Samuha Hittite City
Kayalıpınar Ruins (Samuha Hittite City), the second Hittite city unearthed after the Hittite city of Sarissa in Sivas, is one of the five centers in Anatolia that yields tablets written in Assyrian and Hittite. The Hittites, whose capital was Hattusha Boğazköy, reached Samuha via Kızılırmak and used it as a center for their summer works. Administrative buildings in the city, which has been excavated since 2005, draw attention with its palace structure and written tablets. Nearly 1,000 archaeological artifacts from these excavations have been brought to our Sivas Archeology Museum.It has a topography in the form of a hollow bowl in the middle, surrounded by walls. A large part of the region is registered as a first degree archaeological site. The settlement, which was settled in the Hittite, Iron Age, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods starting from the Assyrian Colonial Age, is among the few centers that yield tablets in Anatolia. Kayalıpınar, one of the important cities of the Hittites in Anatolia, and the presence of a relief with the depiction of God, which we call Orstat, next to the Hittite tablets added a special importance to the settlement.
In a Hittite cuneiform tablet found during the excavations, it was learned that the old name of Kayalıpınar ruins was 'Samuha'. It is known that the name of Samuha, which is predicted to be one of the most important cities in Anatolia in the 2nd millennium BC, is frequently mentioned in the written sources in Boğazköy. Samuha, which was a small market place 'Vabartum' where Assyrian merchants traded, later developed and became a part of BC. In the 18th century it had become an important commercial center 'Karum'. While it can be learned from written sources that the Hittite King Telepinu had an official warehouse built in Samuha, which was an important city in the 19th century, the Hittite great Kings, the Kingdom center where they ruled the country, went to Samuha in 14 BC. It is known that in the 16th century, the great King Tuthaliya came with the people of the palace and ruled the country from here, and even died in Samuha. It is known that King Tuthaliya's son, Suppiluliuma I, also came out of Samuha on many occasions, and that the Hittite Kingdom was one of the most powerful states of the ancient world, along with Egypt, where the pharaohs ruled.
