Karatepe

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Karatepe, ("Black Tell") Osmaniye Province Turkey, in the Taurus Mountains, on the right bank of the Ceyhan River, about 23 km from Kadirli, is an ancient city of Cilicia that controlled a passage from eastern Anatolia to the plain of north Syria. It became an important Neo-Hittite center after the Hittite collapse of the late twelfth century BCE. The ruins of the walled city of king Azitawadda were excavated from 1947 onwards by Helmuth T. Bossert and Halet Çambel. Relics found here include vast historic tablets, statues and ruins, even two monumental gates with reliefs on the sills depicting hunting and warring and a boat with oars; pillars of lions and sphinxes flank the gates.

The site's eighth-century BCE bilingual inscriptions, in Phoenician and Hieroglyphic Luwian, which trace the kings of Adana from the "house of Mopsos", given in hieroglyphic Luwian as Moxos and in Phoenician as Mopsos in the form mps, have served archaeologists as a Rosetta stone for deciphering Hieroglyphic Luwian.

The site (Latitude: 37.258801N Longitude: 36.247601E) is contained within Karatepe-Arslantaş National Park.

In the 2004 exploration of Mars, "Karatepe" was the name given to a site designated for entering the Endurance crater to investigate the layering of the bedrock.

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Last updated on Wednesday February 06, 2008 at 08:18:29 PST (GMT -0800)
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