Communication to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 6 August 1948Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Printed: MINISTÈRE / DES / AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES

Printed: LIBERTÉ · ÉGALITÉ · FRATERNITÉ / RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE

Printed: PARIS, LE

This campaign is in any case the continuation of the excavations conducted between 1932 and 1939 by the late Louis DELAPORTE at Arslan Tepe near Malatya. The discovery of a series of bas-reliefs from the doorway of a Hittite palace had immediately sparked a controversy over the date of these sculptures. From the stylistic point of view, they came closer en or less in part, closely to the bas-reliefs of the sanctuary rock-cut of Yazılıkaya, which would indicate the 14th-13th centuries before our era.

It was this date that Delaporte himself had first proposed, before later abandoning it in favour of an attribution to the Neo-Hittite period, i.e. to the 9th c. B.C. As the controversy could not be settled by the study iconographic and as, on the other hand, it was desirable to complete the excavation of the tepe interrupted during the war, the Excavations Commission established at the General Directorate of Cultural Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs entrusted me with a mission to examine the stratigraphy and the chronology of the tepe and to recognise the remains of the palace so far that had escaped the excavators.

Accompanied by the same team that assisted me at Ankara, Messrs Coche de la Ferté, Pitronin and Forrer, archaeologist-assistant and architects, I devoted 55 days to the examination of the tepe during the months of August and September. Despite a heat oppressive and a dust that burned the throat and tired our Muslim workmen already weakened by the traditional fast