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The Early Geography of South-Eastern Asia Minor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Extract

Thanks to the cuneiform tablets discovered at Boghaz-Keui, the capital of the Hittite empire, the thick darkness which hung over the geography of eastern Asia Minor in the pre-classical age is at last being dispelled. And therewith several questions relating to the culture and history of prehistoric Greece are likely to be cleared up.

At Kara Eyuk, also called Kul Tepè, ‘the Burnt Mound,’ eighteen kilometres N.E. of Kaisariyeh and near the village of Manjé-su, many hundreds of tablets have been found written in a West-Semitic dialect, differing but little from the vernacular of Assyria as distinct from Babylonia, and belonging to the age of the Babylonian Third Dynasty of Ur (2400–2200 B.C.). The name of the city was Kanis or Ganis, and it was a Babylonian colony, defended by the Assyrian soldiers of the Babylonian empire, but chiefly occupied by Babylonian and more especially Assyrian merchants, who worked the mines of silver, copper and lead in the Taurus and exported the metal to the civilised world. The great Babylonian firms had their ‘agents’ there; good roads had been made throughout the whole region, in connexion with the trade-route from Babylonia past Nineveh to Cappadocia, and traversed by postmen whose letters were in the form of clay tablets. I may remark incidentally that one of the places from which the copper came was Khalki, perhaps meaning ‘Wheat’-city (Contenau: Trente Tablettes cappadociennes, xvi. 12, 131), which probably gives us the origin of the Greek Χαλκός.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1923

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References

1 As in Khata-tirra and Kholma-dara.

2 The Hittite word signifies literally ‘is the property.’ Here it must refer to territorial possession.

3 Santimmas is a derivative from the name of the Cilician god Santa or Sandes.

4 The classical Olymbros, Illubri in the Assyrian inscriptions.

5 Or perhaps ‘you must not block the exit from the city.’ The noun may be read either khatrian ‘writing’ or parian ‘outlet,’ and the signification of the verb is doubtful.

6 Cp. the name of Urballa of Tukhan in the time of Tiglath-pileser III. The termination -σητας may be merely the double suffix -sê-tas of the Hittite language, Mira-sêtas being ‘the Mirian.’

7 Repeatedly mentioned in the Cappadocian tablets of Kara Eyuk, and therefore probably in the neighbourhood of Mount Argaeus.