Reconsidering the Rise of a Newly Discovered Iron Age Kingdom in Anatolia:

This event will take place in person at ISAW.

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This talk is cosponsored by ISAW and the Archaeological Institute of America-New York Society.

Since the 2019 discovery of a royal inscription authored by "Great King Hartapu," Iron Age Anatolian scholarship has been energised by the appearance of a hitherto unknown kingdom in the Konya Plain. While the historical context of Hartapu's inscriptions have undergone dramatic reassessment in light of this new text, little attention has been paid to the conditions that would have contributed to the rise of this kingdom in the first place. This lecture proposes several factors that likely played a role in the emergence of the kingdom: cultural and economic interaction with the Neo-Assyrian Empire, similar relations with Phrygia, emulative competition with its local peer polities and a propitious ecological setting at a time of significant environmental transformations. Results from newly launched excavations at Türkmen-Karahöyük, almost certainly Hartapu's capital city, help illustrate these points. Interspersed with these arguments are reflections and anecdotes about Hartapu, and especially the way we represent Hartapu visually, that evoke how the effort we have spent on understanding political dynamics in Hartapu's kingdom has been imbalanced toward the man himself, with insufficient consideration having been given to longer term, structural forces. Such reflections lead us to reconsider the disproportionately impactful effect of Hartapu's monuments in the past and the present alike, and the extent to which Hartapu's kingdom in fact consisted of his own self-imaging.

James Osborne is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. He is a Bronze and Iron Age archaeologist concentrating especially on Anatolia and the Levant during the late second and early first millennium BCE. His monograph The Syro-Anatolian City-States: An Iron Age Culture, published by Oxford University Press, was the 2023 winner of the American Schools of Overseas Research's G. Ernest Wright Award for most substantial book in the archaeology of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean. With Michele Rüzgar Massa (Bilkent University), he is Co-Director of the Türkmen-Karahöyük Archaeological Project.

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