BOGAZKÖY. - It is the Turkish name of a small village east of Ankara in Turkey, very well known among scholars of the civilizations of the ancient East, because not far from it are found the ruins of the capital of the Hittite empire, Hattisalá, among which have been found in various periods and also very recently conspicuous remains of the archive and the state library of this nation. The writings that have come to light are inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform characters, the vast majority in the Hittite language, but not a few written in other languages of the empire, in Hattic, in Luwian, in Palaic, in Hurrian, in Sumerian and also in the Akkadian language, that is, Babylonian and Assyrian. These are the tablets of B., which have shed so much light on the civilization of Asia Minor from about 1800 to 1200 B.C. Among the tablets almost all literary genres are represented: from international treaties to prayers, to the Annals of the Hittite kings, to vocabularies and to the Hittite and Hurrian versions of the Mesopotamian epic poem of the hero Gilgamesh. Most of the tablets have been published in facsimile, but not all have been translated and interpreted (v. HITTITES, RELIGION of).
Giuseppe Furlani