CHAPTER 21

City of Temples and

Bureaucrats:

The Royal Capital

1

THEGREATRAMPART,POSTERNGATE AND CITY-WALLS

A

n impressive sight greeted visitors as they approached the
Hittite royal capital: a great earthen rampart some 250 m
long and 30 m high paved with limestone and dazzingly
bright in the reflected rays of the harsh Anatolian sunlight. It is
called Yerkapıtoday, meaning‘Gate in the Earth’. The reason for
the modern name is that there is a tunnel through it (actually built
before the rampart) now called the‘Postern Gate’,whichprovided
access to the outside world. Hattusa has a number of other posterns
as well (‘postern’is derived from the Latin wordposterulameaning
‘side- or back-gate’), but this is the only one you can still walk
through. The tunnel is made up of layers of roughly hewn stone
blocks, each slightly overlapping the one below, in a technique known
as corbelling. Exactly the same building technique can be seen in
contemporary architecture of the Mycenaean world. The galleries of
the Mycenaean palace centre at Tiryns, dating toc.1200, provide an
excellent example. It’s not unlikely that the technique originated
in the Hittite world and was transmitted westwards to Anatolia’s
Aegean coast, and thence across the sea to mainland Greece.
The 71 m long Postern Gate was once closed by double wooden
doors. What its actual purpose was remains a mystery. Entrance