House of the bones

In November 2019, archaeologists excavating the Hittite city of Sapinuwa, an important military and religious centre of the Hittite empire 3,500 years ago, discovered a skull and femur bone believed to be from the Hittite period...

The discovery of the bones is important as Hittites cremated and seem to have hid the remains of their dead. This is why no royal tombs belonging to Hittite kings have been found to date, and only very few skeletal remains of Hittite people have been unearthed...

Now the fact that no Hittite royal burials were ever found is very interesting indeed. Hittite texts talk about "The stone house (É.NA4) of the Gods" which was the place where the bones of the deceased Hittite kings and queens were brought after the cremation ceremony...

This royal cemetery, or royal mausoleum was probably a resting place for all members of the royal family. But the problem is no one knows where that royal cemetery or royal mausoleum was...

There is however an indication that it was located in Yazılıkaya, the natural bedrock outcrop, which was the main sanctuary of the Hittite capital Hattusa...

Yazılıkaya means "inscribed rock" because it contains the most important group of religious rock reliefs made by the Hittites. One of the reliefs alone depicts a procession of 12 gods of the underworld...

So if there was a "Stone house of the gods" anywhere in the Hittite kingdom, this could have been it...

Yazılıkaya is where some archaeologists, like Charles Burney in his "Historical Dictionary of the Hittites" believe the mysterious "Hesti house" was situated...

What this "Hesti house" was is still a matter of debate. Hittite "Hesti" meaning "a ritual place", is equated to Greek altar, and in that sense would indicate a presence of fire, hearth, which is what "Hesti house" contained...

Now was this hearth just a ritual hearth where offerings were prepared for the gods and offered to them, as was a Hittite custom?

Or was this hearth also the funeral pyre hearth, where bodies of the kings and queens were cremated? The Yazılıkaya chambers, rooms are open courtyards where a funeral pyre could have been lit without problems...As can be seen on this map of the sanctuary from "Hattusa: sacred places near Büyükkaya, Ambarlikaya and the Budakŏzŭ" by Joost Blasweiler:

Well when the body is cremated, the only things that remain among the ashes are the big bones and sometimes the skull. It is these bones that were placed into "The stone house of the gods"...

In Hittite language the word for bones was "hastai". There is even a late Hittite term "hastiyas pir" meaning "house of the bones"...Which is why some linguists propose that "Hesti house" would then be "the house of the bones", the place where the bones of the members of the Hittite royal family were deposited after being taken out of the funeral pyre...

Now this "Hesti" house, the house containing the bones of the Hittite kings and queens, was an important cultic place which had permanent attendants, priests...Which is not surprising knowing how important ancestor worship was to the Hittite royal elite...

Even the remains of the kings who died away from Hattusa were later brought to Hattusa, so they can reside with their  kin. This was and still is a practice around the world, where royals are all buried together. Usually near the capital and the throne room...

This was done not just so the living kings can pay proper tribute to the famous dead ones, but also that these famous royal ancestors can give legitimacy to the present kings...

If a king chose a new capital and new burial place for himself, this was an act with a political or religious message. It meant he wanted the break with the tradition. And the family...

And if a king was not buried in the royal cemetery, that was also an act with a political message. It meant that he was not worth being buried together with his ancestors...

For the Royal Hittites this link between the living and the dead was so strong, that when the split happened in the royal family, and the king Muwatalli transferred his capital from Hattusa to Tarhuntassa, he took with him the statues of the gods and "GIDIM.HI.A" a mysterious thing which is now believed to mean "the bones of his ancestors"...

This is not the only time someone did something like this in Middle East. Chaldean king Meredach, when he fled from Babylon to Elam, in front of the advancing forces of Sargon, "took with him all the gods of the land and all the bones of his ancestors from their graves"...

He did this so he can continue to make funerary offerings to his ancestors.

Also, there is a King Ashurbanipal’s inscription in which he says that he exposed the grave of the Elamite kings and deprived them of sacrificial food and drink offerings...This inscription is mentioned in the article "Peace for the Dead, or kispu(m) Again" by Akio Tsukimoto, which talks about "the Mesopotamian wide custom of regular, ritual food and drink offerings to the dead"...

And knowing how important ancestors were for Chaldeans, we can now understand this scene depicted on the relief from Nineveh palace: Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Elamite captive to grind bones of his family, 7th - 6th c. BCE. 

This wasn't like most people think an act of random cruelty...Making someone destroy the bones of their ancestors was a deliberate forced act of sacrilege...

Why were ancestors and their bones so important to the Hittites?

In "The Religion of the Hittites" published in "The Biblical Archaeologist" in 1989,  Gary Beckman gives a ritual incantation dating from the Hittite Old Kingdom period in which Hittite king says that gods have entrusted him to rule the land of Hittites...But he only mentions two gods: Sun god and Storm god...

"The gods, the Sun-God and the Storm-God, have entrusted to me, the king, the land and my household, so that I, the king, should protect my land and my household, for myself"

As the source for the incantation text, Gary Beckman cites E. Laroche, "Catalogue des textes hittites" 1971, and K. Bittel, "Hattusa, the Capital of the Hittites", 1970...

Well, the Hittite royals, who "ruled in the name of the Sun god and the Storm god" also firmly believed that the fortunes of the living were not only determined by the gods, but also by the ancestors...

Which is why the ancestors were regularly remembered and given food and more importantly water. Because forgotten, hungry and especially thirsty ancestors can get angry and bring ruin to their descendants...

They can bring drought and storms which can result in crop failures and hunger and thirst...Which is what was happening increasingly often during the last years of the Hittite empire...

The effects of the climate change which eventually led to the collapse of the Bronze Age empires around Mediterranean, Hittites blamed on themselves. Because they have forgotten to honour their ancestors. And all that have been plaguing the living was the revenge of the dead...

This belief was the most clearly expressed in the oath of the last Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II in which he says that the "...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the living Hittite kings and their subjects have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with the dead..." He then promises in the name of the Hittite kings and in the name of his subjects that they will do everything in their power to rebuild this sacred bond again...

But that was too little too late...The Hittite empire collapsed, their capital Hattusa was abandoned and Hittite royals disappeared from the face of the world...Together with the bones of their ancestors...

Curious...Very curious...Maybe the reason why archaeologists have never found the bones of the Hittite royals in the house of bones, was because the Hittite royals took them with them when around 1200 they moved out of Hattusa...

Where did they go?

At the end of his paper "In Hattusa the Royal House Declined. Royal Mortuary Cult in Thirteenth Century Hatti", Itamar Singer from the university of Tel Aviv says:

"To sum up Suppiluliuma II's document, it would seam that its all embracing message of the vital bond between the Living and the Dead is unique in the Hittite literature, and I am not aware of a clear parallel in the Near Eastern corpus either...This document seeks to guarantee and immortalise the obligations of the Living towards the Dead and vice versa..."

I don't know if this kind of "vital link between the Living and the Dead" existed in any other culture, but here is something I know, which is totally unrelated to the previous story about the Hittites' ancestor cult of course:

The cult of the dead was and still is the most important cult of the Serbs. Serbs believed that it was not just the gods that determine their faith but also their dead ancestors...They even considered their supreme god Dabog, who is both Sun god and Storm god, to be their original ancestor, thus attributing even god's actions to the ancestors. In the past Serbs buried their dead under their doorsteps and their hearths. Effectively they lived with their dead...So that the Living can continuously venerate the dead, and so that the Dead can continuously support and protect the Living. And they made damn sure that the dead were always remembered, always well fed and especially well watered...

Or else: 

You can read more about this in my post "Thirst"...

And finally:

There are even records from this, 21st century, of Serbs digging out and carrying away their dead with them when they were forced to move or relocate. Here is an example from last Serbian exodus from Kosovo: 


In an isolated village Staro Gracko, on a scorching summer day in 1999, 14 men were bringing in the wheat harvest as NATO and the U.N. were still moving in to secure the province. Shots rang out, but no one came to help. Later, British peacekeepers found the 14 dead in a field fringed with poplar trees, in an attack blamed on ethnic Albanians. 

Local Serb Ljubica Zivic didn't hear the shots that day, but felt an ominous breeze that seemed to foretell that both of her sons, Radovan and Jovica, would not return home. 

"I waited and waited. There was an eerie wind blowing," Zivic said, clasping her hands together in grief. "In the evening I went inside and said, 'It's all over.'" 

Zivic ekes a living on euro40 (US$60) a month, struggling to feed seven grandchildren who survived their slain fathers. 

She did not join the 200,000 Serbs who sought shelter in Serbia, some unearthing their dead and carrying away the bones as they left. 

Clad head to toe in black, the tiny woman is bound to the dead in a village that now has the air of a ghost town. 

"This is my village and this is where my dead are," she said. "I will stay." 

PS: According to genetic data, Serbs are a very mixed population, which has absorbed pretty much anyone who passed through the Balkans in last 10,000 years...Some of Serbian ancestors could have been in some way related to Hittites...Or not...

There of course could have been intermediaries with the same belief in the link between the Living and the Dead. Ancestor worship was and still is an important part of many cultures. Also there is the common Indoeuropean cultural root...