Guide
The site lies in the Kadirli district of Osmaniye, inside the Karatepe-Aslantaş national park, and it opened as the first open-air museum in the country. Excavation began in 1947 and brought to light two great gate complexes of the late Hittite period, an axial road, and the rooms, sculpture and other remains along both sides of it.
Declaring it an open-air museum and taking it, with the natural forest around it, under national park protection means the remains are shown in their own setting rather than removed from it. The cultural landscape continues, and the archaeology is conserved and managed where it stands.
Karatepe-Aslantaş was built in the eighth century BC by Asativatas, who presents himself as ruler of the region, as a frontier fortress against attack from the north. The wall and its gates make it a distinctive example of the defensive architecture of its time, and the gate entrances themselves are monumental work of a high order.
What makes the site matter to archaeology beyond that is its bilingual inscriptions. The basalt stelae and reliefs at both gates carry texts written in the Phoenician alphabet and in Luwian hieroglyphs. These are the longest bilingual texts in those two scripts, and they played an important part in the decipherment of Luwian hieroglyphic writing.
An enclosed museum section was opened within the open-air museum in 2007 to display archaeological material found at Karatepe and at Domuztepe. The site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list in 2020 — a candidacy, not an inscription.
