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Hattusa Great Temple

BoğazkaleHittites & ArchaeologyArchaeology

The Great Temple (Temple 1) lies in the Lower City of the ancient city of Hattusa, in the district of Boğazkale. UNESCO’s description of Hattusa names it as the best-preserved ruin of a 13th-century BC Hittite temple. According to a 2018 article by Salihoğlu and Demirarslan, it is the only temple of the Lower City and the largest temple and building complex of the whole city.

Position and size

The temple was built on higher ground than its surroundings; the article writes that this made it visible from the northern parts of the city. According to Ankara University lecture notes, the building measures 65x42 m and, together with the storerooms around it, covers 14,500 square metres. The same notes say the temple was in use in the imperial period but may have been built earlier.

Temple or palace?

Charles Texier, who visited Hattusa in 1834, took the building to be a temple. Later travellers Heinrich Barth and George Perrot argued that it was a palace, not a temple. According to the article, Puchstein and his team found strong evidence in 1907 that it was a temple, yet Perrot’s palace view continued to be repeated for many years.

Plan: blocks A, B and C

Drawing on Kurt Bittel’s study, Salihoğlu and Demirarslan divide the complex into three parts.

  • Block A (east): It has a large courtyard, a sacred room, a large entrance gate and, behind them, a pillared hall with many rooms; Bittel regards it as the part set aside for worship. A stone-paved road runs around all four sides. Beside the south-eastern entrance gate are small cells thought to be for guards.
  • Block B: An irregular block measuring 130x55 m, thought to have served administrative purposes. Seeher called it the “workhouse”; according to tablets it housed staff such as dancers, cooks and craftsmen. Bittel, working from a tablet, reports that 208 people used this unit.
  • Block C: A smaller part to the north of the complex. In Bittel’s view A and C were built at the same time and B later; when B was built, A was enlarged and made more imposing. The three parts were used together in the second half of the 13th century BC, and around 1200 BC block C was no longer needed.

Cult rooms

Most religious ceremonies are thought to have taken place in the courtyard, with the main cult rooms on the far side of it. Bittel notes that one possible explanation for the two equal-sized sanctuaries is that the temple was built for the two greatest Hittite gods. The Turkish Museums article likewise says the temple, with its two cult rooms, is accepted as dedicated to the Storm God Teshub and the Sun Goddess of Arinna. In Hattusa’s temples the cult room is not entered directly but through an entrance shifted to the side and after passing two rooms; the article, following Naumann, presents this as the reflection of a religious ritual in the architecture.

Storerooms and archive rooms

In the rooms on the south and west, huge storage jars stand in two rows in their original positions. The 25 rooms in the west can be entered through a single door only. The rooms in the north held no storage jars but many burnt clay tablets and seals. The Ankara University notes say that about 50 scribes are known to have worked in this temple in the 13th century BC.

Water basins

Stone basins were found on the paved road near the temple entrance and inside the building. The “lion basin”, which carries lion reliefs, differs from the other. Drawing on studies of Hittite rituals, Bittel reports that the king and queen washed their hands in the outer courtyard before entering the temple; the article says the lion basin was built to suit this ritual. The function of these basins has not been settled.

Construction

The base blocks are of well-worked limestone; the base courses of the walls survive to a height of about 1.5 m, and some blocks reach 5 m in length and about 20 tonnes. The upper walls are thought to have been timber-framed mudbrick (the technique known in Anatolia as hımış), and the roof a flat roof closed with wooden beams; the base blocks show the mortise holes in which the timbers sat. The base blocks of a separate structure in the inner courtyard, thought to have been used as an altar, are of dark green gabbro. For the green rock in the Great Temple area see Hattusa Green Stone.

Further sources

According to Tayfun Bilgin’s 2024 entry for the Database of Religious History, the Hittites built the temple around 1600 BCE and it remained in use for about four centuries, until the end of the empire in the early 12th century BCE. The entry says the building was probably called the “Great House” in Hittite texts and was closed to the public as part of the state cult. The complex stands on artificial terraces and covers an area of about 200x130 m, in three parts: the temple, the storerooms around it, and an administrative building to the south. This describes a different boundary from the 65x42 m (temple building) and 14,500 square metres (with the storage rooms) quoted above from the Ankara University notes. The same entry gives the temple as probably single-storey and about 5 m high, with 49 rooms around a courtyard. The two large rooms at the north-east end (a double adyton) are built of dark green gabbro and are taken to be the cult rooms of the Storm God of Hatti and the Sun Goddess of Arinna. There were at least 200 storerooms (some of two or three storeys), some large storage jars held up to 2,000 litres, and thousands of clay tablet fragments came from the eastern storerooms. For the annex to the south a text uses the name “house of work” and lists more than 200 personnel (the figure quoted above from Bittel is 208 people). Bilgin adds that the building seems to have been emptied before a fire destroyed it.

Andreas Schachner’s 2015 DAI conservation report describes the Great Temple as the largest cult building of the capital and the religious centre of the empire; it says the whole plinth of the building was made of worked limestone and gabbro blocks of up to 6x2x1.70 m, which were in places badly damaged by the fire that destroyed the temple and by weathering. The value quoted above from Salihoğlu and Demirarslan was that some blocks reached 5 m in length and about 20 tonnes. The Hittite Monuments website writes that the lion basin near the main entrance was carved from a single limestone block about 5.5 m long, that it may have been a ritual water basin or a statue base, and that its function is unclear. The ICOMOS evaluation prepared for UNESCO (1986) describes the temple as dedicated to the Storm God and to the Sun Goddess of Arinna, surrounded by stores, workshops, dwellings and a scribal school.

Sources

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