Ancient Middle Eastern Arts and Architecture
Anatolian arts and architecture: HITTITE PERIOD
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Articolo di approfondimento tratto da Enciclopedia Britannica ed.98 The Hittite old kingdom, with its capital city, Hattusa (modern Bogazköy), in the Halys bend, was one of several states into which Anatolia was divided during the second quarter of the 2nd millennium BC. Its finest monuments date from the imperial period that followed. The capital city, strategically placed astride a rocky gorge, has an inner enclosure, rising up to a high citadel rock (Büyükkale). Greatly extended in imperial times, the outer city has a four-mile circuit of powerful fortifications. The double walls, with their defensive towers and substructure of cyclopean masonry (large irregular blocks without mortar), stand upon a stone-faced rampart of earth, itself protected by a stone apron wall. The corbeled arches of its gates are flanked by portal sculptures--lions or sphinxes--anticipating those of the Late Assyrian palaces. Carved on the stone doorjamb of one arch is a famous relief of a warrior wearing the characteristically Hittite short kilt and conical helmet. Elsewhere in the city there are four buildings recognizable as temples, the largest of which has been fully excavated. It is a huge building, surrounded by ranges of store chambers, planned around a wide courtyard with pillared colonnades and a small freestanding shrine in one corner. These features and the isolated position of the main sanctuary have no parallel in the temples of Mesopotamia or Syria. Modern knowledge of Hittite sculpture is derived, first, from the portal sculptures of Hattusa itself and, second, from rock sculptures, including those decorating the remarkable shrine called Yazilikaya, some distance outside the town. Here, deep clefts in the limestone, open to the sky, form a setting for the cult; the reliefs are carved on the vertical faces of the rock. One of the recesses, or chambers, is decorated with a pageant of deities, some standing on their appropriate cult animal or identified by a hieroglyphic inscription. These figures are carved with only average proficiency, and some of the iconography is borrowed from the Hurrians, with whom the Hittite royal family had intermarried. The figures in the second, or inner, sanctuary, however, are carved with an artistry inspired by religious fervour. The figure of a young king (Tudhaliyas IV) in the protective embrace of a god is hardly less impressive than the symbolism of a huge dagger thrust into the rock before him. The rock reliefs of this period elsewhere in Anatolia--Sirkeli, Gâvur Kalesi, and Fraktin, for example--are mainly of archaeological interest. They are inferior in carving to contemporary reliefs and to those of the Iron Age, of which there is a fine example at Ivriz Harabesi in the Taurus Mountains, showing a local ruler of the 8th century BC paying homage to a fertility god.  Monuments such as that at Ivriz Harabesi represent a curious aftermath of Hittite history. In about 1190 BC the empire was destroyed and the Hittites driven from their homeland on the Anatolian plateau by the Phrygians, but in the 10th-8th centuries they reappeared as part occupants of small city-states such as Milid (modern Arslantepe-Malatya), Sam`al (modern Zincirli), and Carchemish, in the Taurus or north Syria, where they shared political authority with indigenous Aramaeans and other peoples. During this Syro-Hittite period, their art and architecture was of a hybrid and rather inferior character much influenced by Assyria, to which the Hittites frequently became subject, and also by Phoenicia and Egypt. Conspicuous in their buildings are the sculptured 
orthostats that line the bases of the walls, often of coarse,
black basalt awkwardly alternating with white limestone. Columns
are of wood, with bases and capitals of stone, and monolithic
statues, more than life-size, are a common feature. Fortifications
are still an important aspect of their cities. Those at Zincirli
enclose a circular town, a half mile in diameter, with a high-walled
citadel in the centre, containing a complex of palaces. Like
all Syrian palaces, these incorporate one or more bit hilani
units, consisting of a columned portico, a long reception room,
with an adjoining staircase to the roof, and a varying number
of retiring rooms A striking example of these
bit hilani is the
Kaparu Palace at Tall
Halaf, near the source of the Khabur River.
The almost barbaric array of sculpture shows the city to have
been predominantly Aramaean.
Copyright © 1994-1998 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. |
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