Hattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age, and its ruins lie beside the small town of Boğazkale in Çorum Province, central Turkey, about 200 km east of Ankara inside the great loop of the Kızılırmak River. The Hittite kings ruled from here from around 1650 BCE until the empire collapsed around 1200 BCE, apart from two spells when the court moved elsewhere. At its height the city covered about 1.8 km² behind more than 6 km of double walls, with carved gateways, at least 31 temples and a royal archive of some 30,000 clay tablets, among them the Hittite text of the world's oldest surviving peace treaty. UNESCO added Hattusa to the World Heritage List in 1986.
From Hattush to Hattusili: How Boğazkale Became a Capital
People lived on this rocky site long before the Hittites. Traces go back to the 6th millennium BCE, and towards the end of the 3rd millennium the Hattians, an earlier people with a non-Indo-European language, built a settlement they called Hattush. In the 19th and 18th centuries BCE, Assyrian merchants based at Kanesh (modern Kültepe) ran a trading post in a quarter of the lower town, and their business letters are among the oldest written documents found at the site.
Around 1700 BCE the town was burned. King Anitta of Kussara claimed the destruction and set up an inscription cursing any future king who resettled the place, calling on the Storm-god to strike him down. The curse did not hold. About 1650 BCE a king named Labarna moved his capital from Neša to Hattusa and took the throne name Hattusili, "the man from Hattusa". The city was not continuously the seat of power: raids by the Kaska people from the north drove Tudhaliya I to move the court to Sapinuwa, and Muwatalli II later shifted it south to Tarhuntassa, leaving his younger brother, the future Hattusili III, as governor. The capital returned to Hattusa in the 13th century and stayed there until the end of the kingdom.
The fortifications visible today belong mostly to the reign of Suppiluliuma I (c. 1344–1322 BCE). Walls with inner and outer faces about 3 m thick and a 2 m gap between them, 8 m in all, enclosed two parts of the city. The inner city of about 0.8 km² held the royal citadel on the ridge now called Büyükkale, "the great fortress", with administrative buildings and temples. The outer city to the south, about 1 km², held temples, houses and secular buildings and was entered through monumental gates carved with warriors, lions and sphinxes. Modern estimates put the population at around 10,000.
The Lion Gate, King's Gate and Sphinx Gate
The outer city's walls were pierced by gates built of huge, roughly shaped blocks, and three of them carry the best-known sculpture at Hattusa. At the Lion Gate, two lions are carved from the stone jambs on either side of the passage, their forequarters projecting from the wall as if guarding the way in. The heavy, fitted masonry around it invites comparison with Bronze Age Greece, above all with the Lion Gate at Mycenae, which has its own pair of carved beasts above the entrance.
The King's Gate, another opening in the city fortifications, is named after the armed figure carved in relief on its jamb; the original relief has been moved to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. The Sphinx Gate stood on top of the great Yerkapı rampart at the southern end of the city. Its pair of sphinxes was taken to Germany for restoration in 1917; the better-preserved one returned to Turkey in 1924 and went on show in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, while the other stayed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum from 1934. In 2011 both were brought to the new Boğazköy Museum below the ruins, reuniting the pair close to where they had stood. In 1986 excavators found an inscribed metal tablet 35 m west of the Sphinx Gate. It measures 35 by 24 cm, weighs 5 kg, is fitted with two chains, and records a treaty between Tudhaliya IV and Kurunta, king of Tarhuntassa.
Yerkapı: the Door in the Ground
Beneath the Sphinx Gate lies Yerkapı, Turkish for "door in the ground". It is an artificial ridge of earth and stone about 250 m long and more than 80 m wide at its foundation, marking the highest point of the city's fortifications at its southern end, with the city wall running along its crest. Through it runs a stone tunnel about 70 m long, built as a corbelled arch, its walls stepping inwards course by course until they meet overhead.
Why it was built is still debated. A postern tunnel would have let defenders slip out and surprise a besieging army, but a rampart this monumental, crowned by a gate of sculpted sphinxes, may also have been meant to impress, or to serve ceremonies, as much as to fight.
Thirty-One Temples and the Great Temple
The remains of at least 31 temples survive at Hattusa, which is why the historian Itamar Singer called it "a city of many temples". The largest, known to archaeologists as the Great Temple or Temple 1, sits on a raised platform about 65 by 42 m and is thought to have been dedicated to the Storm-god Tarḫunna and the Sun-goddess, the chief deities of the Hittite state, whose statue bases survive.
In a small room at the south end of the street leading from the temple gateway stands the Hattusa Green Stone, a roughly cubic block of what is believed to be nephrite, about 69 cm on each side and weighing about 1,000 kg. It sits below the level of the door sills, which suggests it is not in its original place, and nobody knows what it was for. Most houses in the city were built of timber and mud brick and have vanished; what survives are the stone foundations of temples, palaces and walls.
Thirty Thousand Tablets and the Eternal Treaty
For historians, nothing found at Hattusa outweighs its archive. From 1906, when Hugo Winckler of the German Oriental Society began excavating the royal fortress of Büyükkale, thousands of clay tablets came out of the ground. A few were in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, and those confirmed that the ruins were Hattusa. Most were in a language nobody could read. In 1917 the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný showed that it belonged to the Indo-European family, making Hittite the earliest attested Indo-European language and founding the field of Hittitology.
In all, some 30,000 tablets and fragments have been recovered, the main body of Hittite literature: royal letters, contracts, law codes, ritual instructions, oracle reports and myths. The most celebrated is the Hittite version of the peace treaty between Hattusili III and the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, agreed around 1259 BCE, some 15 years after the two empires fought at Kadesh in Syria. It is often called the Treaty of Kadesh, but the text never mentions the battle; it is also known as the Eternal Treaty. It is the oldest known surviving peace treaty, and the only one from the ancient Near East preserved in both parties' versions: the Egyptian text is carved at Karnak and the Ramesseum in Thebes. Two of the Hattusa tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums and a third in Berlin, and a copy hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Yazılıkaya's Procession of Gods
Within walking distance of the city gates is Yazılıkaya, "inscribed rock", Hattusa's open-air sanctuary. Two roofless chambers formed by natural rock outcrops were screened by gateway buildings, of which only foundations remain. The site was in use by the late 16th century BCE, but most of its carvings date from a major refurbishment under Tudhaliya IV and Suppiluliuma II in the late 13th century.
Chamber A holds a procession of 64 deities cut into the rock. Male gods in kilts, pointed shoes and horned caps advance along the left wall, goddesses in crowns and long skirts along the right, and the two lines meet at a central scene of the Storm-god Teshub, standing on two mountain gods, facing the Sun-goddess Hebat on a panther. The narrower Chamber B has fewer but larger and better-preserved reliefs, and may have served as a mortuary memorial for Tudhaliya IV. A 2019 study by Rita Gautschy and Eberhard Zangger proposed that the carvings also worked as a calendar tracking the sun and moon, an idea still under discussion.
Abandonment Around 1200 BCE and the German Dig Since 1906
The Hittite state fell around 1200 BCE in the wider Late Bronze Age collapse. Excavation suggests Hattusa was not stormed in a single day but emptied over several decades as the empire disintegrated, possibly under the pressure of a regional drought. There are signs of a final fire, but it probably came after the royal family, the elite and the administration had already left. By the 12th century BCE farming communities with a different material culture were living among the ruins.
The French traveller Charles Texier brought the ruins to European attention in 1834. Georges Perrot dug there in 1861 and proposed in 1886 that Boğazköy was the Hittite capital, and Carl Humann drew a full plan in 1882. Systematic work started with Winckler's campaign of 1906, run by the German Oriental Society and later the German Archaeological Institute, and German teams have worked at the site ever since: under Kurt Bittel from 1931, interrupted by the Second World War and resumed in 1952, then under Peter Neve, Jürgen Seeher from 1994, and Andreas Schachner from 2006, when the emphasis shifted towards restoration and preparing the site for visitors. Boğazkale itself, once Boğazköy, had 1,203 residents in 2022.
Hattusa is one of several Bronze Age and classical sites that make central and western Anatolia an archaeological heartland; the Roman and Greek city of Ephesus shows what came to the region a thousand years after the Hittites, and Göbekli Tepe in the south-east reaches back thousands of years before them. Most visitors reach Boğazkale by road from Turkey's modern capital, Ankara, whose Museum of Anatolian Civilizations holds many of the finds.