Evidence of massacre in Bronze Age Turkey [ Titris Hoyuk ]

Past Horizons ^ | Monday, February 20, 2012 | Katy Meyers

[SunkenCiv]

Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area...

The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, dating to 2900-2100 BCE. The site grew very quickly in this period from a small farming community to an urban centre within a large mud-brick fortification wall built over a stone foundation. Within one of the house structures (House #2, Room 13), a burial was found in a plaster basin beneath the floors. While the location of the burial and the basin are not unique, the state of the individuals is...

Instead of the normal burials recovered from these basins, the team from University of California, San Diego and University of Akron found a large number of disarticulated remains with the crania placed at the top. Based on the strata of the burial, it is unknown whether this burial was created in a single moment or over time. Given their layout and the slight connection of some of the remains, it was more likely there was a single burial episode rather than a multiple event internment. Since the bones were co-mingled, determining the number of individuals required counting the number of repeating bone elements. The researchers looked at crania and long bones and from this they argue there are a minimum number of 13 adult males, 3 adult females and 3 sub-adults. This burial dates to the end of the period of occupation, approximately 2200-2100 BCE.

[SunkenCiv]

Mass burial in plastered basin in the Outer Town at Titris Hoyuk. Image: Titris Hoyuk Photographic Archive

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Renfield. Why yes, there is a titrishoyuk keyword. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Average Al]

Perhaps they wanted to make sure they were dead. ;-)

[DManA]

Pinpoints where this pernicious idea of Kingship entered the world.

[SuzyQue]

????

[DJ MacWoW]

FR Is Raising Money For New Servers

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[wideminded]

The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, dating to 2900-2100 BCE.

"Çatalhöyük ( also Çatal Höyük ...) was a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE ." - Wikipedia

So, despite the age of this site, people had already been living in towns in Anatolia for an enormously long time when this massacre happened, in fact for longer than the time from then to now.

[SunkenCiv]

It still boggles my mind that Catal Huyuk was around nearly 3000 years, destroyed (apparently by an attacking force), and the small successor settlement built nearby only lasted about 50 years — and that all this ended nearly 7000 years ago. The destruction of CH was attributed by Ryan and Pitman to the ingress of refugees fleeing the Black Sea flood (pretty good suggestion, IMHO).

[Verginius Rufus]

I vote for Indo-European-speaking invaders. They didn’t expand from India to the Iberian peninsula by being nice.

[SunkenCiv]

May have been them but could have been one of the imperial powers from just over the threshold of the age of literacy — the Elamites (who had a writing system, but it can’t be read, so far) would be a guess. The Indo-Europeans entered Europe and the Middle East (and India, for that matter) in a series of waves, which at least in part coincide with the global climate cycles.

[Verginius Rufus]

Apparently there are two early Elamite writing systems that are still undeciphered, but there are cuneiform texts in Elamite which can be read. One of the three languages on the Behistun or Bisutun inscription of Darius I is Elamite. It doesn't seem to be related to any other known language (possibly distantly related to Dravidian). They were down there along the Persian Gulf--I don't know if they would bother to go all the way to Turkey.

There is an Elamite king mentioned in Genesis 14, and a mention of Elamites in Acts 2.9 (present in Jerusalem).

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks VR, good info. The ruler of the kings mentioned in the account of Abraham, Lot, and the Cities of the Plain was Kudur-Lagamar ('devotee of Lagamar', an Elamite deity), transliterated as Chedorlaomer in the OT. Abraham reportedly managed to free his kinsman Lot and other hostages and booty with fewer than 200 men, apparently from the slow-moving rearguard, as old Ched and his army raced back to Mesopotamia to deal with a revolt, or perhaps fled as his supposed tributaries rebelled after the Cities of the Plain were dealt with. The various chronicles from Semitic sources describe various conquests and revolts, carrying off of each others' idols, and other festivities that went on between the Elamites and their neighbors, and of course amongst each other.

Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West

[snip] As longtime literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement in London, Andrew Robinson is well able to interpret the arcana of scientific discoveries for the general public. In Lost Languages, he explains the principles of three famous decipherments and applies the insights gained to an understanding of several undeciphered scripts—Linear A, the Etruscan alphabet, the Phaistos disc, and the Meroitic, Proto-Elamite, rongorongo, Zapotec, Isthmian and Indus scripts. [/snip]

Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson