Hattusa

Hattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire during the Late Bronze Age, its ruins lying near the modern village of Boğazkale in Turkey's Corum Province within a loop of the Kizilirmak River. Walls raised during the reign of Suppiluliuma I, around 1344 to 1322 BC, eventually enclosed an inner and outer city covering about 1.8 square kilometers, entered through gates including the sculpted Lion Gate and Sphinx Gate, with the Great Temple at the city's center and the rock sanctuary of Yazilikaya nearby carved with reliefs of Hittite deities. Excavation, which began in the early twentieth century after the French archaeologist Charles Texier first identified the site in 1834, recovered the Boğazköy archive of some 30,000 cuneiform clay tablets, including the text of the Treaty of Kadesh between the Hittites and Egypt's Ramesses II. Hattusa was destroyed around 1200 BC amid the wider Late Bronze Age collapse that also ended the Hittite state, and UNESCO inscribed the site as a World Heritage Site in 1986.