The Land of Tuwan(uw)a between the Late Bronze and the Iron Age
As is often the case, textual sources and archaeological record concerning South Cappadocia during the Late Bronze and the Iron Age offer a quite divergent picture. Hittite sources provide evidence for a very early Hittite political control over the region, and the continuity in toponyms and cults into the Iron Age was suggestive of a direct continuity of Hittite political and cultural features in the LBA-IA transition. Archaeological data, however, provide a different picture. Excavations at Niğde Kınık Höyük have brought evidence of political complexity in the region as early as the turn of the 2nd into the 1st millennium. On the other hand, this is very different archaeologically from the evidence of political continuity emerging from the Upper Euphrates and from the northern Levant. Also, upon closer scrutiny, I will suggest that Warpalawa’s Tuwana and his Tarhunza, once considered proof of long continuity going directly back to Hittite Tuwanuwa and its Storm-god, has to be envisioned as a new, splendid but ephemeral political project bringing into south Cappadocia cults and symbols of power deriving from the late Syro-Anatolian Culture Construct as it developed in Cilicia and the southern Levant.