The Restoration of Ancient History – Part 15

Part 1

The Ruins of Pteria (Hattusas)

The Restoration of Ancient History is a paper delivered in November 1994 by Gunnar Heinsohn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bremen in Germany, at a symposium in Portland, Oregon. This paper questions the conventional chronology of ancient history and offers in its place a radical reconstruction—the so-called Short Chronology, of which Heinsohn is the principal architect.

In this article we will continue our survey of Part 3 of Heinsohn’s lecture: Archaeologically-missing history and historically-unexpected archaeology in major areas of antiquity.. In this section, Heinsohn reviews a long list of cases where archaeologists have discovered major discrepancies between the archaeology of the Ancient World and its history as recorded by the Classical historians. These discrepancies fall into two broad categories:

Excavations in which the archaeologists failed to find strata that the recorded history had led them to expect.
Excavations in which the archaeologists uncovered strata that did not correspond to any cultures or civilizations in the recorded history.

Heinsohn noticed that many of these discrepancies come in matching pairs. For example:

The Chaldaeans and the Sumerians
The Medes and the Mitannians
The Assyrians and the Akkadians

We will now examine another of these matching pairs. According to Heinsohn, the people referred to as Hittites by archaeologists and modern historians were the Cappadocians of the Classical historians.

Cappadocia

Cappadocia is a historical region in Anatolia. The earliest written reference to it is to be found in the Behistun Inscription, which was created by the Persian Emperor Darius I sometime between 522 and 486 BCE. Cappadocia is included in a list of twenty-three countries—Old Persian dahyu-, which is often translated by the Greek term satrapy— subject to Darius. In the cuneiform semi-alphabet of the Old Persian language, Cappadocia is referred to as Katpatuka:

Katpatuka in Old Persian Cuneiform

In the Histories of Herodotus, Cappadocia is included in one of twenty major taxation regions—satrapies— into which the Persian Empire was divided. Herodotus calls the Cappadocians Syrians:

Having so done in Persia, [Darius I] divided his dominions into twenty governments, called by the Persians satrapies; and doing so and appointing governors, he ordained that each several nation should pay him tribute ... I will now show how he divided his governments and the tributes which were paid him yearly ... The third [satrapy] comprised the Hellespontians on the right of the entrance of the straits, the Phrygians, Thracians of Asia, Paphlagonians, Mariandynians, and Syrians; these paid three hundred and sixty talents of tribute. (Godley 117 ... 119, The Histories 3:89 ... 3:90)

The administrative structure of the Persian Empire evolved over time, and there is still no scholarly consensus on the number or rank of provinces, or satrapies. The official nomenclature used by the Persians to refer to these districts is also in dispute. In Die Satrapienverwaltung im Perserreich zur Zeit Darius’ III [The Satrapal Administration of the Persian Empire in the Reign of Darius III], Bruno Jacobs, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Basel, attempted to reconcile the divergent sources. His thesis is also stated in an article on the subject in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, which is available online:

Only the Achaemenid inscriptions are primary sources, yet the items they enumerate are not designated as satrapies but as dahyāva ... Consequently, a clear majority of scholars accorded Herodotus’s list precedence over the dahyāva catalogues. Herodotus was also preferred over the Alexander historians, both because, as a contemporary, he was thought to have had more direct information and because of the traditional esteem he enjoyed among modern scholars ... The methodological assumption of the following survey is that the Bisitun Inscription presents an inventory of the standard units of the imperial administration of its time: the Main Satrapies. During the following decade their number was increased by conquests in the Indus valley (Hinduš) and Africa (Putāyā, Kūšiyā). In fact, the existence of each of these dahyāva as a satrapy is demonstrable through the classical tradition, and information about their position in the hierarchical framework can generally be found in Greek and Latin sources. (Jacobs, Encyclopaedia Iranica)

According to Jacobs’ model, the Achaemenid Empire had a three-tier hierarchy. The Empire as a whole was divided into seven Great Satrapies. These were subdivided in twenty-six Main Satrapies, which were in turn subdivided into forty-nine Minor Satrapies.

Administrative Structure of the Persian Empire (490 BCE)

3. Great Satrapy Sparda/Lydia. This is the best-documented Great Satrapy in the sources ... Its capital was the old Lydian metropolis Sardis (Strab., 13.4.5; Pausanius, 3.9.5; Diod., 13.70.3).

The assault of Cyrus the Great on Lydia is described by Herodotus (1.76-80, 1.84) as a response to Croesus’s offensive against Cappadocia. Cappadocia and Lydia were collectively incorporated into the empire and henceforth formed a Great Satrapy. Here resided Achaemenid princes or members of the families that were privileged since the suppression of the rebellion of Gaumāta ...

3.2. Main Satrapy Katpatuka/Cappadocia. This was in the beginning presumably governed by a local dynasty (Diod., 31.19 = Phot., Bibl. 382; cf. Nagel, 1982, par. 17 and pp. 111-12), yet the existence of the satrap Artabates (Xen., Cyr. 8.6.7), mentioned at the time of Cyrus the Great, cannot be verified. For the time of Darius I a certain Ariaramnes (see ARIYĀRAMNA, in EIr. II, p. 411) is named as satrap of Cappadocia (Ctes. apud Phot., par. 16). In late Achaemenid times a satrap named Mithrobouzanes held office there (Arr., An. 1.16.3; Diod., 17.21.3) ...

3.2.1. Central Minor Satrapy Katpatuka/Cappadocia-beside-the-Pontus. This satrapy had western and southern borders that were formed by the bend of the Halys (Hdt., 1.92), within which the Leucosyrians lived (Nepos, Datames [14.]1.1-2; cf. Hdt., 1.72, 1.76). The Halys separated Cappadocia-beside-the-Pontus from Cappadocia-beside-the-Taurus, Greater Phrygia, and Paphlagonia (Hdt., 1.76; Strab., 12.1.3, 12.3.2, 12.3.9, 12.3.12; cf. Ruge, “Paphlagonia,” cols. 2489-90). The eastern border touched the sea immediately west of Cotyora (Jacobs, 1994, p. 143). The course of the frontier with (West) Armenia cannot be determined precisely. (Jacobs, Encyclopaedia Iranica)

Jacobs’ Central Minor Satrapy of Cappadocia-beside-the-Pontus corresponded, more or less, to the heartland of the so-called Hittite Empire. The old Hittite capital of Hattusas lay within it. Pteria, the city sacked by Croesus King of Lydia in 547, has been identified with Hattusas by some scholars. This, however, is problematic for mainstream academia, as Hattusas was supposedly destroyed around 1200 BCE and never reoccupied.

Roman Imperial Province of Cappadocia (125 CE)

The borders of Cappadocia changed over time. Achaemenid Katpatuka included Paphlagonia to the west of the Halys River, but excluded the lands along the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea. In Strabo’s Geography, however, Kappadokia was bounded on the west by the Halys River, on the south by the Taurus Mountains, and extended to the east as far as Colchis and Armenia.

Kappadokia has many parts and has experienced many changes. Those who speak the same language are mostly those bounded on the south by the so-called Kilikian Tauros, on the east by Armenia, Kolchis, and those peoples in between who speak other languages, on the north by the Euxeinos as far as the outlets of the Halys, and on the west by the Paphlagonian peoples and the Galatians who settled in Phrygia, as far as the Lykaonians and the Kilikians who possess Rough Kilikia. (Roller 513)

This Cappadocia is similar in extent to the Roman Imperial Province of Cappadocia during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138):

Between the fall of Persia and the establishment of the Roman Imperial Province, Cappadocia was an independent kingdom. Its territory corresponded roughly to the landlocked southern half of the later Roman Province, or the Achaemenid Minor Satrapy of Tauric Katpatuka:

Anatolia and the Kingdom of Cappadocia

The White Syrians

According to Herodotus, the native Cappadocians at the time of Croesus’ campaign and the rise of the Persian Empire were a people known to the Greeks as Syrians. Quoting Aristagoras, the despot of Miletus, who is describing the political geography of Anatolia to King Cleomenes of Sparta, he writes:

”Here are the Ionians; and here the Lydians, who inhabit a good land and have great store of silver,” showing as he spoke the map of the earth which he had brought engraved on the tablet; “and next to the Lydians,” said Aristagoras in his speech, “you see the Phrygians, to the east, men that of all known to me are the richest in flocks and in the earth’s produce. Close by them are the Cappadocians, whom we call Syrians; and their neighbours are the Cilicians, whose land reaches to the sea yonder, wherein you see the island of Cyprus lying.” (Godley 53, The Histories 5:49)

In Book 7, Herodotus tells us explicitly that these Syrians were called Cappadocians by the Persians (Godley 385). In Strabo’s Geography, these Syrians are referred to as White Syrians, or Λευκοσυροι (Roller 521, Geography 12:3:5).

Strabo’s Geography of Cappadocia

Heinsohn’s Thesis

From the foregoing, it seems clear that the Greek toponym Cappadocia (Καππαδοκία) was a corrupt form of the Old Persian Katpatuka. The origin and meaning of the latter, however, are still uncertain. Several etymologies have been proposed, among which a Hittite etymology is currently favoured:

Since the decipherment of cuneiform, it has been commonly accepted that the Greek toponym Καππαδοκία, first used by Herodotus with reference to central Anatolia, is related to Old Persian Katpatuka (K-t-p-tu-u-k), the central Anatolian satrapy of the Achaemenid empire. The earlier history of this place-name, however, is unclear. Nineteenth-century attempts at its analysis ... which occasionally re-emerge in non-specialized literature, have no scholarly value ... According to one interpretation, the statement of Herodotus (1.72) that the Greeks referred to Cappadocians as Syrians reflects a Greek perception of “Neo-Hittite” cultural unity stretching from the Konya plain to northern Syria ...

The only etymological suggestion that I consider to be a step in the right direction belongs to the French geographer Xavier de Planhol. According to his 1981 hypothesis, Cappadocia/ Katpatuka can be analyzed as “Low Land,” since the first morpheme of Kat-patuka is ultimately cognate with the Hittite preverb katta “down, below” ... Cappadocia/Katpatuka did originally mean something similar to “Low Land” and contain katta as its first element, but this compound had nothing to do with Kizzuwatna, and the language in which it had been formed was not Luvian but Hittite. The Hittite historical sources mention two Anatolian regions conventionally rendered in English as Upper Land and Lower Land. The first region is usually written heterographically, as KUR ŠAPLITI, literally, “land of the bottom.” ... I suggest that a Hittite term corresponding to KUR ŠAPLITI was *katta peda-, literally, “place below.” Although this phrase is not directly attested, its grammaticality can be inferred from a similar collocation istarna peda- “place in the middle, central position,” which has numerous attestations in Hittite texts. The same hypothesis implies that a designation for Upper Land could be *sara peda-, literally, “place above” ... (Yakubovich 347-350)

This is all very speculative. Cappadocia stands atop the Anatolian Plateau, at an altitude of approximately one thousand metres. Lower Land hardly seems appropriate as a name for such a place.

Heinsohn agrees that Katpatuka is of Hittite origin, but he believes that the initial syllable, Kat-, is of the same etymology as the ancient toponym of the Hittite domain: Kheta in Egyptian Hieroglyphic, and Ḫatti in Akkadian Cuneiform (Assyrian and Babylonian). These names are derived from the Hattians, the people who inhabited this region before the Hittites. The same element occurs in the neighbouring region of Cataonia.

It might be argued that the initial sound of these toponyms is the guttural phoneme [x], or voiceless velar fricative, and not [k], or voiceless velar plosive. Old Persian had both of these sounds, so why would the Persians substitute one for the other? But Ancient Greek also had both sounds (represented by the letters chi and kappa), and yet the name Kēteioi (Κητειοι), which is believed to refer to the Hittites, is spelt with an initial kappa in the Odyssey (see below).

Heinsohn does not account for the other element in the name, Patuka. This certainly weakens his argument, but Yakubovich’s peda, Hittite for place, could be accommodated here, so Katpatuka might be interpreted as Hattian Place (Güterbock & Hoffner 330 ff).

Could there be an etymological link between Herodotus’s Pteria and Patuka? In Old Persian Cuneiform, the sign transliterated as pa actually stands for p-. The following vowel is not specified. It could be any one of the three vowels of Old Persian, [a], [i] or [u]—or none of them. If there was any relationship between these two names, however, it must have involved some measure of corruption, as this seems the only way of accounting for the substitution of r for k. In early forms of the Greek alphabet, kappa and rho were sufficiently alike to be sometimes confused—possibly.

Archaic Greek Letters

Chronology

Heinsohn’s revised chronology and the conventional chronology are compared in the following table, which also draws on Heinsohn’s book Die Sumerer gab es nicht, first published in 1988 (Heinsohn 2007:28, 59):

Heinsohn	Period	Period	Conventional
330-190	Kingdom of Cappadocia	Alleged Hiatus	1100-190
550-330	Katpatuka Satrapy	Late Empire	1300-1100
750-550	Katpatuka and Media	Early Empire and Mitanni	1500-1300
900-750	Keteians	Old Kingdom	1700-1500
1150-900	Hattians	Hattians	2100-1700

The Kingdom of Cappadocia was established in 331 BCE by Ariarathes I. It became a Roman ally in 188 BCE, when Ariarathes IV sued for peace following the Roman defeat of Antiochus III of Syria, whose cause had been espoused by Ariarathes.

Note that Heinsohn’s reconstruction identifies the “Late Hittite Empire” with the Persian satrapy of Katpatuka. In its final phase, the Hittite Empire was involved in continuous warfare with its Anatolian neighbours and with the Assyrians. Heinsohn would equate this with the satrapy Katpatuka’s rebellions against Persian rule. Presumably, then, the fall of the “Hittite Empire” was actually brought about by Alexander the Great’s invasion. Heinsohn is largely forced into this position by his identification of the Mitannians and the Medes.

In an earlier article, however, we saw that this simplistic equation of Mitanni = Media is problematic. I suggest the following emendation of Heinsohn’s Short Chronology:

Heinsohn	Period	Period	Conventional
331-190	Kingdom of Cappadocia	Kingdom of Cappadocia	1100-190
547-331	Katpatuka Satrapy	Katpatuka Satrapy	547-331
750-547	Katpatuka	Hittite Empire	1500-1170
900-750	Old Kingdom	Old Kingdom	1700-1500
1200-900	Hattians	Hattians	2100-1700

In this scenario, the fall of the Hittite Empire is precipitated by Croesus of Lydia’s campaign across the Halys in 547 BCE. In this model, the 600-year gap between the fall of the Hittite Empire and the establishment of the Persian satrapy is spurious.

Hattusas (Reconstructed City Walls)

Pteria

In the early part of the 20th century, before the conventional chronology of the Ancient World had been established, identifications similar to Heinsohn’s now-controversial ones were being openly entertained by mainstream scholars. In Volume 22 of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was published in 1911, we read:

PTERIA (mod. Boghaz Keui), the ancient capital of the “White Syrians” of Cappadocia, which Croesus of Lydia is stated by Herodotus to have taken, enslaved and ruined, after he had declared war on the rising power of Persia and crossed the Halys (after the middle of the 6th century B.C.). Thereafter he fought a drawn battle near the city, and retired again across the river to his ultimate defeat and doom. Pteria is mentioned by no other ancient authority, but it is of great interest if, as seems highly probable, (1) its “White Syrian” inhabitants were what we call “Hittites” (q.v.), or at least, participants in the “Hittite civilization”; (2) its remains are to be seen in the immense prehistoric city and remarkable rock-sculptures near Boghaz Keui in Cappadocia, about 100 m. east of Angora and beyond the Kizil Irmak (Halys). This is the chief “Hittite” site in Asia Minor, far superior in extent to either Euyuk or Giaur Kalesi, which seem to have been its dependencies, and a centre from which roads, marked by the occurrence of “Hittite” monuments, radiate towards Syria and the Aegean. Sir W. M. Ramsay has shown with great probability that it was the importance of Pteria and its bridge over the Halys which diverted the Persian “royal road” far to the north of its natural line. This road, in fact, followed an earlier main track whose ultimate objective had been different. (1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica)

In 1834, the French archaeologist and traveller Charles Texier visited the same site—now identified as the Hittite capital city of Hattusas—and identified it with the ruins of Herodotus’s Pteria:

It remains to determine from the historical data the name of this city, the extent of which surpasses that of all ancient cities, with the exception of Nineveh and Babylon. Inspection of the ruins alone conveys the impression of a capital city fortified by all that the military arts of that era could suggest to the engineers: walls following the crests of the mountain, and having everywhere such a thickness that even today one can ride along them on horseback. Reconstructing them in one’s imagination, one can see them crowded with chariots and machines of war. Three fortresses, not connected to the encompassing wall, dominate the weakest section of the city—ie the lower town. I must admit that of the hundred ancient cities whose ruins I have visited, none has presented the military genius of the ancients in a more admirable light. This, then, was a city of no little importance. The particular character of the constructions testifies to their antiquity; but nothing in Strabo, who was my only guide, could reveal to me the name I was desperate to recover. The commission appointed by the Academy of Inscriptions to examine my report had suspected that the ruins were those of Soandus; but on the map of Père Cyrille, Soandus is placed thirty leagues to the south, in the place called Soanli-déré; this was a Cappadocian settlement and was still flourishing under the Romans. What, then, was this city, which had fallen into ruins long before the Greeks established colonies beyond the River Halys? A careful reading of Herodotus gives us the clue, and the new documents reported by Monsieur [William John] Hamilton put the matter beyond all doubt.

It is necessary to recall the position of Boghâz-Keui. Situated in a mountainous country to the east of the Halys, its territory once bordered that of the Medes, for the Halys was the boundary between the Median and Lydian kingdoms according to Herodotus. It was through this country that Croesus advanced to attack Cyrus.

The army of Croesus departed from Sardis and marched out to engage the Persians. It is not likely that they would have passed through Axylon, a land without water or wood, in order to cross the Halys. Their route was marked by fertile and well-populated valleys, where the ancient cities of Gordium, Midaeum and Orcystus stood—ie the southern border of the province later known as Galatia. Croesus would have reached the Halys at the latitude of Ancyra; the river, too deep to ford, was diverted into several channels by Thales of Miletus. The army must then have been on flat terrain, for such an operation would have been impossible if the banks of the river had been steep. Now I let Herodotus take up the tale [Histories 1:75-76]: “Croesus, after having crossed the Halys, arrived in that part of Cappadocia known as Pteria; it is a country of very difficult access, and extends as far as Sinope. Croesus occupied the region, destroyed the possessions of the Syrians (Pontic Cappadocians), and took possession of the capital of the Pterians, the inhabitants of which he enslaved. He also captured all the cities in the interior and on the frontier, and in the end transported the entire Syrian nation, even though they had offered no resistance. Cyrus meanwhile, after having assembled his forces, marched forth to meet the Lydians, reinforcing his army along the way. Cyrus camped opposite the enemy, and the two armies, after some skirmishes in which they sounded out each other’s strengths and weaknesses, came to blows in the Pterian country.” (Texier 221-222)

Hittite Anatolia

One of the earliest historians of the Hittite Empire, Archibald Henry Sayce, also identified Herodotus’s Pteria with the ruins at Boghâz-Keui and his Syrians with the Hittites (Sayce 82, 85, 97). Today, the identification of Hattusas and Pteria is no longer countenanced by mainstream academia. The 600-year-long gap between the fall of the Hittite Empire and the rise of Persia precludes any possibility of continuity between the Hittites and Herodotus’s Cappadocian Syrians, or between Hattusas and Pteria. The idea that it was Croesus of Lydia who brought the glorious Hittite Empire to an end in 547 BCE is simply untenable.

Note that Heinsohn does not claim that Croesus’s campaign across the Halys coincided with the fall of the Hittite Empire. In Heinsohn’s reconstruction, the final phase of the “Hittite Empire” was contemporaneous with the Persian satrapy of Katpatuka.

Immanuel Velikovsky was one of the first to suggest that the so-called Hittite Empire collapsed in the middle of the 6th century in the face of a Lydian invasion. In Ramses II and His Time, which was first published in 1978, he wrote:

Croesus, son of Gyges, king of Lydia, with his capital at Sardis, ruined Boghazkoi in -546. Boghazkoi was not ruined by the mythical Peoples of the Sea in ca. -1200: it was burned by Croesus six and a half centuries later. (Velikovsky 168)

Velikovsky, however, went much further than this. He identified the Hittite Empire with the Neo-Chaldaean or Neo-Babylonian Empire, equating Hattusilis III with Nebuchadnezzar II. Heinsohn was initially disposed to accept this (2007:233), but he eventually rejected it as untenable.

Halys River (Kızılırmak)

Keteians

The only mention of Hittites in ancient Greek literature occurs in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Speaking of the deeds of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, Odysseus tells Achilles:

ἀλλ᾽ οἷον τὸν Τηλεφίδην κατενήρατο χαλκῷ,
ἥρω᾽ Εὐρύπυλον, πολλοὶ δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτὸν ἑταῖροι
Κήτειοι κτείνοντο γυναίων εἵνεκα δώρων.

But such was the son of Telephus, slain with the sword,
The hero Eurypylus, and many of his comrades around him,
Keteians, slain because of a woman’s gifts.

(Odyssey 11:519-521)

Strabo, writing several centuries later, does not know what to make of this passage:

Thus an enigma is set before us instead of a clear statement, for we do not know how we must understand either the “Keteians” or “the gifts of a woman,” but the grammarians have thrown in mythic traditions more for their ingenuity in argumentation rather than to solve questions. (Roller 584-685)

Homer’s Keteians have been identified—at least tentatively—with the Hittites since the 19th century. One of the first to make the connection was none other than the British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (Gladstone 171 ff). He repeated his claim two years later in Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenae, a book for which he provided the preface (Schliemann xvi-xvii).

In the Odyssey, the leader of the Keteians is called Eurypylus son of Telephus. The latter is similar to the Hittite royal name Telepinu. And Eurypylus is not too dissimilar from Warpalawas, the name of two kings of Tyana, which was one of the so-called Neo-Hittite States. Tyana was in Katpatuka.

The Ruins of Gordion

The Stratigraphy of Gordion

One of the strongest pieces of evidence adduced by Velikovsky in support of his revised chronology was uncovered during archaeological excavations carried out at the ancient Phrygian city of Gordion:

But in 1950 Rodney Young, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, led a team [to Gordion] and then returned over many seasons of excavation. If the conventional scheme of history is true, the level of the “Hittite Empire” should be found at Gordion beneath the Phrygian level; but if the reconstructed scheme is true, what goes under the name of the Hittite Empire must have left some of its relics above the Phrygian layer. (Velikovsky 129)

Young found unmistakable evidence of Hittite remains overlying Phrygian remains. When excavating in the vicinity of the Persian Gate Building, Young made the following discovery:

Under the Persian Gate the filling was entirely of blocks and stone rubble ... To the west of the building proper the filling was of clay at the surface, rubble beneath. The rubble extended as far to the west as the western limit of the Phrygian Gate ... to the west of [the “Dam Wall”, which enclosed the rubble] the filling was all of clay which had been brought from elsewhere to raise the level of the entire mound. [Footnote 12: The clay layer is about 4 m. thick beneath the temple-like building in our deep sondage, lying between it and the Phrygian building below it. Building A, as well as the Persian Gate, is known to lie on a deep clay filling. The clay layer, varying from 2.50 to 4.00 m. in thickness, has been spotted in other tests at various places on the mound ... The laying of this enormous mass of clay over the entire surface of the mound may have been done in order to make an important strategic post more defensible, and at the same time to provide a more secure bedding for the buildings of the Persian city over the earlier artificial accumulation of earth which was probably very soft in many places.] For purposes of dating, the sherds from this layer of clay are of little use; they are almost entirely Hittite, with occasional Early Bronze Age fragments among them—clearly a deposit already in the clay when it was brought from elsewhere to be laid down over the surface of the city mound. (Young 1955:12)

One has to admire Young’s brazenness. Faced with a thick stratum of clay full of Hittite relics and lying between the Phrygian and Persian strata, he could not draw the obvious conclusion: the so-called Hittite Empire flourished between the Phrygian and Persian occupations of Gordion. This was incompatible with the preconceived chronology with which he had armed himself before a single trowelful of Gordian dirt was sifted.

In Die Sumerer gab es nicht (1988), Heinsohn writes:

The crucial stratigraphic evidence for this is provided by the city of Gordion, where the—on average—4-metres thick Hittite layer lies immediately below the Persian layer. See R S Young, Gordion: Preliminary Report, 1953, in American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 59 (1955). This layer, weighing millions of tonnes, was found by the Persians somewhere and was then used in Gordion as levelling material—or so the modern archaeologists are compelled to postulate, as the Hittite Empire of the conventional chronology could not have collapsed as recently as -539, but rather as early as -1200. (Heinsohn 2007:205 fn 8)

Note that the collapse of the Hittite Empire in -539, immediately before the rise of Persia, was later emended by Heinsohn. In his 1994 paper, he makes the final phase of the Hittite Empire contemporaneous with the early Persian Empire. Curiously, however, when Die Sumerer gab es nicht was reissued in 2007, the earlier chronological scheme was retained (Heinsohn 2007:8).

Rodney S Young’s Gordion Excavation

Conclusions

As usual, reconciling the complicated archaeology of the Ancient East with the records of the Classical historians is no easy task. Heinsohn, himself, has been forced to alter his views on more than one occasion. I cannot claim to understand the precise relationship between the history and the archaeology, or to have solved the chronological conundrums of Anatolia. I do believe, however, that the identification of Herodotus’s Pteria with Hattusas of the archaeologists and the attribution of the final destruction of the so-called Hittite Empire to Croesus of Lydia are strong foundations on which to build a new chronology of this region.

And that’s a good place to stop.

References

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William Ewart Gladstone, Homeric Synchronism: An Enquiry Into the Time and Place of Homer, Harper & Brothers, New York (1876)
Alfred Denis Godley (translator), Herodotus, Volume 2, The Histories, Books 3-4, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA (1921)
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Leonard William King, Reginald Campbell Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistûn in Persia: A New Collation of the Persian, Susian and Babylonian Texts with English Translations, Etc, Longmans & Co, London (1907)
Archibald Henry Sayce, The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire, The Religious Tract Society, London (1890)
Heinrich Schliemann, Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns, Scribner, Armstrong & Company, New York (1878)
Charles Texier, Description de l’Asie Mineure : Faite par Ordre du Gouvernement Français en 1833-1837 : Beaux-Arts, Monuments Historiques, Plans et Topographie des Cités Antiques, Volume 1, Firmin Didot Frères, Paris (1839)
Immanuel Velikovsky, Ramses II and His Time, Paradigma, Online (2010)
William Wright, The Empire of the Hittites, James Nisbet & Co, London (1884)
Ilya Yakubovich, From Lower Land to Cappadocia, in Michael Kozuh et al, ** Extraction & Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W Stolper**, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, Number 68, pp 347-352, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago (2014)
Rodney S Young, _Gordion: Preliminary Report, 1953 _, American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 59, Number 1 (Jan 1955), pp 1-18, Archaeological Institute of America, Boston (1955)

Image Credits

The Ruins of Pteria (Hattusas): Boudier (artist), after Charles Texier (), in G Maspero, A H Sayce, M L McClure, History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8, p 396, The Grolier Society, London (1903)
Roman Imperial Province of Cappadocia (125 CE): Milenioscura, Creative Commons License
Anatolia and the Kingdom of Cappadocia: Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Mitchell’s Ancient Atlas, Classical and Sacred, Map 2, H Cowperthwait & Company, Philadelphia (1856), Public Domain

Were the Hittites Cappadocians?