In 2008 and 2009 thanks to the kind approval of the Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums of Turkey 1 a new archaeological survey was started by the University of Florence 2 on the site of U akl /Ku akl Höyük and its surrounding area, a wide plain northwest of the Kerkenes Da watered by the Egri Öz Su. The site is clearly visible from the route connecting Yozgat and Sivas (fig. 1), emerging in a wide plain defined to the south by the Kerkenes Da. It had already been visited by E.

This book contains studies on the symbolic significance of the landscape for the communities inhabiting the central Anatolian plateau and the Upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys in the 2nd-1st millennia BC. Some of the scholars who attended to the international conference Sacred Landscapes of Hittites and Luwians held in Florence in February 2014, present here contributions on the religious, symbolic and social landscapes of Anatolia between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. Archaeologists, hittitologists and historians highlight how the ancient populations perceived many elements of the environment, like mountains, rivers and rocks, but also atmospheric agents, and natural phenomena as essential part of their religious and ideological world. Analysing landscapes, architectures and topographies built by the Anatolian communities in the second and first millennia BC, the framework of a symbolic construction intended for specific actions and practices clearly emerges.

No abstract

No abstract

In the history and archaeology of the Ancient Near East, the period between the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium BC in northern Mesopotamia constitutes a 'Media Aetas', an obscure period between the flourishing of the urban cultures of the Ancient Bronze Age in the middle of the III millennium BC and the development of the Amorite states of the Middle Bronze Age at the end of the 19th century BC. The identification in the archaeological sequence of Tell Barri, the ancient city of Kahat, of the ceramic horizon coeval with the 'urban crisis' that preceded the diffusion of the painted ceramic of Khabur, associated with a new phenomenon of sedentarisation, makes it possible to redefine the chronology of events in the region. It aso enables a delineation of the processes of interaction between the various social realities of northern Mesopotamia in the phase of formation that underlies the subsequent cultural development of the II millennium BC.