Geoffrey & Françoise Summers

fig 1

The Urban Infrastructure

The city sprawls across the high undulating site (Fig. 1). There was no urban predecessor here, although the prominent tor was sacred to the Hittites. The integrated city plan comprises various elements, defences, communications, palace, military installations, imperial stables and urban blocks, demonstrating not only a will and capability, but also a preconceived concept of a city containing all the requirements commensurate with imperial rule by a foreign elite. Alongside, and almost in contrast too, the preconception shows a remarkable capacity for adaptation to the peculiarities of the terrain and the available building material. The influences are hard to discern. Many of the features at Kerkenes are unique and display a freshness and vitality that is perhaps suggestive of novelty and innovation as well as the vestments of power and the trappings of defiant empire.

It is possible to identify some of the major urban features and tentatively to delineate metropolitan zones. Urban space was defined by the line of defences, in itself suggested by the topography. Within, all but the steepest slopes were utilised, generally by the laying out of streets that defined walled urban blocks, but the high southern end contains spacious and ambitious public and (probably) military complexes, a stone lined pool and imperial stables and storehouses. The city is not so much imposed on the landscape as adapted to it. The positions chosen for the city gates were influenced by natural routes of access, although the number of gates, seven, and their general dispersal were a matter of choice and inspiration. Streets were preferably straight, urban blocks square or rectangular; but this ideal was not imposed in the Hellenistic manner but, rather, adapted to make the best use of the lie of the land with its many out-crops of rock and its steep and difficult slopes. This adaptive approach to the planning of a fully conceptualised city was expedient, in that it entailed the minimum of effort and labour in the rapid initial construction, but it also reflects the way in which urban space was perceived, the creation of irregular spaces and channels of communication bounded by the high and presumably blank walls of the urban blocks. No areas within the city are physically divided off by inner defensive walls, there is no acropolis and no walled quarters. Instead, there is an aura of harmony, an ease of access from one zone to another, an impression of homogeneity, which, it could be argued, is the physical and material reflection of the confidence and unity of an imperial power.

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