Situating the Kingdom of Hartapu – The Context of the Rise of an Iron Age Polity
The 2019 discovery of the TÜRKMEN-KARAHÖYÜK 1 inscription by “Great King Hartapu,” combined with the understanding of the scale of the associated site of Türkmen-Karahöyük, very likely Hartapu’s capital city, effectively placed a hitherto unknown Iron Age kingdom on southern Anatolia’s political map. There is still so much that is unknown about this polity, and even basic information is still lacking, largely due to a complete lack of excavation to date. Nevertheless, it is important to create models for various aspects of the kingdom’s sociopolitical organization that can be tested as new information comes to light. In this paper I ask, why did Hartapu’s kingdom appear to have thrived during the 8th century BCE in particular? And why in this region of the Konya basin? I will propose that there are several factors that explain why the kingdom’s apparently sudden florescence. These include environmental factors like the onset of the Beyşehir Occupation Phase and hyper-local geological settings, macroregional geopolitical factors like the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Phrygian kingdom, and local contingent historical factors like peer-polity interaction among Tabalian kingdoms. At the same time, however, it would be misleading to neglect long-term issues like connections with the preceding Hittite Empire and the settlement history of Türkmen-Karahöyük that show that, in fact, the site was probably just as important in previous centuries as well. Ultimately, there’s something of a disjuncture between the sensationalism inspired by Hartapu’s monuments and their spectacular setting, and slower scale archaeological data, both of which need to be taken into account for a full understanding of Hartapu’s kingdom.