may have emerged bearing the image of a god, with the rampart
serving as a kind of gigantic stage for the celebration of religious
rites before the assembled throngs below. But for any visitor
allowed to mount one of the staircases the gate would have
provided an excellent vantage point for viewing the entire city,
enclosed within its massive fortifications which seemed to stretch
almost endlessly into the distance.
THEUPPER ANDLOWERCITIES
From where you stood, at Hattusa’s highest point, the city’s terrain
sloped gradually downwards. It was rugged terrain, marked here
and there by large outcrops of rock and spurs, interspersed withflat
areas, hollows and large ponds of water. As your eye travelled north
down the rugged slope, across a complex of mudbrick-on-timber-
frame buildings, it would see, beyond further rocky outcrops, a wall
which partitioned off another large area of the city. Numerous
tunnels, what we have called posterns, inserted in the wall provided
access between both parts of the city–hence the modern name for
this wall, the ‘Postern Wall’. Archaeologists now refer to the
southern, higher part of the city as the‘Upper City’, and the lower,
northern part as the‘Lower City’. In the southeast corner of the
Lower City was an elevated plateau, today called Büyükkale (‘Big
Castle’) which had fortifications of its own. This was the royal
citadel, location of the palace of the Great Kings of Hatti. And to its
northwest lay an enormous sprawling complex, the largest temple
in the Hittite world. Commonly referred to as the Temple of the
Storm (Weather) God, it contained two shrines in its innermost
recesses, in contrast to most other temples that contained only
one. For this reason, it is believed to have been dedicated to two
deities–the most important ones in the Hittite pantheon–the
Storm God and his consort, the Sun Goddess of Arinna.
THE CITY’S TEMPLES
We’ll look in more detail at some of these features as we inspect the
city at closer quarters. But let’s now return to our original vantage
CITY OF TEMPLES AND BUREAUCRATS:THE ROYAL CAPITAL 207