🗿 Каратепе

Видимо, 1950-е годы. Фотограф: Ара Гюлер.

Из архива Хатидже Гоннет-Баганы.

🐙 When Howie met the Hittites...

Самое неожиданное упоминание Каратепе мне попалось в романе Колина Уилсона «Паразиты сознания» (The Mind Parasites, 1967 г.). Это лавкрафтианский хоррор. Не очень хорошая книга, если честно. Зато! Главный герой археолог проводит раскопки в Каратепе и обнаруживает там под сиро-хеттскими слоями следы культов темных богов, забытых цивилизаций и т.п. Прикольно, что Уилсон выбрал не более растиражированные египетские или месопотамские руины. Есть несколько пассажей, где идет пересказ археологической литературы, упоминаются Бедржих Грозный и Хельмут Боссерт (есть кое-какие неточности), потом туда вплетаются Древние Ужасы. В общем, интересный эпизод в популярной рецепции хеттов.

Большой пассаж:

There are many mysteries attached to the ‘Black Mountain’, which is part of the Anti-Taurus mountain range. The so-called Hittite Empire collapsed in about 1200 BC, overcome by hordes of barbarians, prominent among whom were the Assyrians. Yet the Karatepe remains date from five hundred years later, as do those at Carchemish and Zinjirli. What happened in those five hundred years? How did the Hittites succeed in preserving so much of their culture through such a turbulent time, when its northern capital Hattusas was in the hands of the Assyrians? This was the problem to which I had devoted ten years of my life.

I had always believed that further clues might lie deep under the ground, in the heart of the Black Mountain—just as deep excavations into a mound at Boghazkoy had revealed tombs of a highly civilized people a thousand years older than the Hittites. My excavations in 1987 had, in fact, turned up a number of strange basalt figurines, whose carving differed strikingly from the Hittite sculptures found on the surface—the famous bulls, lions and winged sphinxes. They were flat and angular; there was something barbaric about them and yet not in the manner of African sculptures, with which they have occasionally been compared. The cuneiform symbols on these figures were distinctively Hittite, rather than Phoenician or Assyrian, yet, if it had not been for these, I would have guessed that the figures came from a completely different culture. The hieroglyphs in themselves presented another problem. Our knowledge of the Hittite language has been fairly comprehensive since the researches of Hrozny, yet there are still many lacunae. These tend to occur in texts dealing with religious ritual. (We could imagine, for example, some archaeologist of a future civilization being baffled by a copy of the Catholic mass, with its sign of the cross and odd abbreviations.) In that case, we surmised, the symbols on the basalt figures must deal almost entirely with religious ritual, for about seventy-five percent of them were unknown to us. One of the few statements we could read was: ‘Before (or below) Pitkhanas dwelt the great old ones’. Another read: ‘Tudaliyas paid homage to Abhoth the Dark’. The Hittite symbols for ‘dark’ may also signify ‘black’, ‘unclean’ or ‘untouchable’ in the Hindu sense. My finds had excited considerable comment in the world of archaeology. My own first view was that the figurines belonged to another proto-Hattian culture (i.e. the forerunners of the Hittites), that differed considerably from the one discovered at Boghazkoy, and from which the Hittites took over their cuneiform. Pitkhanas was an early Hittite ruler of about 1900 BC. If my surmise was correct, then the inscription meant that before Pitkhanas there lived the great proto-Hattians from whom the Hittites derived their script. (‘Below’ could also signify that their tombs were below those of Hittites, as at Boghazkoy.) As to the reference to Tudaliyas, another Hittite ruler of about 1700 BC, it again seemed likely that the Hittites had derived some of their religious ritual from the proto-Hattians, of whom ‘Abhoth the Dark’ (or unclean) was a god.

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