Isuwa
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Isuwa (transcribed Išuwa and sometimes rendered Ishuwa), was a kingdom founded by the Hurrians, which came under Hittite sovereignty towards 1600 BC as a result of their struggle with the Hittites.[1]
Location
Isuwa was located on the eastern bank of the river Euphrates, opposite modern-day Malatya and along the south bank of the Murat Su. The important crossing of the Euphrates from Malatya to Elazığ is referred to in the Hittite texts as the 'Isuwa crossing' (eberti KUR URUIśuwa).[2] Isuwa covers the present-day province of Tunceli.[1] The plain had favourable climatic conditions due to the abundance of water from springs and rainfall. Irrigation of fields was possible without the need to build complex canals. The river valley was well suited for intensive agriculture, while livestock could be kept at the higher altitudes. The mountains possessed rich deposits of copper which were mined in antiquity.
History
The area was one of the places where agriculture developed very early in the Neolithic period. Urban centres emerged in the upper Euphrates river valley around 3000 BC. The first states may have followed in the third millennium BC. The name Isuwa is not known until the literate Hittite period of the second millennium BC. Few literate sources from within Isuwa have been discovered and the primary source material comes from Hittite texts.
The Isuwans left no written record of their own, and it is not clear which of the Anatolian peoples inhabited the land of Isuwa prior to the Luwians. Aram Kosyan identified etymologically Hittite, Luwian, Indo-Iranian (possibly connected to the Mitanni), Hurrian, and Kaskian personal names in Isuwa, as well as a number of anthronyms with unknown or unclear origins.[3][4]
To the west of Isuwa lay the hostile kingdom of the
Isuwa continued to be ruled by kings who were vassals of the Hittites. Few kings of Isuwa are known by names and documents. One
Archaeology
The ancient land of Isuwa has today virtually disappeared beneath the water from several dams in the Euphrates river. The Turkish Southeastern Anatolia Project which started in the 1960s resulted in the Keban, Karakaya and Atatürk Dam which entirely flooded the river valley when completed in the 1970s. A fourth dam, Bireçik, was completed further south in 2000 and flooded the remainder of the Euphrates river valley in Turkey.
A great salvage campaign was undertaken in the upper Euphrates river valley at instigation of the president of the dam project Kemal Kurdaş. A Turkish, US and Dutch team of archaeologists headed by Maurits van Loon began the survey. Work then continued downstream where the Atatürk Dam was being constructed. Also, the Keban Dam flooded some sites. Especially the Murat River valleys, and the Altınova plain (Elazığ Province) had many early settlements.
The excavations revealed settlements from the Paleolithic down into the Middle Ages. The sites of Ikizepe, Korucutepe, Norşuntepe and Pulur around the Murat (Arsanias) river, a tributary of the Euphrates to the east, revealed large Bronze Age settlements from the fourth to the second millennium BC. The center of the kingdom Isuwa may have lain in this region which would equate well with the Hittite statements of crossing the Euphrates in reaching the kingdom.
The important site of
The earliest settlements in Isuwa show cultural contacts with
See also
- Ancient regions of Anatolia
- Assyria
- History of the Hittites
- Hurrians
- Indo-European languages
- Mitanni
- Mesopotamia
- Phrygians
- Hayasa-Azzi
References
- ^ a b Tuncel 2012, p. 380–381.
- ^ Barjamovic, Gojko. A Historical Geography of Anatolia in the Old Assyrian Colony Period. United States, Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Near Eastern Studies, University of Copenhagen, 2011.
- ^ Aram Kosyan. "To the East of Hatti." Essays in Honour of Veli Sevin (ed. A.Ozfirat). Yayınları. Istanbul, 2014, p. 278.
- ^ Aram Kosyan. "On the Ethnic Background of Isuwa (A Preliminary Study)." Aramazd: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Vol. 4. Issue 2. 2009.
Bibliography
- Conti, Persiani : Between the Rivers and over the Mountains, La Sapienza Rome 1993.
- Erder, Cevat: Lessons in Archaeological and Monument Salvage: The Keban Experience, Princeton university 1973.
- Konyar, Erkan: Old Hittite presence in the East of the Euphrates in the light of stratigraphical data from Imikuşağı (Elazığ), lecture held at Hethiter-workshop Istanbul 2004.
- Loon, Maurits van: Korucutepe : final report on the excavations of the universities of Chicago, California (Los Angeles) and Amsterdam in the Keban reservoir, American Elsevier New York 1975-80 (3 vol.).
Sources
- Tuncel, Metin (2012). "Tunceli". TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (in Turkish). Vol. 41. pp. 380–381.