Was a little-known culture in Bronze Age Turkey a major power?

A study of archaeological sites in western Turkey has revealed hundreds of major cities that flourished there during the Bronze Age, potentially supporting the controversial idea that the area was home to a major political force that destabilized the eastern Mediterranean around 3,200 years ago.

Traditionally, scholars have identified several major Bronze Age civilizations that coexisted in the eastern Mediterranean between approximately 2000 and 1200 BC. These include Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks and – in what is now central Turkey – Hittites.

But Eberhard Zanger, President Luwian studiesinternational non-profit foundation, has long suspected that the researchers were missing something. He believes that in western Turkey there were also many powerful states, sandwiched between the Hittites in the east and the Mycenaeans in the west.

Ten years ago, Sanger presented satellite image data confirming the existence many archaeological sites in western Turkey this could fit his hypothesis. But it was not clear from the images exactly when these places were occupied.

Over the past 10 years, Zanger and his colleagues have been reading Turkish-language excavation reports at several sites and visiting many of them in person to better understand their professional history.

They focused on large areas, at least 100 meters in diameter, where archaeologists found Bronze Age pottery. Published today, the database contains details of 483 sites scattered across western Turkey that meet both criteria. “We're looking at settlements that each have several hundred people who have lived there for many centuries,” says Sanger.

He suspects that the settlements were organized into a series of small states, which he collectively calls Luwian states. This suggests comparisons with the Mycenaean civilization, which also appears to have been organized into a number of small states, each with its own palace and its own king. These states remained largely unrecognized, Zanger says, because Turkish excavators tended to focus on understanding individual objects rather than studying their regional context.

The idea that there were small but important states in the region is not completely inconsistent with the existing evidence. “In western Anatolia there was a large kingdom called Arzawa,” says Guy Middleton from the University of Newcastle, UK, who was not involved in the study. “The king of Arzava corresponded with the pharaoh [Amenhotep III] and he was called the “Great King”—one of the gang—at a time when the neighboring Hittites were in decline.”

“But we still lack archaeological evidence from Arzawa and other Luwian states,” says Zanger. He believes this is partly because many sites associated with these states continued to be inhabited long after the Bronze Age, so the Luwian levels are buried under many younger archaeological finds. “It takes years, even decades of excavation before you get to Bronze Age levels,” he says.

Ian Rutherford from the University of Reading, UK, points out that “Luvian” was a term the Hittites used to describe the people in Western Anatolia, but whether all the people who lived there were Luwian, or whether there were non-Luvian cultures there too, we cannot say without further evidence. “I'm skeptical,” he says.

Most controversially, Zangger suggests that the Luwian states at times formed a large political coalition powerful enough to fight against the more familiar Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. He even suspects that the Luwian coalition led to the collapse of the Hittite civilization about 3,200 years ago and the attack on Ancient Egypt around the same time. A mysterious group called the Sea Peoples is often involved in these events, and Zanger believes they were the Luwians. Many other researchers, including Middleton, argue that the history of the Sea Peoples and the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations more confusing and complex.

But Zanger believes support for his idea comes from an unexpected place: the ancient Greek legend of the Trojan War, set in the Late Bronze Age. The story says that tens of thousands of Mycenaean Greeks fought a ten-year war at Troy, a site in one of Zangger's proposed Luwian states.

He notes that this story seems strange if we assume that it took a large Greek army 10 years to defeat one relatively small city. He believes the story spread into the centuries immediately after the Bronze Age because audiences at the time knew it was about a larger battle between the Greeks and a powerful coalition of soldiers drawn from several Luwian states. “Fiction has to make sense,” says Sanger.

Human Origins: Neolithic and Bronze Age Turkey

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