Lecture by James Osborne, University of Chicago

Absttract: Since the 2019 discovery of a royal inscription authored by “Great King Hartapu,” Iron Age Anatolian scholarship has been energised by the appearance of a hitherto unknown kingdom in the Konya Plain. While the historical context of Hartapu’s inscriptions have undergone dramatic reassessment in light of this new text, little attention has been paid to the conditions that would have contributed to the rise of this kingdom in the first place. This lecture proposes several factors that likely played a role in the emergence of the kingdom: cultural and economic interaction with the Neo-Assyrian Empire, similar relations with Phrygia, emulative competition with its local peer polities and a propitious ecological setting at a time of significant environmental transformations. Results from newly launched excavations at Türkmen-Karahöyük, almost certainly Hartapu’s capital city, help illustrate these points. Interspersed with these arguments are reflections and anecdotes about Hartapu, and especially the way we represent Hartapu visually, that evoke how the effort we have spent on understanding political dynamics in Hartapu’s kingdom has been imbalanced toward the man himself, with insufficient consideration having been given to longer term, structural forces. Such reflections lead us to reconsider the disproportionately impactful effect of Hartapu’s monuments in the past and the present alike, and the extent to which Hartapu’s kingdom in fact consisted of his own self-imaging.