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SURVEY OF THE CITY DEFENCES

The city wall, together with its buttresses, towers and gates (Fig. 1), was surveyed with a total station. The wall, or more precisely the line of rubble, had been plotted from aerial stereo pairs by MNG Inc. and some details digitised from lower level balloon photographs. However, while checking the map on the ground and making written descriptions it became apparent that the rubble had obscured the corners of features such as towers, buttresses and elements of the gate and in some cases covered them completely. The wall survey undertaken this season allowed us to generate a more detailed CAD drawing which will need to be checked on the ground in 1997.

The 1996 survey revealed the following features:

  1. Many of the towers are unusually narrow and project far from the front face of the wall which they abut (e.g. along the north-west portion of the wall, Fig. 1). There do not seem to be standard sizes or units of measurement and the narrow, rectangular form of many of the towers appears to reflect the topography of the narrow out-cropping ridges of bed-rock on which they are constructed.
  2. There are more buttresses than previously realised, many entirely covered by rubble. Buttresses appear to have been built where the terrain beyond the wall offered the possibility of attack, suggesting that the positioning of buttresses was determined by defensive requirements rather than by any structural necessity to support the outer face of the wall.
  3. There appear to have been steps or ramps, about 0.80m wide, leading up to the top of the wall from the inside at points where the wall changes direction.
  4. The present appearance of the defences is the result of later tumuli and modern shepherds seasonal huts, shelters and animal enclosures having been constructed on top of and adjacent to towers and gates. Traditional modification of the walls by shepherds is continuing and was documented by series of photographs.

Five of the seven city gates were studied in detail, the "Cappadocia Gate", the "East Gate", the "Northwest Gate", the "Water Gate" and the "Goz Baba Gate". A combination of balloon photographs, cadastral survey with a total station and measured sketches was used to create detailed plans. Drawn reconstructions are now being attempted. The sequence of construction is more complex and the architecture more sophisticated than previously realised. It was established that the Cappadocia Gate was constructed before the curtain wall which abuts the gate on either side, although the precise line of the wall must have been established and marked when building of the gate began.

It has been argued before that the city on the Kerkenes Dag is to be identified with Pteria, and that it was a Median city founded to control and administer the newly gained western domains of the Median empire. The grand design of the city defences displays, on the one hand, a highly developed conception of city fortifications and, on the other, the confidence and ingenuity to adapt the architectural scheme and the building methods to the chosen location and the materials immediately available. Comparable city fortifications from the first half of the sixth century BC are scarcely known in Anatolia, although considerable progress is now being made at the rival imperial capital, Sardis. The situation in Iran is no better, although new work at Hamadan promises interesting results. Babylon was the most splendid power in the Near East, she had been an ally of the Medes in the overthrow of Assyria, had brokered a peace between the Medes and the Lydians and built an enormous wall in Mesopotamia from fear of Median (and other) aggression. The question thus arises as to what traditions of city fortifications the military architect(s) at Kerkenes drew on and were influenced by; Iranian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Aegean. A question of equal interest is the extent to which the vast defensive scheme at Kerkenes influenced the development of later Persian and Greek fortifications. There are, as yet, no firm answers. The influence of Mesopotamia might be dismissed as minimal, although the mighty walls and unrivalled size of Nineveh surely had some place in the Median sub-conscious. It is perfectly possible that influence came from Lydia or from the East Greek world bringing to the Medes western concepts which were fused with their own. The plan at Kerkenes, however, exhibits fundamental characteristics which were foreign to and took nothing from the west, and that are at odds with the ideals of urban fortifications in the Greek world, at least as they are known from the fifth century' BC. Of these, the most striking are the absence of an acropolis and the lack of any defensive walls subdividing the city. The uniqueness of the Kerkenes defences is emerging, their influence on later development are tantalisingly obscure.