Hattusa, a 3,800-year-old warehouse resurfaces; Anadolu also reports three Hellenistic-era tombs

Hattusa, in the district of Boğazkale, province of Çorum, is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and the cuneiform tablets of Boğazköy-Hattusa appear on the Memory of the World register. The ongoing excavation campaign concerns two finds separated by about fifteen hundred years, both located on the northwestern slope of the citadel.

The storage complex. According to the excavation directorate and as reported by Arkeonews, archaeologists have identified a large complex intended for storage dating back roughly 3,800 years, to the period of the Assyrian trading colonies. The structure is located on the northwestern slope of Büyükkale, in a position between what would later become the Hittite royal palace and the Great Temple. Excavations have so far exposed sixteen large storage jars, embedded in a steep slope specifically terraced to accommodate the building. The head of the excavations, Andreas Schachner, places the complex around 1800-1750 BC, in the Middle Bronze Age. On this find, the news currently comes from a single source (the Hattusa excavation directorate); no independent confirmation available.

The chronological detail is the interesting part. The period of the Assyrian trading colonies precedes the phase in which Hattusa becomes an imperial capital: the find therefore concerns the site before its moment of greatest renown. A storage complex of that size, terraced onto a steep slope — that is, built with no small investment of labour — indicates organised economic activity already at that stage. This is not a trivial detail: in the 1960s, about thirty metres northeast of the current excavation area, another similar structure had already been identified, which suggests that this is not an isolated episode but a system.

The tombs, according to Anadolu. The second find must be reported for what it is: news released by the Turkish agency Anadolu together with the excavation directorate, with no independent verification available. According to Anadolu, three burials dating to about 2,300 years ago have emerged in the same area, from the proto-Hellenistic and Galatian period, datable to between the late 4th and the 3rd century BC; one of them reportedly preserves a complete skeleton, with a knife placed beside the right shoulder. The same account indicates that the cemetery emerged while the team was working to clear the area around a nearby storage structure. The agency’s materials are picked up by Türkiye Today and by Arkeonews: two pickups of a single source, not two sources.

Still according to Anadolu, the three new burials add to an already known set: five tombs found in the same area the previous year, three of them belonging to women, and nine further burials from the same period identified west of the excavation area. The total that the agency reports as known thus rises to seventeen.

Why the two finds should be read together. The stated proximity is the point. An area that in the Middle Bronze Age served to store goods, and which centuries later housed the royal palace and then the imperial city, in the proto-Hellenistic and Galatian period would have been used as a cemetery. This is the typical sequence of multi-layered sites: the function changes, the location remains, and each phase reuses the space of the previous one, overlapping it. That the cemetery emerged precisely while the area around the warehouse was being cleared, as the agency reports, is not a lucky coincidence: it is the ordinary way in which stratigraphy returns the phases in reverse order to that in which they were deposited.

On the storage complex, the publishable data remains that of the excavation directorate: sixteen jars exposed and a dating to 1800-1750 BC. On the cemetery, the count of seventeen burials recorded in the northwestern area is for now information attributed to Anadolu, which a scientific publication of the excavation could confirm or correct.