there for at least a year. And in April, a few days before we set out for the Black Mountain of Karatepe, I received a letter from Standard Motors and Engineering, Karel Weissman’s former employers, saying that they would like to return a great many of Weissman’s papers to me, and enquiring as to my present whereabouts. I replied that letters would reach me care of the Anglo-Indian Uranium Company at Diyarbakir, and that I would be grateful if they would return Weissman’s papers to my London address, or to Baumgart, who was still in Hampstead.
When Professor Helmuth Bossert first approached Kadirli, the nearest ‘town’ to the Black Mountain of the Hittites, in 1946, he had a difficult journey over muddy roads. In those days, Kadirli was a tiny provincial town with no electricity. Today it is a comfortable but quiet little town with two excellent hotels, and within an hour’s reach of London by rocket plane. The trip from there to the Black Mountain, Karatepe, cost Bossert another arduous day’s travel over shepherds’ paths overgrown with prickly broom. We, in our own helicopter, reached Kadirli in an hour from Diyarbakir, and Karatepe in a further twenty minutes. Reich’s electronic equipment had already been brought by transport plane forty-eight hours earlier.
I should, at this point, say something about the purpose of our expedition. There are many mysteries attached to the ‘Black Mountain’ , which is part of the Anti-Taurus mountain range. The so-called Hittite Empire collapsed in about 1200 BC, overcome by hordes of barbarians, prominent among whom were the Assyrians. Yet the Karatepe remains date from five hundred years later, as do those at Carchemish and Zinjirli. What happened in those five hundred years? How did the Hittites succeed in preserving so much of their culture through such a turbulent time, when its northern capital—Hattusas—was in the hands of the Assyrians? This was the problem to which I had devoted ten years of my life.
I had always believed that further clues might lie deep under the ground, in the heart of the Black Mountain—just as deep excavations into a mound at Boghazköy had revealed tombs of a highly civilized people a thousand years older than the Hittites. My excavations in 1987 had, in fact, turned up a number of strange basalt figurines, whose carving differed strikingly from the Hittite sculptures found on the surface—the famous bulls, lions and winged sphinxes. They were flat and angular; there was something barbaric about them—and yet not in the manner of African sculptures, with which they have occasionally been compared. The cuneiform symbols on these figures were distinctively Hittite, rather than Phoenician or Assyrian, yet, if it had not been for these, I would have guessed that the figures came from a completely different culture. The hieroglyphs in themselves presented another problem. Our knowledge of the Hittite language has been fairly comprehensive since the researches of Hrozny, yet there are still many lacunae. These tend to occur in texts dealing with religious ritual. (We could imagine, for example, some archaeologist of a future civilization being baffled by a copy of the Catholic mass, with its sign of the cross and odd abbreviations.) In that case, we surmised, the symbols on the basalt figures must deal almost entirely with religious ritual, for about seventy-five per cent of them were unknown to us. One of the few statements we could read was: ‘Before (or below) Pitkhanas dwelt the great old ones’. Another read: ‘Tudaliyas paid homage to Abhoth the Dark’. The Hittite symbols for ‘dark’ may also signify ‘black’, ‘unclean’ or ‘untouchable’ in the Hindu sense.
My finds had excited considerable comment in the world of archaeology. My own first view was that the figurines belonged to another proto-Hattian culture (i.e. the forerunners of the Hittites), that differed considerably from the one discovered at Boghazköy, and from which the Hittites took over their cuneiform. Pitkhanas was an early Hittite ruler of about 1900 BC. If my surmise was correct, then the inscription meant that before Pitkhanas there lived the great proto-Hattians from whom the Hittites derived their script. (‘Below’ could also signify that their tombs were below those of the Hittites, as at Boghazköy.) As to the reference to Tudaliyas, another Hittite ruler of about 1700 BC, it again seemed likely that the Hittites had derived some of their religious ritual from the proto-Hattians, of whom ‘Abhoth the Dark’ (or unclean) was a god.
This, I say, was my original interpretation: that the Hittites had taken over parts of the religion of their predecessors at Karatepe, and had made inscriptions upon Hattian figurines to this effect. But the more I considered the evidence (which is too complex to detail here), the more I was inclined to believe that the figurines helped to explain how Karatepe remained an island of culture long after the fall of the Hittite empire. What force will keep invaders at bay over a long period? Not, in this case, the force of arms; the evidence at Karatepe reveals an artistic, not a military culture. Sheer indifference? Why should they be indifferent? Through Karatepe, Zinjirli and Carchemish lay the road to the south, to Syria and Arabia. No; it seemed to me there was only one force strong enough to hold back an ambitious and warlike nation: superstitious fear. Surely the power of Karatepe and its neighbours was the power of some mighty religion—some religion of magic? Possibly Karatepe was a recognized centre of magical culture, like Delphi. Hence those strange reliefs of bird-headed men, of strange, beetle-like creatures, of winged bulls and lions?
Reich disagreed with me, and his disagreement was based upon his dating of the figurines. He claimed that, in spite of their excellent state of preservation, they were many thousands of years older than the proto-Hattian culture. He later verified this beyond all doubt with the use of his ‘neutron dater’. Well, I was willing to be corrected; I was not entirely happy with my own provisional dating of the figurines. But an immense problem remained. As far as we know, there was no civilization whatever in Asia Minor before 3000 BC Further south, civilization dates back to 5000 BC; but not in Turkey. So who made the figurines, if not the proto-Hattians? Did they come from further south? If so, where?
During the first two months that I spent with him, Reich continued to work on his ‘neutron dater’, and used my figurines as basic testing material. But here absurd difficulties arose. The dater showed itself remarkably accurate with samples of potsherd from Sumer and Babylon, where we had means of cross-checking its results. But they had little success with the figurines. At least, their results were so extra-ordinary as to be obviously inaccurate. The neutron beam was directed at minute fragments of stone dust in the cracks and hollows of the figurines. From the ‘weathering’ and decay of these fragments, the dater should have been able to give us a rough estimate of how long ago the basalt was carved. It failed completely; the needle of the indicator swung to its furthest limit—about 10,000 BC! Reich talked about increasing the range of the indicator, simply out of curiosity, to see what date it would finally arrive at. In fact, he actually doubled its range, by some fairly simple adjustments. The needle still swung to its limit with the same unhesitating speed. It was becoming insane, and Reich began to wonder if he had made some elementary error. Perhaps the dust had not been produced by carving?—in which case, the dater was attempting to give us the age of the basalt itself! At all events, Reich left his assistants the task of constructing a dial that would show anything up to a million years—an immense task that would take most of the summer. And then we made our expedition to Karatepe, to try to investigate the problem at its source.
Yes…the source of the problem. How incredible it now seems as I tell the story! How is it possible to believe in simple ‘coincidence’ in the light of these facts? For my two ‘problems’ were converging: the problem of my friend’s suicide, and the problem of the basalt figurines. When I think back upon that summer, it is impossible to believe in a materialistic historical determinism.
Let me try to place the events in their order. We arrived at Kadirli on April 16th. On the 17th, we established a camp at Karatepe. Admittedly, there was nothing to stop us from commuting between Karatepe and our comfortable hotel at Kadirli. But our workmen had to stay in the nearest village, and we decided that it might be better if we spent most of our time at the site of the excavation. Besides, all the romantic in me revolted at the idea of leaving the second millennium BC and plunging back into the late twentieth century every evening. So we set up our tents on a level space of ground near the top of the mound. From below us came the perpetual roar of the Pyramus river, with its swirling yellow waters. The electronic probe was set up on top of the mound.
I
