Alacahöyük: The Sun Discs of the Hittite Kings

On a modest mound northeast of Boğazkale, in Çorum Province, farmers once walked over the graves of kings without knowing it. The höyük itself is unassuming — 310 meters by 275 meters, rising only about 14 meters — but beneath its surface lie fourteen occupational layers stretching from the Chalcolithic Age to Ottoman times. It was William John Hamilton who first noted the site in 1835, though serious excavation would wait decades.

The first true digging came in 1907, when Ottoman archaeologist Theodor Makridi Bey spent two weeks probing the mound on behalf of the Istanbul museums. German teams followed in the 1910s, uncovering royal tombs from the third millennium BC and the remains of a Hittite town beneath — a town entered through a sphinx-flanked gate carved with reliefs. But it was in 1935 that the excavation gained its most unusual patron: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk personally ordered the work resumed, funding it in part from his own budget, with Turkish archaeologists Remzi Oğuz Arık and Hamit Koşay leading the effort.

What they found rewrote the site's importance. Fourteen shaft graves, dated roughly 2850–2450 BC, held the so-called 'Royal Tombs' — contemporaries of the Royal Tombs of Ur and Troy's second level. Each grave was a simple shaft about 1.5 meters deep, sealed with wooden beams, holding the dead with legs folded, facing west. Around them lay the heads and horns of bulls placed on platforms, as if the animals themselves stood guard.

The grave goods were staggering for their age. Gold fibulae, diadems, belt buckles, and repoussé gold-leaf figures adorned the dead. Seven metal figurines — four bronze, three silver — were recovered. Tomb H, belonging to a woman, contained a golden diadem, copper mace heads, a bronze sun standard, animal statuettes, gold and silver ornaments, gold and clay vessels, axes, five pairs of twin gold idols, and three female figurines. Tomb A, also an adult woman's grave, yielded a golden diadem, four sun standards, an animal statuette, metal ornaments, fragments of an iron object, and two anthropomorphic metal figurines.

Among all these treasures, the bronze standards remain the most enigmatic. Cast in copper, often shaped as flat circles, half-circles, or squares filled with openwork crossbars, central crosses, and swastika motifs, some bear bulls or stags mounted on pedestals. Archaeologists still debate their exact purpose — ceremonial standards, perhaps, or symbols tied to sun worship. Excavator Leonard Woolley observed that the tombs 'seem to belong to the end of a period,' marked by a layer of destruction and a burned citadel, with the culture of the tombs not continuing into the following era of Kültepe.