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Four graves, two jugs and seven coins dating to the Hittite period were unearthed during excavations conducted in the Mediterranean province of Adana, archaeologists working at the site announced on Monday. Adana Archaeology Museum Director Kaz›m Tosun told reporters that the graves were unearthed on May 25 during the excavations in the Ceyhan village of Sirkeli. Tosun said they had found some human bones in the graves. "The excavation is still under way. The findings will be exhibited at the Adana Archaeology Museum," he said. He also said the excavations were begun at the request of Akdeniz Petrolleri Inc. prior...

An exhibition titled "The Hittite Winds" by sculptor and ceramic artist Erdinç Bakla opened on Tuesday at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum in Topkap› Palace. The exhibition, which interprets Hittite artifacts in various materials, features 35 pieces of marble, bronze, plexiglas and fiberglass as well as a golden dinner set and silver tea set. The exhibition will run until May 28 and will also be on display in Ankara in June, reported the Anatolia news agency.

Amazon Warrior WomenThis painting on a Greek vase depicts an Amazon woman warrior on horseback engaged in battle.Amazons in myth: History's first mention of a race of warrior women comes in Homer's ILIAD, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th to the 7th century B.C. Homer's Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in other Greek myths. One of the labors of Hercules, for example, required him to...

February 25, 2002 Recent finds prove that Homer's stories were more than myth By Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent A CYNICAL scholar once noted that the reason that academic disputes were so bitter was that the stakes were so small. In the real world maybe, but Troy has been a battleground for 3,000 years not because of mundane matters of funding and status but because of its grip on our imaginations. There may or may not have been a decade’s siege on the edge of the Dardanelles around 1100BC, pitting Late Mycenaean Greeks against their neighbours and possible distant kin: but ...

Devastating 'World War ZERO' destroyed ancient Mediterranean civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age 11:41, 13 MAY 2016 UPDATED 11:44, 13 MAY 2016 BY JASPER HAMILL Controversial theory finally identifies mysterious 'Sea Peoples' blamed for cataclysmic series of events which changed the course of history It was a disaster which destroyed the ancient world's greatest civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age that lasted centuries. Now one archaeologist think he's worked out who's to blame for sparking an event he calls "World War Zero", but which most academics refer to as the The Late Bronze Age Collapse ....

The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed "World War Zero" -- an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago. And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians. By the second millennium BC, civilisation had taken hold throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian New Kingdom coexisted with the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Mycenaeans of mainland...

George and I have had several meaningful conversations via email. This one might be of interest to other readers and George gave me permission to reproduce the conversation. George: I want to thank you for your blogs. I read them all the time and they have been a BIG help! I've been trying to sell others on the fact that the Hebrew lettering system goes back further than the 4th century millennium BC thanks to your findings of the Ainu/Annu culture and their lettering system in their later homeland of Japan - but with no success. I definitely believe your...

Since this disk was found in Crete, and the people of Crete today speak Greek, that's a good language to assume was spoken by the maker of the disk. Still, that's a guess, or a hypothesis, not a fact. Besides that, we know that not everybody on Crete spoke Greek in the Bronze Age. The classical Greeks mentioned people they called Eteocretans who did not speak Greek. Further, we know that Linear A, written by the Minoans on Crete before the Mycenean Greeks came, did not represent Greek. Professor Hubert LaMarle considers it to be an early Indo-Iranian language, related...

Archaeologists have found the figure of a goddess that dates back to the early Hittite period as well as a Viking amber necklace during an ongoing excavation in the ancient city of Bathonea by Lake Kucukcekmece in Istanbul. An archaeological excavation was launched in 2009 near Lake Kucukcekmece in the Avcilar district of Istanbul to uncover the ancient city of Bathonea, which is estimated to be 1,600 years old. The excavation is being conducted under the supervision of Associate Professor Fengul Aydingun from Kocaeli University. in an earlier interview with the press, she had said the first two years of...

The excavation of a mountain castle in central Turkey has revealed a secret tunnel, built by the Hittites around 4,000 years ago. Geval Castle, on Takkel Mountain in Central Anatolia, sits over 5,500 feet above sea level and once offered a strategic 360-degree vantage point for a population that regularly faced assaults from the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Thracians throughout their history. As a result, Hittites were master underground builders, although the exciting discoveries at Takkel Mountain appear to be the first of their kind. "We have discovered secret tunnels in the castle. We have cleaned there and revealed a [328-foot...

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment. The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings....

Archaeologists rewrite timeline of Bronze and Iron Ages, including early appearance of alphabet FOR RELEASE: Dec. 19, 2001 Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr. Office: 607-255-3290 E-Mail: bpf2@cornell.edu ITHACA, N.Y. -- Using information gleaned from the sun's solar cycles and tree rings, archaeologists are rewriting the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The research dates certain artifacts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean decades earlier than previously thought. And it places an early appearance of the alphabet outside Phoenicia at around 740 B.C. Writing in two articles in the forthcoming issue of the journal Science (Dec. 21), archaeologists from Cornell University ...

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

Ancient Hittite dam inaugurated after 32 centuries Wednesday, September 20, 2006 ANKARA - Turkish Daily News A Hittite-era dam located in the central Anatolian province of Çorum and believed to be one of the oldest in the world to have survived to date has been restored and is once again serving as a source of irrigation for local residents. The dam, located at the Alacahöyük archaeological site, was built by the Hittites in 1240 B.C. The dam's inauguration was marked with a ceremony over the weekend attended by Professor Aykut Çýnaroðlu, who heads the team excavating Alacahöyük, Ankara University Rector...

First Toilet And Sewer System Of Prehistoric Period Found In Van Anadolu Agency: 8/22/2004 VAN - The first toilet and sewer system of prehistoric period was found in an Urartian castle in Gurpinar town of eastern province of Van. In an interview with the A.A correspondent, Istanbul University Eurasian Archaeology Institute Director Prof. Dr. Oktay Belli said on Saturday that they had unearthed a toilet in the western part of Cavustepe Castle built by Urartian King Sarduri II in 764 BC. ''We revealed that Urartian architects had formed a sewer system before building the castle. The toilet and sewer system...

Posted on Mon, Jul. 22, 2002 Key to an ancient tongue Penn archaeologists have puzzled over the cuneiform writings for decades. At last, a Sumerian dictionary may be ready by 2004. By Faye Flam Inquirer Staff Writer Steve Tinney and Tonia Sharlach hold cuneiform tablets from the collection at Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The two Sumerologists are working on the 30-year dictionary project. The people known as Sumerians are credited with starting the first civilization and building the first settlements worthy of being called cities. They also invented writing, and then they wrote and wrote and wrote, filling...

The History Channel is going to air a new historical series entitled DECISIVE BATTLES including some classic wars between ancient Persian armies and Roman and Greek ones. The History Channel goes on location to the actual battlefields and integrates cutting-edge videogame technology to bring history and imagination together in the new series DECISIVE BATTLES. The half-hour series DECISIVE BATTLES premieres Friday, July 23 at 9-9:30pm ET/PT. The series is hosted by Matthew Settle (Band of Brothers) on location at the ancient battlefields and features expert commentary from the world©s foremost historians. DECISIVE BATTLES is unlike any series The History Channel...

[T]he exclusively masculine epithets referring to this individual in the same tomb and on a now-vanished block at Memphis, confirm that we are dealing with a man - as distinct from the pharaoh-queen Ankh(et)kheperure Neferneferuaten... Contrary to Ancient Egyptian custom, Smenkhkare is not presented under a coronation name and a birth name in his two cartouches, but under two coronation names. The explanation for this curious fact seems to me clear: both his royal names were composed on the occasion of his coronation. He therefore must have had another name beforehand... The absence of a birth name, the lack of...

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...