A shrine built more than 3000 years ago in what is now Turkey may be a symbolic representation of the cosmos, according to a new interpretation. It ha

3200-year-old shrine in Turkey may be an ancient view of the cosmos

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2021-06-21 02:30:06

A shrine built more than 3000 years ago in what is now Turkey may be a symbolic representation of the cosmos, according to a new interpretation.

It has now been suggested that the elite of the Hittite society, an empire that dominated what is now Turkey between 1700 and 1100 BC until it was destroyed, created the Yazılıkaya shrine to embody their ideas about how the universe was organised.

Yazılıkaya contains many images in rock relief, and the researchers behind the new interpretation argue that these have symbolic meanings relating to the underworld, earth and sky, as well as to cycles of nature like the seasons.

“There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out,” says Eberhard Zangger, president of Luwian Studies, an international non-profit foundation. “But we worked on it for seven years.”

“They may be onto something,” says Ian Rutherford at the University of Reading in the UK. “I’m not convinced of all the details, but very interested in the whole thing.”

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