Just as the Rosetta Stone was instrumental in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, other writing systems followed a similar process, sometimes more bumpy and convoluted. We have already discussed some of them here before, and in fact, they contributed in part to the decipherment of the one we are dealing with now, the Anatolian hieroglyphs, in a kind of curious domino effect.
In 1694, the Cippi de Melqart, two pedestals bearing bilingual inscriptions, in ancient Greek and Punic Phoenician, were discovered in Malta, allowing Jean-Jacques Barthelemy to decipher and reconstruct the Carthaginian Phoenician alphabet in 1758 (which also allowed, some 200 more years later, partially understand the Etruscan language, as we saw in the article dedicated to the Plates of Pirgi).
That knowledge of the Phoenician alphabet was essential, in turn, to decipher the hieroglyphs found on stone inscriptions and lead tablets in Anatolia and Syria, the oldest examples of which date back to the 14th century BC. and the most recent to VII BC, at which time the hieroglyphic writing system disappeared to make way for alphabetic writing.
The first news of these unknown Anatolian hieroglyphics in Europe came from explorers such as Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and Richard Francis Burton in the 19th century, who saw them on the walls of the city of Hama, north of Damascus. For a long time it was thought that they had a Hittite origin and therefore were a script of their language.
The Hittite cuneiform script had already been deciphered at the beginning of the 20th century, which also led to the partial decipherment of the Luwian cuneiform script, since they were directly related, by Emil Forrer in 1919. But in the case of hieroglyphs the task was certainly more complicated.
In 1946 the German archaeologist Helmuth Theodor Bossert (at the time a professor at Istanbul University), together with his assistant Halet Çambel, discovered and excavated Karatepe (an ancient Hittite fortress in southern Turkey, in the Taurus Mountains). ). There they found remains of buildings, tablets, statues, two monumental doors with reliefs and pillars on which lions and sphinxes are represented. Karatepe was one of the first important and amazing discoveries in the Middle East after World War II.
Precisely on the walls next to the monumental gates, a bilingual inscription appeared, dating from the 8th century BC. It was written in Phoenician characters and Anatolian hieroglyphs. As in the Rosetta stone, both texts say the same thing in both languages. The problem was that it was not known what language the hieroglyphs represented (or rather, as we said before, it was thought to be Hittite). In fact, although decipherment attempts were made, it would not be until the 1970s that a team made up of John David Hawkins, Anna Morpurgo Davies and Günter Neumann realized that both the cuneiform script and the hieroglyphs of Karatepe represented the same thing. language, Luwian.
To get there, and continuing with the domino effect, Hawkins, Davies and Neumann relied on another later discovery:vessels from Urartu (kingdom of the 9th-8th centuries BC in present-day Armenia) with inscriptions, written in Urartian but using precisely the luwian hieroglyphic writing.
Once the language of the hieroglyphics was identified as Luwian, the decipherment with the help of the Phoenician part of the inscription could be carried out. The inscription, whose author turned out to be Azatiwada, the ruler of the city, commemorates his own founding while recognizing himself as a subject of the kingdom of Quwe:
The excavations, which continued until the 1990s led by Halet Çambel (his co-discoverer), brought to light the walls of the fortress (376 meters north and 196 east-west) between 4 and 6 meters high and 2 to 4 thick. Every 20 meters there is a tower or bastion, with a total of 34 (although only 28 have been identified), and there are two large entrance gates. The southwest is flanked by statues of lions, and the northeast by sphinxes. The Phoenician part of the inscription was found on the wall by the northeast gate, while the Luwian part is by the southwest gate. Today the place is an archaeological park and open-air museum that can be visited.
As a curiosity, some theories relate Karatepe and the Luwian language to Troy. This last point is based on the discovery of a Luwian seal in 1995 at the Troy VII level, which has led some researchers, such as Frank Starke, from the University of Tübingen, to wonder if Luwian was the language spoken in Homeric Troy. Starke himself thinks that the name of King Priam would be related to the Luwian priimuua , which means exceptionally brave .
In 2010, in a documentary for German television ZDF, the writer Raoul Schrott claimed that the fortress and the landscape around Karatepe seemed to fit the Homeric description of Troy. His theory is that Homer could have been a scribe in the service of the Assyrians in Karatepe, where he would have combined his knowledge of the Trojan legend with the real environment of the fortress. Of course, there is no evidence of this.
As for the discoverers of Karatepe, Professor Bossert stayed in Turkey, where he became director of the National Archaeological Institute. He married and obtained Turkish nationality in 1947. He continued to lead the Karatepe excavations until he retired in 1959 and died in Istanbul in 1961.
Halet Çambel replaced Bossert at the head of the excavations. She was appointed professor at the University of the Saarland (Germany) in 1960, retiring in 1984. In 2004 she was awarded the Prince Claus Award in the Netherlands in recognition of her archaeological and restorative work in Turkey, as well as for having founded the Chair of Prehistory in Istanbul University. As if that were not enough, in 1936 she had participated in the Berlin Olympics (foil fencing), being the first Muslim woman in history to compete in the Olympics. She passed away in 2014.