Geoffrey & Françoise Summers

Discovery and Exploration

"As to the silent ancient city immediately before us, it is nothing short of imposing. The surrounding walls, which when viewed from the kaleh at the easternmost angle of the city appear like long welts of piled-up rocks….The great expanse of ruins, once teeming with life and resounding with the voices of a powerful people who dominated most of Asia Minor, now lies mute and barren. A few scrub trees, stunted by the harsh winter winds which sweep over this now deforested region, timidly sprout from amongst the jumble of rocks….Otherwise the great enclosure is a picture of desolation."

E. Forrer (1927) also visited in 1926 and suggested that it was Cimmerian, to the fury of von der Osten who, unaware of Anderson's account, wrote from Ankara to James Breasted, at the Oriental Institute, Chicago, in a letter dated August 5, 1927: "Incidentally I received a preliminary publication from Dr Forrer in which he claims the discovery of this most important place, a fact which upsets me very much as it was I who directed his attention toward this region. Please do not think me small but the Keykenous (sic) City is an object which one finds but once in a lifetime." But in an earlier unpublished report to Breasted, written at Alişar on July 31 of the same year, von der Osten wrote: "What astonished me most was that this site had been already known since a long time", with reference to Anderson's account.

Following von der Osten's enthusiastic accounts and shrewd realisation that the city was a pre-Hellenistic foundation of supreme importance, Breasted decided that the precise date had to be established. Thus, in 1928, with a permit from the Turkish authorities, Erich Schmidt was instructed to make a diversion from the Hittite Expedition's excavations at Alişar Höyük to dig exploratory trenches. Schmidt dug a total of 14 test trenches in the space of a week. The results were clearly stated in a Marconigram sent from Kayseri to the breasted guranty trust company of newyork fifty pallmall london. It said, simply, "kerkenes posthittite preclassical + schmidt". The late Iron Age date had been correctly established and was clearly a disappointment, bluntly put in Schmidt's letter to Charles Breasted written at Alişar on September 12: "We found, to our regret, that it is a post-Hittite town, built in preclassical times. We worked madly, up there, to cover the entire ruin territory in the shortest possible time. It took us eight days to accomplish that, and we nailed down the facts in quite a durable manner." These quotes are taken from papers held in the archive of the Oriental Institute, copies of which were kindly provided by archivist Dr. John Larsen. Schmidt's results were promptly published with exemplary thoroughness (Schmidt 1929).

Scant attention was paid thereafter. The Hittite Expedition was primarily interested in the Hittites and their beginnings, von der Osten having deliberately chosen to excavate Alişar Höyük because the mound afforded the opportunity to obtain a stratigraphic sequence. It is to the enormous credit of Schmidt and von der Osten that the Alişar excavation reports remain seminal to current understanding of the pre-classical archaeology of the Anatolian plateau. Generations of scholars from the German expedition to Boğazköy visited Kerkenes, Bittel showing keen interest and publishing a collection of local legends (Bittel 1960-61), but energy was not to be diverted from Hattusa.

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