Hattusa

The wind is the first thing you notice. It comes across the open slope without anything to stop it, and it carries the smell of dry grass and thyme. Somewhere below, sheep bells knock against each other. There are no walls here to shelter behind, only low lines of stone in the grass and rock outcrops pushing up through the hillside. Stand still and listen for a moment. For a capital city, this place is now extremely quiet.

Adjust your expectations about size. This was not a compact fortress. The city spread across a steep, folded landscape, and its defensive walls ran for several kilometres around it. A loop road now takes visitors past the main points, and walking the whole circuit takes a good part of a day. What survives is mostly foundations, gateways and stretches of wall. You have to build the upper storeys yourself, in your head, as you go.

The Hittites ruled from here through the second millennium before the common era. At their height they were one of the great powers of the ancient Near East, alongside Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. They fought wars in Syria, signed treaties, married into foreign royal families and kept meticulous records. Then they vanished so completely that until modern times they were known mainly from a handful of mentions in the Hebrew Bible and in Egyptian texts.

The Great Temple lies in the lower city, and it is the easiest part of the site to read. The foundation blocks are enormous, and the plan of storerooms around a central court survives almost complete. Inside those storerooms stand rows of huge clay jars sunk into the floor, used for grain, oil and wine. The temple served two gods together — the storm god of the sky and the sun goddess of a city called Arinna.

Somewhere in the temple area you will find a smooth green block of stone, roughly cubic, polished on its faces. Nobody knows what it was for. Guides sometimes call it a wishing stone, and visitors touch it and turn around. Treat that as folklore rather than archaeology. What is certain is that the stone is not local, which means somebody hauled it up here on purpose, and that alone makes it worth a stop.

Climb toward the upper city and you reach the Lion Gate. Two lions are carved directly into the gate blocks, facing outward, mouths open. Their bodies are only roughly shaped but the heads are detailed. Note that several sculptures across this site have been replaced by copies, with the originals moved indoors for protection. Look at the ground under the gate as well. The round pivot holes for the door posts are still cut into the threshold.

The most demanding structure sits at the highest point, called Yerkapı, meaning ground gate. Here the Hittites built an artificial rampart of packed earth, faced on the outside with a sloping skin of stone. Straight through the base of it runs a stone tunnel, roughly seventy metres long, narrowing to a point overhead where the blocks lean against each other. Walk it. The temperature drops as you go in, and the light at the far end is a small bright wedge.

The tunnel is often described as a secret escape route, but it is not secret at all — both ends stand wide open and can be seen from a distance. Current thinking leans toward a ceremonial function, perhaps for processions. On top of the rampart stood a gate flanked by carved sphinxes. One of those sphinxes spent about a century in a museum in Berlin. It came back to Turkey in 2011 and now sits in the local museum in the village below.

The royal citadel, Büyükkale, occupies a rock spur on the eastern side. This is where the archives were found. Excavators recovered tens of thousands of clay tablets, written in cuneiform — wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay. Treaties, letters, prayers, laws, festival instructions, land grants. Fire destroyed the buildings, and the heat baked the tablets hard and preserved them. The Hittite record survives largely because the Hittite capital burned down.

Here is the detail that changes how you look at the ground under your feet. When those tablets were first studied, nobody could read the main language. In 1915 a Czech scholar named Bedřich Hrozný worked out that Hittite belonged to the Indo-European family. One clue was a sentence about eating bread and drinking water, where the word for water closely resembled the English word. The language of this hillside turned out to be a distant relative of English, German and Greek.

Another tablet from these archives records a peace treaty between the Hittite king and the Egyptian pharaoh, agreed after a battle at Kadesh in Syria. Both the Hittite version and the Egyptian version survive, which is rare. It is generally described as the earliest international peace treaty for which texts from both sides have been found. A copy of it is displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Before you leave the area, drive the short distance to Yazılıkaya. Two natural rock chambers open off a cliff face there, and the walls are carved with long processions of gods walking toward each other. Male figures on one side, female on the other. In the smaller chamber a king stands under the arm of a god much larger than he is. The limestone is worn, but in low sun the figures come out clearly.

Around 1200 before the common era this city was emptied and burned, part of a wider collapse that brought down several states across the eastern Mediterranean at once. What caused it is still debated. Now look around you again. Grass, wind, lines of stone, sheep on the far slope. An empire that negotiated with pharaohs governed from this exact hillside, and today you can hear a single bee go past. That contrast is the whole visit.