Sirkeli mound is located about due east of Adana.
Posted on 09/23/2018 12:39:15 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Archeologists at Adana's Sirkeli Mound have uncovered a double-skin wall dating back to the Iron Age. Located in the city's Ceyhan district, the wall bears the traces of a war... The defensive wall and waterways were discovered at the lower city part of the mound... they have also discovered stores and seeds on the upper part of the mound. They date back to the Iron and Early Bronze Ages... Novak said they found the wall after geophysical and surface researches that were conducted in the lower city of the mound. Excavation works have started in the light of that data. He said that works continue at nearly 2.5 meters below the surface at the moment. "A double-skin defensive wall system dating back to the Iron Age was found during excavation. There are also houses belonging to various settlements in the inner part of the inner walls. There are some traces on the outer walls as well. They show how soldiers attacked the walls with their spears. We know that Shalmaneser III started a war against this region in 835 B.C. The carbon-14 samples and ceramics from here show this wall dates back to the 9th century B.C.," he added. The wall dates back to the Iron Age but whether it was built on an earlier wall or not will come to light with further excavations in the next few years. Novak added that they also found a stamp seal with Luwian hieroglyphics and Babel cuneiforms. "We also discovered ceramic and metal workshops in the inner part of the walls," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysabah.com ...
Sirkeli mound is located about due east of Adana.
[photo from HIttite Monuments dot com] The better preserved rock relief of the two shows the Hittite King Muwatalli II (ca. 1290-1272 BC), opponent of Pharaoh Ramesses II in the famous Battle of Qadesh in Syria and is thus the oldest Hittite rock relief known so far.
Cultic City And Fortress Unearthed In Southern Turkey | November 5, 2007
One of *those* topics.
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Weekly digest ping.
Thank you, fascinating!
I’m assuming a double skin wall consists of an inner and outer stone wall with the gap between them filled with packed earth. I have never gotten deep into the weeds on such matters, but my layman’s guess is that these might have been a common evolution. One would start with an earthen rampart, probably ditched, and perhaps with a wooden palisade (if in a wooded region) or light stone wall on top. A natural next step would be to add an outer face of stone to get a stronger and more nearly vertical wall on the business side. The inner stone facing would come last, to reduce erosion and stabilize the fighting platform along the top. Do you have a sense of how common such constructions were? Would there have been any added advantages to this method other than time and cost of construction? For example, is this a preferred building technique in earthquake prone territory?
It would go up fast, and would yield a wide area at the top on which defensive garrisons could operate. A single curtain-style wall would better suit a town more concerned about bandits and other freelance raiders, and about the movements of the local regime's own citizens, and during the day the control of wandering traders. A capital would require more ambitious defenses.
:^) My pleasure.
Tarsus was no mean city, according to its most famous native. Mopsuestia means the "hearth of Mopsus." Mopsus was a minor figure in Greek stories about events in the Bronze Age, but has been confirmed to have really existed, I believe from a contemporary inscription.
Thanks VR.
Two things to watch out for -- number one, she pushes the "ancient Palestine" line of BS, and number two, the dating of the Luwians is based on the conventional pseudochronology, and is centuries too high.
Cuneiform writing on clay became wildly popular among the governing elites of the Ancient Near East. Although some societies, such as Egypt, only used cuneiform for their international correspondence, the Anatolians additionally adopted cuneiform for domestic use to write Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, and several other languages. But they also developed their own hieroglyphic script for inscriptions in Luwian only. Among other topics, this lecture explores where it came from, how widely it was used, and who could read it. Presented by Petra Goedegebuure, Associate Professor of Hittitology, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.
Petra Goedegebuure | Luwian Hieroglyphs: An Indigenous Anatolian Syllabic Script from 3,500 Years Ago | The Oriental Institute | Published on February 11, 2016
Luwian Phoenician inscription:
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