- Founded
- c. 2400 BC
- Abandoned
- 9th century BC
- Excavated
- From 1996, Kay Kohlmeyer
- State
- Under a protective shelter
Everything else here is a fortress. This is not. Before Aleppo was a city worth defending, this hill was a place where people came to speak to the god of the storm, and they kept coming for roughly fifteen hundred years.
The sanctuary was founded around 2400 BC, rough stones and plaster on bare bedrock. Kings of Ebla rode some thirty-five miles to sacrifice here. Around 1800 BC the Amorite kings of Yamhad rebuilt it as a tower temple with a hall ninety feet by fifty-five and a northern wall thirty-three feet thick; cuneiform texts describe a colossal seated statue of the god holding the sun god on his knee. In the fourteenth century BC the Hittites reoriented it and filled it with basalt — lions and a sphinx seven feet high, bull-men, and a six-foot figure that is half fish and half man, holding a pinecone and a bucket for purification. Around 1100 BC a Neo-Hittite king named Taita left an inscription in Luwian hieroglyphs naming his kingdom; scholars still argue over whether to read it Patasatini, Palistin, or Walastin, and whether it connects to the Philistines.
Then it was abandoned, in the ninth century BC, and forgotten so completely that nobody knew it was here.
Two accidents are worth telling. Around 300 BC, Hellenistic builders cutting into the hill drove a trench right past the Hittite reliefs — and left them exactly where they stood. They recognised a storm god as their own Zeus and would not disturb his house. And in the 1920s French archaeologists dug on this mound, stopped, and went home; when Kay Kohlmeyer's team reached the temple in 1996 they found the French trench ending half a metre short of it, with a trowel and an empty champagne bottle left behind.