ithaca, New York, 1911 p 49
- ↑ H. Th. Bossert: Travel Report from Anatolia In: Orientalia Nova Series Vol. 28 No. 3 (1959) pp. 271-272, Figs. 2-5
- ↑ Wolfgang Messerschmidt: Grave stele of a ruler of Kummuḫ - on the late Hittite roots of the Commagenic king and ancestor cult In: Asia Minor Studies 64 From Kummuḫ to Telouch. Historical and archaeological research in Kommagene . Rudolf Habelt, Bonn 2011 p. 284.
- ↑ Wolfgang Messerschmidt: Grave stele of a ruler of Kummuḫ - on the late Hittite roots of the Commagenic king and ancestor cult In: Asia Minor Studies 64 From Kummuḫ to Telouch. Historical and archaeological research in Kommagene . Rudolf Habelt, Bonn 2011 pp. 286–287.