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STONE WORLDS: TECHNOLOGIES OF ROCK-CARVING AND PLACE-MAKING

IN ANATOLIAN LANDSCAPES

mr Harmanah
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University,
Providence, RI 02912, USA
e-mail: omur_harmansah@brown.edu

Abstract:
In this study I explore practices of rock carving on the Anatolian peninsula from a
diachronic perspective, with special emphasis on the Late Bronze, Early-Middle Iron
Ages (ca. 1600-550 BC). Linking together materiality of monuments, rock-carving
technologies and issues of landscape imagination, I first focus on the commemorative
rock reliefs across the Anatolian landscape, sponsored by the Hittite, Assyrian and the
Syro-Hittite states. Rock reliefs were carved at geologically prominent and culturally
significant places such as springs, caves, sinkholes, rivers sources or along the river
gorges. They constituted places for communicating with the underworld, the world of
divinities and dead ancestors. I then venture into the Urartian and Paphlagonian rock-cut
tomb-carving practices and Phrygian rock-cut sanctuaries of the Iron Age, to argue for
the broader dissemination of the idea of altering karstic landscapes for cultic and funerary
purposes. I argue that rock-monuments can only be understood, always as part of a
complex assemblage in the long-term history of places. Using a limited number of
examples, this study contributes to studies of landscape and place in Mediterranean
archaeology by promoting a shift of focus from macro-scale explanations of the
environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of place-making.

...the world into which we are thrown is always a built world... Building, which starts from the
ground up, is where the fundamental ontology of our mundane lives both begins and ends...
I intend the term ground both literally and nonliterally. Indeed it is because places come into
being through acts of human grounding that the term possesses its literal and nonliteral senses.
We know by now that the wherewithal of place does not preexist the act of building but it is
created by humanitys mark its edified sign or signatureon the landscape.
Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, 17-18. Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2003.
As a child, whenever I was quizzed about my place of origin, I used to waver momentarily. This
is because I have several that are mine. Ordinarily, I end up replying Ain-el-Qabou or, more
accurately, in the local pronunciation, Ain-el-Abou, though the name doesnt appear on any of
my identity papers. Machrah is listed on these, a village very close to the first, but whose name is
hardly ever used any more, possibly because the only road suitable for cars now turns away from
Machrah and crosses the above-mentioned Ain-el-Qabou.
It is also true that this name has the advantage of corresponding to a concrete reality: ain is the
Arabic word for spring, and qabou means vaulted room. When you visit the village, you see
that there actually exists a gushing spring inside a man-made cavern of sorts with a vaulted roof.
On the stone half-moon there is an ancient Greek inscription that was once deciphered by a
Norwegian archaeologist: it is a biblical quote starting with Flow, Jordan, flow on ... The source
of the Jordan River is about ten kilometers away, but in Byzantine times, these kinds of
inscriptions were probably a traditional way of blessing the waters.
Amin Maalouf (Catherine Temerson, trans.), Origins: a Memoir, 43-44. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Introduction: Springs, Rock Carving and vriz as a Place of Deep History

At a place called vriz, in the northern foothills of the Taurus-Bolkar Da massif, near the
modern town of Ereli and close to the historical route that connects Cappadocia to the
Adana Plain and the Mediterranean, there is a well-known spring. The 17th century
Turkish geographer and traveler Katip elebi, also known as Hajji Khalifah, gives a
detailed description of the rock relief in his Cihannuma, where he identifies the place as
Peygamber Pnar (spring of the prophet); he reports that its water and mud had healing
qualities. Today it is a pleasant and refreshing picnic spot visited by hundreds on any hot
summer day. In addition to its gushing ice-cold water beneath tall walnut trees, vriz is all
the more powerful with its impressive vistas of the soaring limestone peaks and the
verdant valley of Ambarderesi, as well as its rock relief and ancient ruins. In antiquity, a
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series of rock reliefs and other monuments were carved into the living rock or raised in
close proximity to each other, near the multiple mouths of the spring where fresh water
pours out of the rock. These monuments inscribed and re-inscribed this locality with
multiple representations in text and image, grounding the place for cult activity and
further animating an already eventful and geologically wondrous locale. The site is
famous for its eighth century BC rock relief depicting Warpalawas, The King, the Hero,
the Ruler of the regional kingdom of Tabal (Aro 1998; Hawkins 2000 [2]: 425-33)
(Figures 1-2).

Figure 1. Iron Age rock relief of Tabalian Warpalawa at vriz, Turkey (ca 8th c. BC)
(Ivriz I)
Figure 2. Landscape at vriz (Turkey) and Kocaburun Kayas. (authors photograph)

Facing south, the relief is carved on Kocaburun Kayas, an impressively prominent rock
outcrop that extends into the space of the valley perpendicularly, long and thin. The ruler
is depicted in veneration of his Storm God Tarhunzas, and voiced in his monumental
Luwian hieroglyphic inscription (Hawkins 2000 [1.2]: 516-18):

This (is) the great Tarhunzas of Warpalawas

For him let him/them put long(?) SAHANA(?)
This (is) the image of Warpalawas the Hero...
Tiyamartus Warpalawass belo[ved?...] carved it...

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In this study I explore various practices of rock carving and the associated cultural
practices on the Anatolian peninsula from a diachronic perspective, with special emphasis
on the Late Bronze, Early and Middle Iron Ages (ca. 1600-550 BC). Looking across a
variety of regional rock carving practices in Anatolia, I aim to link together the material
corpus of rock-cut monuments such as the commemorative one of Warpalawas at vriz
with broader practices of place-making and ontologies of place. While these
monuments are either ritual, funerary or commemorative in nature (or serving more than
one function at a time, which is arguably the case for most of them), it is argued that rock
carving should first be understood as a technology of altering natural places and has a
lot to do with issues of the construction and inscription of places as culturally
meaningful, politically contested locales. Bradley refers to votive deposits, rock art,
production sites and the relationship between the monuments and the features of the
natural terrain, and states that they should be more carefully explored by archaeologists
as a new form of landscape archaeology (Bradley 2000: 33; see also Bradley 1993;
1998). Furthermore, the act of carving into the living rock is characterized as a direct
encounter between cultural practices and the geomorphology of the terrain, which always
provokes human imagination and storytelling in the most unexpected ways (for
ethnographic work on landscape and storytelling, see e.g. Sikkinka and Choque 1999;
Cruikshank 2005). Therefore, rock carving goes contrary to the compartmentalization of
landscapes into natural, man-made and imagined components it is all about the
hybridization of the three.

The monuments of concern here range from Hittite and post-Hittite (esp. Syro-Hittite /
Luwian and Assyrian) commemorative rock reliefs to Urartian, Phrygian and
Paphlagonian practices of carving the living rock for cultic, commemorative and funerary
purposes. Within the limits of this study, my intention is not to present a comprehensive
survey or classification of such monuments. Instead, I emphasize the diachronic
continuities (and discontinuities) in rock cutting practices, assuming we can understand
rock cutting as a cross-cultural technology of place-making in Anatolian landscapes.
Especially within the karstic limestone geologies of the peninsula, I suggest that the
heterogeneous practices of carving and inhabiting the rock are closely associated local,
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place-specific practices in long-term history. The making of such landscapes across the
Anatolian peninsula can only be understood by drawing links between societies of
different ethno-linguistic affiliations and emergent cultural identities.

The article also critiques the specialized art historical and epigraphic approaches to rock
reliefs and rock-cut structures, which portray them as stand-alone monuments and show a
certain disregard for their micro-geographical context. I argue that rock-monuments can
only be understood, always, as part of a complex assemblage in the long-term history of
places. Within the last century, the archaeological richness and complexity of vriz was
slowly revealed through the discovery of new reliefs and rock features, documentation of
an associated fortress and monumental buildings, and the excavation of a stele
(Messerschmidt 1900: 142-43 and 320-23 (Table 34); Gelb 1939: 31 and plate 46; Bier
1976; Rossner 1988: 103-15; ahin 1999; on the bilingual Iron Age stele: Dinol 1994;
for a recent archaeological assessment of the area: Karauuz and Kunt 2006).
Immediately to the south of the main rock relief, archaeologists excavated a massive
statue head and a fragmentary stele of the weather god with a bilingual Phoenician and
Luwian inscription (Dinol 1994). Slightly farther south, about 110 m from the major
rock relief and on the very top of a rocky spur, is a small relief of a supplicant bringing a
sacrificial animal, along with a series of stepped rock cuttings, and an offering platform
(Bier 1976). Even in the absence of systematic archaeological work at Ivriz, these finds
alone suggest that in the four or five hundred years following the fall of the Hittite
Empire, the site continued to be an intensively used spring sanctuary.

From site to a complex landscape

Early in the 20th century, along the now-dry river bed of Ambarderesi or Karanlkdere,
about one km from the well-known relief of Warpalawas, an almost identical rock relief
was located. In order to get to this relief, one has to climb the steep saddle south of
Warpalawas's relief in the slopes of the impressive Mt. Aydos. Climbing in the river bed
of Ambarderesi, one enters a very narrow canyon, which used to be the other branch of
the Ivriz spring, before its waters were diverted for a recent dam project. Halfway into
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this very steep and narrow gorge, one arrives at an area punctuated by a series of large
caves. Two Late Antique/Byzantine monasteries (locally known as Olanlar Saray and
Kzlar Saray) are constructed with mortared rubble masonry, right at the point where the
canyon makes a sharp dog-leg turn. Facing northeast, one finds the second Warpalawas
relief, an approximate but unfortunately badly weathered copy of the original presenting
the same composition, only without the inscription and with certain minor differences in
detail (Figure 3). This relief was noticed by E. Herzfeld in 1905 (Messerschmidt 1906:
335-36) and visited by Gertrude Bell in 1907 (Barnett 1983: 73; Karauuz and Kunt
2006: 29-30, nn. 23-27).

Figure 3. Second rock-relief of Warpalawa of Tabal at vriz (Turkey) (authors

photograph)

This rare practice of carving the same composition at another important locale deserves
close scrutiny through new fieldwork in order to address issues of re-inscription and
associated site-specific practices. Finally, and most recently, on the high saddle that
separates the two valleys, Ivriz and Ambarderesi, archaeologists Karauuz and Kunt
(2006) surveyed the remains of a sizeable ancient fortress, for which they provided a

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possible, Late Iron Age date of 750-300 BC. The fortress seems to have seen continued
use in the late antique and Seljuk periods.

Although often construed as a single rock relief in the traditional art historical and
philological scholarship, the site of Ivriz embeds a complex landscape, a locale of deep
history, a place of memory and imagination similar to Maaloufs Ain-el-Qabou. It is not a
unique example: every single one of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age rock
monuments I have visited or researched appears to have existed within an intricate web of
geological and archaeological features that unquestionably testify to long-term
engagements of heterogeneous nature with places.

Perhaps two of the most fascinating examples of multiple inscriptions of place in the
form of rock-cut images and monumental inscriptions over a long period of time in the
Near East are the sites of Nahr al-Kalb in Lebanon and Bstn in Iran. At Nahr al-Kalb,
there exists 22 recorded inscriptions and reliefs carved at the site, starting with the one
commemorating the Egyptian Pharoah Ramses II (ca. 1270 BC) right next to numerous
monuments of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian rulers (Volk 2008). The practice of
carving reliefs and inscriptions was continued by the Mamluk Sultan Barquq in the 14th
century AD, Napoleon Bonaparte III in 1860-61 and Lebanese president Alfred Naqqash
in 1942. At Bstn, the famous Achaemenid-Persian relief of Darius I was later
accompanied by Seleukid Herakles and Arsacid reliefs of military victory (Canepa 2010).

Rock carvings and their monumental inscriptions are only one component of a
constellation of material features and residues that make up the places of long-term
cultural practice in which they exist. This study approaches sites of this nature, where
place-making practices of a variety of cultural groups in ancient Anatolia intimately
engaged with the bedrock of places and left durable marks or shaped them within the
social contexts of ritual, funerary, and commemorative events and practices.

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Karst Landscapes, Rock-Carving and the Long-Term

The middle and western Taurus Mountains, the southern parts of central Anatolia and
some in the southeast feature karstic landscapes composed of Mesozoic and Tertiary
limestones (Atalay 1998). These landscapes carry a wealth of karstic features such as
karrens, dissolution dolines, collapse dolines, blind valleys, karstic springs, swallow
holes, caves, unroofed caves, natural bridges, gorges and poljes (Doan 2005). Karstic
aquifers and other features that involve moving water, gushing springs, and disappearing
streams always provoked the imagination of local communities in antiquity; they were
believed to connect the everyday world physically to the underground world (of the dead,
the ancestors), thereby inviting and stimulating the inscription of such sites (Gordon
1967). Such meaningful interaction with the mineral world geomorphologically
transforms eventful places into dynamic sites where geological and cultural processes are
entangled in the long term.

The assumption here is that a spring is already an eventful place by virtue not only of the
geological spectacle of water pouring out of the bedrock but also of the very basic human
engagement in securing drinking water; this water is often regarded as sacred and healing
as it was at vriz (Hland 2009). The frequently visited sacred places at springs, caves,
and sinkholes take on distinct social associations and highly specific cultural significance
through sustained practices in the landscape, thus becoming sites of concentrated local
knowledge and social memory (Boivin and Owoc 2004). When local bodies of
knowledge are involved in exploring the stratified history and the significance of places,
it is intriguing that geological formations themselves appear as actors (Cruikshank 2005:
1), or as animate beings e.g. the mountains, rivers, springs, rock outcrops, and eternal
peaks in Hittite Anatolia (Bryce 2002: 135).

From a long-term regional perspective, practices of rock-carving offer substantial

evidence for continuity across the peninsula during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. As
argued in detail below, rock reliefs, inscriptions, and other kinds of rock-cut monuments
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were always built at various geologically distinct locales: springs, caves, steep river
gorges, sinkholes, and rocky mountain peaks and passes which by definition are
places of sustained social practices. With respect to the Early Iron Age, Syro-Hittite and
Assyrian rock reliefs and inscriptions, as well as Phrygian rock-cut sanctuaries, we are on
safe grounds to suggest an Iron Age inheritance of Late Bronze Age technologies of
inscribing rocky places with commemorative monuments.

Urartian, Paphlagonian, and southern Anatolian rock-cut tomb carving provides another
distinct yet related practice and relates to the broader dissemination of the idea of altering
karstic landscapes for cultic and funerary purposes. The practice of embedding these rock
locations with rupestral monuments to dead ancestors and local divinities is maintained
right through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, even into late antiquity. The next
section offers some critical insight into the particuliarities of such practices in their
regional context and seeks to link them to the longer-term landscape imagination in
ancient Anatolia. The discussion is intended to contribute to studies of landscape and
place in Mediterranean archaeology by promoting a shift of focus from macro-scale
explanations of the environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of
place-making. At the same time, it advocates further empirical research on places, to
address the ontological nature of places rather than limiting ourselves to issues of
representation and symbolism (Merrifield 1993).

Inscribed Landscapes
Hittite and Early Iron age rock reliefs in Anatolia are often seen to be politically
motivated monuments that deliberately marked or guarded the territorial borders or
important highways of antiquity (mountain passes, river valleys etc. see e.g. Bonatz
2007; Seeher 2009; Glatz 2009 for important recent contributions). This standard
commemorative reading of the monuments as imperial interventions to landscape derive
from the long tradition of locating, discovering, and deciphering these monuments
especially from 19th century onwards by renown travelers, antiquarians, and classical
epigraphers of the last two centuries (most prominently in the late 19th century,
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Hirschfeld 1887). Such epigraphic and art historical studies of rock-reliefs and extraurban monuments have been instrumental for imagining ancient landscapes. The
reconstruction of the historical geography of the Hittite Empire and the Iron Age polities
of the Anatolian peninsula benefitted tremendously from the reading of these firmly
located monuments with inscriptions and images. Consider for instance the recent debate
over the geographical definition of Tarhuntaa and the Hulaya River Land provoked by
the discovery and publication of the rock-relief at Hatip at an abundant spring in the
outskirts of the modern town Konya (Bahar 1998; 2005; Dinol 1998a; 1998b; for
speculations on the geography of Tahuntaa in the light of landscape monuments, see
Dinol et al. 2000; Karauuz 2005; Melchert 2007). In these debates, this
commemorative monument of Kurunta, king of Tarhuntaa, became a boundary marker
of sorts between that Mediterranean kingdom and the Hittite Lower Land. By virtue of
their subject matter and the inscriptions permanently carved onto the living rock, such
reliefs are seen as authentic sites, to which ancient political geographies can be anchored.
The relationship of Hittite monuments and geography especially in South Central Turkey
has thus been a major scholarly concern (Hawkins 1995: 49-65, Gordon 1967). In the
case of lengthy royal inscriptions such as the Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions at Yalburt
Sacred Pool complex or Hattuas Sdburg where many place names are uttered, the
debate over the political geography is even more complex and heated. Ann Shafers
dissertation (1998) similarly explore Neo-Assyrian border steles and rock-reliefs as
monuments that defined the periphery of the empire.

This methodology and the historical conceptualization of rock reliefs and other extraurban monuments have a number of limitations. First and foremost, the specific scholarly
obsession with the internal elements of the monuments e.g. dating, composition,
iconography, and philological content led to the relative neglect of the specific locales,
the micro-landscapes, the places in which such monuments serving collective memory
are carved or set up. Notable exceptions to this trend are Ehringhauss volume on Hittite
rock reliefs (2005) which presents excellent photographs of the landscape and
Schachners recent survey of Source of the Tigris (Birklinay) monuments in their geoarchaeological context (Schachner et al 2009). By advocating an archaeology of place
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and place-making, I propose that it would be possible to get a contextualized and

balanced understanding of these monuments as places where specific practices are
exercised and as places with active roles in the everyday life of local communities.

Secondly, a sharp contrast is usually assumed between these explicitly political

commemorative monuments of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages vis--vis the more
funerary nature of Urartian, Paphlagonian and south Anatolian rock cut architecture of
later periods (Middle Iron Age to Late Roman); in turn, Phrygian rock cut architecture is
heavily associated with cult rituals. This implies a discontinuity in the nature of human
engagements with the living rock. My intention here is to show that the evidence is far
more complex. On the one hand, we see a continuity in the commemorative and broadly
politicized nature of rock carving in Anatolia; on the other hand, Hittitologists are
increasingly convinced of the possible funerary functions of Hittite rock reliefs. I will try
to unpack these two issues below.
During the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, landscape monuments of the Anatolian
peninsula often feature monumental inscriptions sponsored by a variety of regional
powers, including the Hittite state and various Anatolian vassal states of the Late Bronze
Age, and the Assyrian empire and the Syro-Hittite regional states in the Iron Age. I
borrow the term landscape monuments from C. Glatz (2009), with reference to Hittite
rock reliefs, spring monuments, dams and quarries (Also Ehringhaus 2005, Seeher 2009,
Bonatz 2007, Kohlmeyer 1983). What is quite interesting in Anatolian and Near Eastern
archaeology is that the Hittite rock reliefs are almost never discussed in relation to the
similar monuments that are dated to the Iron age, even though there are strong indications
for the uninterrupted continuity of the practice from the Late Bronze Age into the Early
Iron Age.
Many of the well-known rock reliefs were carved at liminal mountainous locations,
overwhelmingly at geologically prominent and culturally significant places outside the
cities e.g. at springs and river sources, along the river gorges, or on prominent rock
outcrops. There are also many instances where rock monuments also appear in urban
contexts e.g. at Boazky/Hattua, Gavurkalesi, and Kzlda. These reliefs and
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monuments created places of unusual human interaction, particularly places for

communicating with the underworld, the other-worlds of divinities and dead ancestors.
Hittitologists have recently pointed out a possible association of such monuments with a
number of expressions in Hittite texts, especially in Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions as
well as in treaties and ritual texts. Eternal Peak (NA4.HEKUR.SAG.U) of Hittite texts
for instance, is understood as a commemorative rock-cut monument (such as Nianta at
Boazky), a memorial posthumously dedicated to a royal ancestor but not necessarily
comprising a burial (Taracha 2009: 134; Van den Hout 2002: 74-75; on the etymology of
hekur, see Puhvel 1991: 287-89). Rock-hekur has also been translated as rock-sanctuary
and associated with sites such as Yazlkaya (Puhvel 1991: 287; it is often compared to
Divine Stone House (.NA4 DINGIR.LIM) or the hesti-house, both clearly associated
with funerary installations Hawkins 1998: 71).

Figure 4. Rock Relief at Fraktn near Develi (Kayseri Province) (authors photograph)

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There are a series of Imperial Hittite rock reliefs found along the Zamant Su valley in the
province of Kayseri in southeast central Anatolia. Among these, the well-known rock
relief at Fraktn is carved on a volcanic bedrock faade, immediately above one of the
tributaries of Zamant Su; it overlooks a very green plain, has a spectacular view of the
Erciyes Mountain, and is immediately below an ignimbrite pumice-flow platform
(Figure 4). Walking on the bedrock plateau immediately above the relief, one comes
across several cup marks and circular basins, related to extensive quarrying activity. Only
a few hundred meters northeast of the relief, there is a prominent rock promontory where
one sees a dense artifact cluster and surface remains of a monumental building, at least 30
x 28 m in size. Cup marks and circular basins also cluster near this building. The 13th
century BC Hittite relief itself depicts the Hittite king Hattuili III and Puduhepa pouring
libations in front of the Storm God Tarhunzas and the seated Hepat respectively. The
hieroglyphic inscription identifies all of them by name, and Puduhepa is singled out as
the great queen, daughter of Kizzuwatna, having become god, a well-known Hittite
euphemism for being deceased. Similar associations of various rock relief monuments of
the Hittites may suggest that at least some of them could be associated with the Eternal
Peak (NA4.HEKUR.SAG.U) or the Divine Stone House (.NA4 DINGIR.LIM),
monuments to dead royal ancestors. These were not simply tombs or commemorative
monuments but large self-supporting institutions employing cultic, administrative, and
other personnel, and mostly enjoying some kind of tax exemption (Van den Hout 2002:
91).

Rock reliefs and rock-cut monuments are commemorative in their often overtly political
disposition: embedded in the geological temporality of the living rock, they act as a
means of naturalizing state power. While they attempt to construct territories of power,
they connect political spectacles with the supernatural world of ancestors and cultivate
grounds for everyday ritual practice, funerary or otherwise. While they appropriate
existing local and located practices, geological wonders, and symbolically charged
landscapes into state discourse, they intervene into everyday practices that constitute the
ontologies of place and processes of place-making. Those place ontologies and processes
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both involve discursive, programmatic interventions, directed inscriptions of place as

well as residual assemblages and archaeological depositions that constitute localities of
human practice and dwelling.

If rock reliefs can be considered as temporally specific and spatially situated inscriptions
of place, they are thus constituted by hybrid temporalities: durable and long-term by
virtue of their incorporation into geological processes, and spectacular and animating for
the long-term maintenance of site-specific practices. The inscriptional practices involve
the embedding of state narratives in the form of formulaic, discursive, and annalistic texts
as well pictorial statements. Once they become entrenched in the bedrock of place, the
materiality of the rock reliefs, their political and cultural significance, and their agency
over the culture of place, do not remain inert but evolve with the landscape in which it
exists. Today, as modified geologies and cultural landscapes of antiquity, they link
contemporary communities with the past through their poetic and mysterious aura as
ruins, and the spectacle of their antiquity. Because they speak so concretely to the
geneaologies of locales, whichever way they are understood and interpreted, they evoke
and provoke cultural imagination and take part in the collective memory and shared
senses of belonging to a place.

Figures 5-6 Source of the Tigris or Tigris Tunnel site. Birkleyn ay Gorge and Cave
I entrance (authors photographs)
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Figure 7. Relief image of Tiglath-pileser I on the Tigris Tunnel (Cave I) walls, with
Tigris 1 cuneiform inscription to his left (authors photograph).

The rock reliefs set up in the frontiers of the Assyrian empire during the Iron Age are
excellent examples of such blending of political ideologies, local cult practices, and the
colonial appropriation of culturally meaningful places. During their military campaigns, a
series of Assyrian rulers carved their images and inscriptions on the walls of two caves at
the source of Birkleyn ay in the Korha Mountain, near the modern town of Lice in
Southeastern Turkey (Harmanah 2007; Schachnet et al. 2009; Shafer 1998: 182-88). The
site and the monuments, known in Assyriological circles as the Source of the Tigris or
the Tigris Tunnel, were visited repeatedly by the Assyrian kings and their army
(Figures 5, 6, and 7). Based on Assyrian annalistic texts and pictorial representations of
the event such as those on the Balawat Gate bronze bands, the carving of the images into
the living rock seem to have been part of a series of commemorative and ritual activities
at this sacred spot, including animal sacrifices, celebration banquets, the washing and
raising of Aurs weapons, the Assyrian kings reception of tributes and offerings 1.
Judging from the textual, pictorial, and archaeological evidence, it is possible to argue
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that the Birkleyn caves were already a place of cultic significance and political
contestation as a symbolic landscape even prior to the carving of the rock reliefs.
Elsewhere I have argued that Assyrians were appropriating a local Hurrian/Anatolian
practice of venerating DINGIR.KAKAL.KUR, The Divine Road of the Earth,
associated with entrances to the underworld (Harmanah 2007; on the ritual significance
of Assyrian rock reliefs in general, see Shafer 2007).

Figure 8. The site of Karabur with Neo-Assyrian Rock reliefs near Antakya (Photograph:
Elif Denel)
Figure 9. Karabur Neo-Assyrian Rock relief near Antakya (Photograph: Elif Denel)

Assyrian rock reliefs in other frontier landscapes similarly adopt novel geological and
locally sacred spots. Another excellent example is the site of Karabur where Tayrek
(1975) located four Neo-Assyrian reliefs (Figures 8-9). Karabur is a granite outcropping
with conical bodies of bedrock about 25 km southeast of Antakya near the village of
atba (Karsabul). On the granite bedrock, Tayrek (1979: 47) located four distinct
reliefs of divine and royal beings with no apparent coherent order in relation to each
other, although he suggested the possibility of understanding the site as an open air
sanctuary. What is fascinating here is the gathering of other archaeological features and
the contemporary significance of the place, beautifully described by Tayrek (1975:
174):
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The importance of this monument lies not only with the Assyrian reliefs but also in
a tradition of sanctity which even today attaches to the spot. As at Ferhatl, the
outer parts of the locality were used as a necropolis in Roman times. A rock-cut
burial chamber of a characteristic Cilician type on the southern edge of the area
suggested the possibility of the presence of further tombs, and in fact some
questioning soon served to locate many other Roman graves. Another point of
interest is a wall, probably Roman, found c. 100 m. north of the area of the reliefs
at a spot surrounded by fir trees. The villagers of atba, who speak Arabic as
their mother-tongue and belong to the Alawite sect, regard this as a place of
pilgrimage and name it Seyh ul Kal'a (Sheikh of the Fortress). Around the Roman
wall, which they regard as a tomb, and where on certain religious days they burn
various kinds of incense, there are stones in the shape of orthostats, and about 7 m.
to the north, there is an undamaged marble pool, probably also of the Roman
period.

This rich multi-temporal engagement with rock relief sites during the subsequent periods
in antiquity is evident in the very material corpus of the place. The new meanings and
associations linked to the rock monuments among the ancient medieval and
contemporary inhabitants of the locales is a fairly common aspect of rock reliefs usually
ignored in contemporary scholarship. The Late Bronze and Iron Age rock-cut monuments
often drew Hellenistic graffiti, Roman quarries, and rock-cut cemeteries as well as
Byzantine monastic establishments to the place; these associations are significant in
arguing for the continuity of rock-carving practices on the Anatolian peninsula and for
the cultural biography of places.

The Rocks of Phrygian Matar

Cult places associated with Phrygian deities, specifically the rock-cut monuments linked
with the cult of Matar, have recently been subject to much archaeological work 2. Roller
notes that there is substantial evidence for the existence of deities other than the wellknown Matar, usually referred to as the Phrygian Mother, but she is cautious to
17 | P a g e

associate all rock-cut sanctuaries with Matar (Roller 2009: 1-2; also Berndt-Ersz
2006:170-172 who suggested evidence for the Male Superior God).
Phrygian rock-cut monuments cluster in and around the Phrygian highlands bordered by
the modern towns of Eskiehir, Ktahya, and Afyon: this is a mountainous and verdant
landscape whose gorgeous valleys are watered by the meandering Sakarya (Sangarius)
River and its tributary Porsuk (Tembris) around Trkmen Da. It is a region of (Tertiary
Period) volcanic tuff resulting in high perpendicular outcrops of soft, easily workable
bedrock, and valleys with rich alluvial soils such as the archaeologically well-known
Gyn (Khn) valley. It is frequently pointed out that Matars association with
mountains and rocky landscapes may be evident in her epithet kubileya, suggested to
denote a natural feature of the landscape, probably a mountain or a specific mountain
(Roller 1999:

68; Bernt-Ersz 2006: 83; Ik 2008: 40-47, with references). The epithet

kubileya appears twice once on a step monument in the Khn valley in the Phrygian
highlands (Berndt-Ersz 2006: catalogue no. 56; Brixhe and Lejeune 1984: inscription
W-04), and once on an inscription right next to a triangular rock-cut niche at Germanos
(Soukam)/Trbe n-Yazlkaya, 26 km south of Gynk in Bithynia (Berndt-Ersz
2006: catalogue no.40; Brixhe and Lejeune 1984: inscription B-01). Vasillieva (2001: 53)
points out that according to one linguistic hypothesis, matar kubileya of these Old
Phrygian inscriptions is an exact equation of meter oreia, i.e. the epithet had not been
derived from the name of a certain mountain, but just from the word for mountain her
privileged dwelling. In consultation with Old Phrygian as well as Greek literary and
archaeological evidence, Maya Vassileva has aptly summarized this association: Kybele
is the mountain that bears a cave, either natural or artificial (Vassileva 2001: 53, who
refers to Zgusta 1982:171-2).
Phrygian rock-cut monuments are usually discussed as open air sanctuaries involving cult
faades and niches, stepped monuments with thrones, aniconic idols and altars, and
sometimes even as tombs and wine presses (Haspels 1971). Yet our knowledge of the
function and meaning of these monuments, features, and sites is relatively meager despite
the growing amount of archaeological work on them (for various readings of the
monuments, see Vassileva 2001; Berndt-Ersz 2009: 11, 143-205). The great majority of
18 | P a g e

the monuments are uninscribed and aniconic, especially those dated to the Early Iron
Age, whereas only with the Middle Phrygian period (800 BC-550 BC) do we begin to see
inscribed monuments and figurative representations of Matar (Berndt-Ersz 2006: 142).
The choice of rocky landscapes and hilltops, locations with impressive vistas, and the
environs of springs and rivers for these monuments suggest that this was a ubiquitous
place-making practice in extra-urban contexts in Phrygian Anatolia at this time.

Figure 10. Midas Monument at Yazlkaya/Midas City. Berndt-Ersz 2006: Fig. 50

19 | P a g e

The three major rock-cut Phrygian sites Dmrek, Fndk, and Midas City (Yazlkaya)
offer a complex variety of rock faades with niches and step monuments with
culminating thrones or crescent shaped discs as backrests. Among these, the evidence for
cultic activity at Dmrek, 40 km northwest of Gordion and overlooking the Sakarya
River, is considered the earliest, because of its overwhelming Early Phrygian pottery
assemblage (Grave et al. 2005; Berndt-Ersz 2009: 12). At Dmrek, on the one hand, one
finds a fascinating clustering of about fifteen rock-cut step monuments of various sizes
(Berndt-Ersz 2006: catalogue nos. 101-107). On the other hand, Midas City as a sacred
landscape offers a wealth of elaborately carved rock-cut faades, such as the so-called
Midas Monument (Figure 10), the Areyastis Monument (Hasan Bey Kaya), or the
Broken Monument. The designs are composed of an architectural faade with a
pediment and acroteria, a framed surface reminiscent of a substantial post-and-lintel
system, a central door-like niche, and dazzling geometric patterns on all surfaces. Many
of the faades have flattened, semi-enclosed, open-air platforms and subsidiary
architectural spaces in front of them, possibly for specific ritual gatherings. Certain rockcut monuments of the faade type, located in different valleys, have associated with them
deep vertical shafts descending from the top surface of the bedrock behind the faade,
and connecting horizontally to the niche in the bottom through a small window opening.
Some scholars have associated the shaft monuments with oracular activities and the
communication with the world of ancestors (zkaya 1997; Berndt-Ersz 1998). The shaft
monuments are rather broadly distributed and built away from each other: Malta in the
Gyn valley, Bakeyi/Bah Monument in Kmbet Valley, Deirmen Yeri in
Karababa Valley Delikli Ta near Tavanl and Fndk Asar Kaya northeast of Ktahya.
The political aspect of rock carving is apparent at sites such as Midas city where several
monumental rock-cut faades with spectacular architectural designs and iconographic
language suggest Phrygian royal patronage. Rock-cut monuments are particularly
powerful tools for political elites to appropriate and colonize sacred landscapes and holy
places. Spectacular, almost dazzling designs of the Midas city monuments carved into the
living rock at previously venerated sites of Matars divine epiphany bring political power
and local cult practices together for the negotiation of cultural meanings and symbolisms
of a place. Political discourse here uses nature (specifically the bedrock that is holy to
20 | P a g e

Matar) as a grounding of place, in a way perhaps annihilating traces of previous micropractices. One has to be cautious, however, in seeing the cult(s) of Matar as a unifying,
state-sponsored deity of politically (read artificially) elevated status, similar to the
Assyrian Aur or Urartian Haldi, as there is little or no evidence to make such a
suggestion (contra Roller 2009: 8, who writes the patronage of the goddess by Phrygian
rulers in the first half of the first millennium BC gave the Mother unusual prominence as
a symbol of Phrygian culture...).
Rock-cut tombs are not unknown in Phrygia either, although oddly enough they seem to
be excluded consistently from the study of Phrygian rock-cut monuments (e.g. BerndtErsz 2006: 152-57). Finely decorated tomb monuments such as Aslanta and Ylan Ta
in the Gyn valley are built facing the Gyn Kale Fortress and in close association
with other rock cut monuments such as faades, cult niches, step monuments and smaller
rock-cut tombs (see Berndt-Ersz 2006: fig. 5 for a map of the Gyn valley). The
Aslanta tomb is protected by ferocious rampant and couchant lions arranged on the tomb
faade in relief around a central flat pillar (Johnson 2010: 227-28). The nearby shaft
monument and elaborately carved faade known as Malta, to the south of the two
monumental tombs, was built immediately above a spring (Berndt-Ersz 2006: catalogue
no. 24, fig.33; Johnson 2010: 230-31). The Malta monument has an inscription under the
lintel of its doorway that reads [s/he] dedicated [the ritual faade] to Pormates/Mater
(e]daespormt[) (Johnson 2010: 231; Brixhe and Lejeune 1984: 47-49 no. W-05 a, b).
Such a gathering of rock-cut features with various functions and a multiplicity of designs
presents a complex landscape that cannot simply be explained with one practice or
another. It is only possible to understand the place as a complex assemblage of rockcutting practices that share a common semantic field associated with the cult of Matar,
the creation and articulation of thresholds to the underworld and the world of the
ancestors, and the powerful significations associated with the act of carving the living
rock.
The continuity of the cult of Matar in the Late Iron Age, Hellenistic and Roman periods
in the Phrygian highlands, at least at certain sites, is particularly important. At sites such
as Kapkaya near Pergamum, at Aizonai, and at the Angdistis sanctuary in Midas City
21 | P a g e

itself, the ritual practices associated with the Phrygian Matar seems to have been active;
they had a special revival in the later first and second centuries AD, evident in multiple
votive dedications and their associated inscriptions (Roller 2009: 6-7). Monumental rockcut tombs with columnar and pedimented faades such as the Gerdek Kaya monument
in the Yazlkaya-Midas Valley or the Kilise Mevkii tomb southwest of Eskiehir
continued to be built in Phrygia, particularly during the Hellenistic period, and were
possibly affiliated with the Paphlagonian rock-cut tombs of the Achaemenid period
(Tfeki Sivas and Sivas 2007: 58-60).
A common scholarly mistake about rock-cut monuments is the tendency to isolate each
one as a solitary structure with a clearly definable, single and unchanging function and
meaning associated with it. Such an approach typically fails to grasp the monument in its
spatially and temporally situated, site-specific, historically nuanced context in relation to
what is adjacent to it. As Vassileva (2001: 55) perceptively discussed, rock-cut
landscapes are composed of complex places where several rock-cut features and other
structures are intimately linked through specific rituals, processions, and a complex set of
procedures involving the mountain setting and the water sources. Typological studies of
rock-cut monuments unfortunately tend to dissect places into their features and
components in meticulously prepared catalogues, where the coherence of culturally
meaningful places is inevitably lost. I suggest that this approach must be replaced with
what I term an archaeology of place, where understanding the complexity of places in a
diachronic perspective is not sacrificed to the typological and chronological parsing of its
constituents 3. This is almost a proposal to return to approaches such as that of Emilie
Haspels, whose intimate engagement with the Phrygian Highlands in the years of 19371939 and 1946-1958 admirably stands closer to a place-oriented archaeology (see now
Berndt and ambel 2009).

Burying the Dead

While we have increasingly rich literary and archaeological evidence for the close
association of Hittite royal burial practices with rock-cut tombs and memorials (Van den
22 | P a g e

Hout 2002), it is only during the Anatolian Iron Ages that the practice of burying the
dead in rock-cut chambers became a widespread, interregional practice. Rock-cut tombs
appear at this time as one of the many forms of burial, alongside other monumental
funerary structures such as the tumulus or the tower tomb. Such tombs are prominently
attested in Urartu in the Lake Van Basin and the Upper Euphrates valley (Krolu 2008;
Ik 1995), in Paphlagonia especially in the modern provinces of Kastamonu and Amasya
(Johnson 2010), and in Lydia during the Late Iron Age. This practice seems to have
spread throughout much of the limestone landscapes of southern Anatolia, particularly
Lycia, Cilicia, and Caria in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Cormack 2004: 17; Ik
1995).

In the Lake Van basin and the Upper Euphrates valley in eastern Anatolia, as well as
broadly in Iranian Azerbaijan and the Transcaucasus, Urartian settlement landscapes of
the eighth and seventh centuries BC feature a full flourishing of carving, inscribing, and
shaping the bedrock as a form of dwelling and building. Urartian fortresses are built on
soaring rocky hills with major interventions made in the shape of the bedrock by creating
stepped surfaces for constructing cut-stone masonry fortification walls, for making
staircases, terraces and platforms, and for carving rupestral tombs and open air
sanctuaries as well as cuneiform inscriptions on the living rock. Rather than isolated
monuments in the landscape, Urartian rock-cut architecture presents us with a complex
worldview of building and dwelling.

Rock-cut tombs in Urartu are known from various citadels of the state, including its longterm capital city at Tupa-Van Kalesi (on Urartian rock cut shrines and tombs, see Ik
1995; Krglu 2008; evik 2000; Forbes 1983: 100-13). The royal tombs at Tupa
(Dou Odalar) were built in massive proportions, both in terms of the ceremonial
platforms in front of them and the interior of the tomb chambers. Entry to the tomb
chambers is gained through raised monumental entrances, accessed through rock-cut
staircases and carved into very steep flattened faades. On the faade of the
south/southwestern Horhor Odalar tombs at Tupa, a large commemorative inscription
of Argiti I (Krolu 2008: 25) is somehow reminiscent of the Achaemenid royal tombs
23 | P a g e

at Naqsh-i Rustam near Persepolis in the Fars Province of Iran. Similarly, at the frontier
fortress of Palu on the Euphrates, a large commemorative inscription of Menua on the
very top of the fortress is accompanied by a series of rock-cut, multi-chamber tombs,
while the Doubeyazt tomb features relief imagery (Forbes 1983: 104-105). The
interiors of the tombs feature several niches for offerings and imitation structural
members, such as roof beams shown in relief.

Thinking through such a broad and long-term perspective on the Anatolian peninsula, the
rock-cut tombs of Achaemenid Paphlagonia present a fascinating case of places where
local, Greek and satrapal Persian identities were negotiated through the practices of rockcarving (Johnson 2010). During the Achaemenid period, Paphlagonian elites seem to
have built a series of funerary monuments in the landscape in close association with
settlements. Iconographic analysis of the tombs that feature columnar temple faades
with gabled roofs, and representations of Greek mythological subjects as well as
Achaemenid fabulous beings, suggest a complex hybridization of visual culture in this
mountainous region of the peninsula. The inheritance that this micro-regional
development owes to the long-term technologies and practices of rock-carving and placemaking in the Anatolian peninsula is well balanced with the local innovations in rupestral
funerary monuments.

Conclusions
In speaking about the making of rock-cut monuments as a place-making practice, one has
to be skeptical of the common modernist understanding of landscape and place.
According to this view, landscape appears as an unaltered natural environment, a
background or undifferentiated space into which socially constructed places or statesponsored monuments are inserted. In this worldview, places appear as islands or as
clearly delineated sites if you will. Here I intended to critique this modernist notion of
space as a noiseless, uniform background, and replace it with a complex notion of
landscape, a rich topographical texture, infinitely differentiated, chaotic and continuously
altered. Landscapes are not measurable voids or vast open spaces, but rather form a
24 | P a g e

hybrid product of natural and cultural processes, which often mix into each other.
Ontologies of places are such that specific geologies encounter and mix with material
practices of the everyday, with cultures of worldly living. Communities that define
themselves through a certain sense of belonging to a particular place exist by virtue of
their specific social attachments, situated memory practices, and local histories. The
politics of space, spatiality, and monumentality are juxtaposed with stories written and
recounted about landscapes, and places are thus always already imagined and politically
negotiated. Contrary to the modernist dissection of landscape into its discrete components
of the natural, the cultural, or the imagined, I argue for an understanding of landscape that
is only possible at the intersection of all these. In the processes of place-making, that is in
the processes of making places as culturally significant locales (like Maaloufs Ain elQabou,) what is important is the blending of the micro-geology of place with the cultures
of place that are woven around it, and the stories told about it.

From the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age on the Anatolian peninsula, the
practices of making commemorative rock reliefs and inscriptions, constructing open air
shrines and sanctuaries, and carving out rock-cut tombs have been an ever evolving
place-making technology that inscribed and re-articulated places. Contrary to the
widespread scholarly understanding of Hittite rock-cut monuments as solely
commemorative, and of Phrygian monuments as reflective only of ritual, I have tried to
emphasize the coexistence of commemorative, cultic, funerary, and political functions
and meanings of rock-cut monuments over the long-term. Thus it may be suggested that
the carving of a rock relief is in itself an innovative, transformative, and especially
performative act that in a way appropriates existing practices and significations
associated with the locale. Through monumentalization, it artfully clarifies and articulates
the richness of the place while incorporating it into new networks of state discourse,
preparing the ground for new meanings, practices, stories, and negotiations.

25 | P a g e

Acknowledgments
I thank the editors of this volume for their continuous encouragement and patience.

About the Author

mr Harmansah is Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Egyptology and Ancient
Western Asian Studies in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient
World at Brown University. He writes on issues of landscape, place, performance, and
memory in the ancient Near East and the eastern Mediterranean. Currently he directs The
Yalburt Yaylas (Ilgn-Konya) Archaeological Landscape Research Project. His first
monograph entitled Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East will be
published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.
http://proteus.brown.edu/harmansah/Home

26 | P a g e

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Notes
1

See the Black Obelisk inscription belonging to the time of Shalmaneser III (Grayson
1996: 65). Similar events are depicted for the scenes usually identified as taking
place at the Source of the Tigris (King 1915: relief panel 10; and see Schachner
2007 on the Balawat Gates representations).
2
The archaeological magnum opus on Phrygian highlands and their rock monuments
is Haspels 1971. For recent work, see especially Berndt-Ersz 2006; 2009, Tfeki
Sivas 1999; Tfeki Sivas and Sivas 2007; Tams 2004; Grave et al. 2005; Roller
2009. Roller notes that there is substantial evidence for the existence of deities other
than the well-known Matar, usually referred to as the Phrygian Mother, but she is
cautious to associate all rock-cut sanctuaries with Matar (Roller 2009: 1-2). See
Berndt-Ersz (2006:170-172) for suggested evidence of the Male Superior God.
3
I use the term here with reference to Richard Bradleys archaeology of natural
places (Bradley 2000) as well as Brenda J. Bowser and Mara Nieves Zedeos
archaeology of meaningful places (Bowser and Zedeo 2009). A similar approach
has been recently discussed in a special issue of the Journal of Archaeological
Method and Theory as well. See Bowser 2009.

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