Kussara

Feel the wind first. On the high plateau of Central Anatolia it rarely stops. It moves across wheat fields and dry grass, carries dust from unpaved tracks, and in summer brings the smell of hot earth and thyme. Somewhere in this wide country, under one of these low brown mounds, lies a city that started a dynasty. Its name was Kussara. And here is the first surprise... nobody knows exactly where it is.

That makes this guide unusual. You are not standing in front of a gate or a temple. You are standing in a landscape that holds a question. Kussara is known almost entirely from writing. Clay tablets mention it, kings call it home, and scribes record its name. But archaeologists have not yet matched the name to a dig site with any certainty. So for the next few minutes, let the open country around you stand in for the city itself.

To understand Kussara, picture Anatolia almost four thousand years ago, in the Middle Bronze Age. This plateau was a patchwork of small kingdoms. Each one was centred on a walled town with a palace, storerooms, and fields around it. Local rulers competed for land, water, and trade routes. There was no single empire yet. The Hittite state, which later rivalled Egypt, did not exist. Kussara was one of these small competing kingdoms.

Trade connected them all. Merchants from the city of Assur, in what is now northern Iraq, travelled here with donkey caravans. They brought tin and fine textiles, and they took silver and gold home. Their main base was at Kanesh, the site now called Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri. The merchants left thousands of clay tablets there. These business letters and contracts are some of the oldest written records found in Anatolia. Kussara appears among the place names in this world of trade.

The most famous story about Kussara comes from a text known as the Anitta Inscription. Scholars consider it one of the oldest surviving texts in the Hittite language. It begins with a king named Pithana, ruler of Kussara. According to the text, Pithana captured the city of Nesa during the night. Nesa is generally identified with Kanesh, the merchants' great trading town. The inscription adds that he did not harm its people, and treated them, in its own words, like mothers and fathers.

Pithana's son, Anitta, went further. The inscription describes his campaigns against neighbouring rulers across the plateau. One target was Hattusa, a city to the north. Anitta says he took it, destroyed it, and sowed weeds on the ground where it stood. Then he placed a curse on anyone who would rebuild it. Read that line twice, because history has an ironic answer to it. Hattusa was rebuilt, and it later became the capital of the Hittite Empire.

Anitta also appears to have moved his royal seat from Kussara to Nesa. That move matters for language. The Hittites called their own language Nesili, which means roughly the language of Nesa. So the speech we now call Hittite carries the name of the city that Kussara's kings conquered. It is a quiet detail, but it links a small hill-country kingdom to the oldest recorded Indo-European language. Indo-European is the large family that also includes English, Persian, and Hindi.

Kussara returns in the story a generation or more later. A king called Hattusili, usually counted as the first great Hittite ruler, made Hattusa his capital. His very name means roughly the one from Hattusa. Yet in a royal text written in both Hittite and Akkadian, he is also described as king of Kussara. Scholars read this as a sign that his family traced its roots to the old city. The curse on Hattusa, it seems, did not stop the descendants of Kussara from ruling there.

So where was it? Scholars have proposed several areas. Most suggestions place Kussara somewhere to the south or east of Kanesh, perhaps toward the routes that led to the Taurus Mountains and northern Syria. None of these ideas has been confirmed by an inscription found in the ground. Until a tablet or a seal names the place on site, Kussara stays a city on paper. That is not rare in Anatolia. Many cities in Hittite texts are still waiting to be found.

It helps to know what to look for in the land itself. Ancient towns here were built mostly of mudbrick on stone foundations. When they fell, the walls slumped and melted into earth. New houses rose on the ruins of old ones. Over centuries this built up a flat-topped mound, called a höyük in Turkish. Drive through the region and you will see them often. Each one rises from the fields like a low table, and some are many metres high.

Look at one of these mounds and think about scale. A Bronze Age capital on this plateau was not a huge metropolis. It might be a fortified hill with a palace complex, workshops, and a lower town of mudbrick homes. Around it were grain fields, sheep pastures, and springs. The colours you see now, the pale soil, the gold of cut wheat, the grey-green of steppe grass, were probably very similar then. Farming patterns here have changed less than the borders.

If you want to see objects from this world, the regional museums are the place to go. The museum in Kayseri displays finds from Kültepe, including tablets, pottery, and seals from the age of the Assyrian merchants. In Ankara, the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations covers the full story, from early farming villages to the Hittite Empire. At Kültepe itself, you can walk among excavated foundations. These sites give physical form to the world in which Kussara's kings lived and fought.

Now look around you again. The road, the fields, the line of hills on the horizon... one of those slopes could hold the palace of Pithana and Anitta. Perhaps a farmer has already ploughed over a piece of its pottery. Perhaps a future excavation will finally read its name on a clay tablet. For now, Kussara lives in a few lines of ancient writing. As you move on, keep an eye on the low mounds beside the road. Any one of them might be the place where a dynasty began.