A fresh discovery of alabaster idols at Kültepe (Turkey)

29 October 2018

The Kültepe site, located to the northeast of Kayseri, in Central Anatolia (Turkey), seems to be an endless source of new discoveries. Continuously under excavation since 1948, this site was occupied during the third millennium and at the beginning of the second millennium BCE. Since 2006, the year in which Fikri Kulakoğlu, professor of archaeology at the University of Ankara, took office as the Director of Excavations, archaeologists have focused their efforts on the Upper Town. Here, they have uncovered many structures, some of large size, dating from the Bronze Age. During the course of the summer of 2018, they brought to light a room of modest dimensions whose floor was littered with 28 alabaster idols, similar to those already discovered in the past at Kültepe.

These idols, carved from alabaster, like holy statuettes, have generally been discovered in tombs and places consecrated for religious purposes. They represent unique evidence of the local art in the second half of the third millennium BCE. The most ancient idols are highly stylised in their form: a half-disk endowed with a slender neck lacking a head. A few of them recall the shape of a violin.

Two types of idol endowed with heads exist; these are characteristic of finds made at the site at Kültepe and date from the last centuries of the third millennium BCE. All of them have disk-shaped bodies, from which one to four necks extend, each surmounted by a head. Sometimes the head is of triangular form, whilst in other instances the head might be better developed, resembling that of a human being. The disk-shaped body is incised with decorations in the form of cross-hatching, circular motifs, stylised drawings representing parts of the body, or in some cases, representations in relief of idols or gods seated on a throne. The rear of the disk, which is flat, is seldom decorated.

The idols of Kültepe are unique of their kind and their interpretation is still the subject of some debate.[1] Their multiple heads are sometimes thought to represent couples, or perhaps even families. However, their genitalia, when depicted, are always female, suggesting that these idols represent women or goddesses. Because of where they were discovered, these idols very probably served as objects for the practice of a religious cult. It could be that they were derived from the ‘Mother Goddesses’ of ancient Anatolian culture, which were fertility symbols. The depiction of one or more idols in relief on the disk of some of the figurines could therefore be representations of a mother and her child(ren).

The newly discovered idols were sent to a laboratory to be cleaned and restored. Their study should make it possible to identify what they were used for and their symbolic meaning. This new discovery should help promote the candidacy, since April 2014, of the Kültepe site on UNESCO’s tentative list of World Heritage. The 23,000 Palaeo-Assyrian cuneiform tablets from Kültepe, unearthed in the Lower Town zone of the site, which constitute the archives of an Assyrian merchant family that established a trading post here in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE, have already been inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register (in 2015).

[1] Öztürk, Güzel (2013), Representations of Religious Practice at Kültepe: Alabaster Idols of Early Bronze Age. In Fikri Kulakoğlu and Cécile Michel (eds.), Proceedings of the 1^st Kültepe International Meeting, Kültepe, 19-23 September 2013, Turnhout: Brepols, 155-170.