Arslantepe, known in antiquity as Melid, is an archaeological settlement seven kilometres northeast of Malatya, in Orduzu, west of the Karakaya reservoir on the Euphrates. It is one of the largest mounds in the country: thirty metres of accumulated occupation spread over four and a half hectares, with the settled area itself measuring about 200 by 120 metres. People lived here from around 6000 BC until the eleventh century AD, and in the fifth and sixth centuries AD the place was a Roman village before serving as a Byzantine cemetery.
What the excavations found is a society with rulers. More than twenty graves dated to about 3700–3600 BC came to light, along with six houses and two children buried in a large jar; a temple of roughly 3600–3500 BC; and a palace of 3300–3000 BC, together with a great many seals and metalwork of real skill. Towards the end of the fourth millennium BC a wide urban quarter of monumental mudbrick buildings spread across the southwestern slope of the mound, and the density of seals found in them marks the complex as an administrative centre.
The setting explains some of that. The site had ample water but lay outside the flood plain of the Euphrates, which left it with excellent farmland, and the community was governed by a local ruling class that held political, economic and religious authority at once. On that basis Arslantepe is described as the first city-state in Anatolia. The seals point the same way for trade: this was a place where goods were stored, counted and sent on.
The first digging was done in 1932 by a French team under Louis Delaporte, concentrated on the Late Hittite layers in the hope of reaching the capital of one of the kingdoms that formed after the Hittite empire collapsed. Systematic work began in 1961 with a group from the Sapienza University of Rome, led into the 1970s by Alba Palmieri and later coordinated by Marcella Frangipane. Finds are shown at the Arslantepe open-air museum on the site, apart from those held by the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Malatya as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -0.2 °C in January to 27.2 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in April (55 mm) and lightest in August (4 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Getting there
- Access
- It can be reached by city public transport.
