Kültepe Archaeological Site

Kültepe rises from a fertile plain about 20 km north-east of Kayseri, at the foot of Mount Erciyes. Natural and historic routes from Sivas, Malatya and the south meet here, and that position made the site a hub of trade and culture between Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia four thousand years ago.

In the second millennium BC this was Kaniş, also called Neşa in cuneiform texts. It was the centre of a kingdom and the chief city of the system of Assyrian trade colonies in Anatolia. Kaniş appears in Mesopotamian records even in the late third millennium BC, making it the earliest recorded kingdom in Anatolia.

The name Kültepe became known in 1871, when cuneiform tablets, later called the Cappadocian tablets, began to appear in museums and antiquities markets around the world. Systematic excavations since 1948 have brought out tens of thousands of archaeological and written finds, and today Kültepe is counted among the handful of most significant centres of Anatolian and world archaeology.