4,000-year-old Hittite texts speak of the lost cultic centre of Zippalanda, somewhere in modern Turkey. Now, new discoveries at the Uşaklı Höyüy site further suggest this was the ancient holy city. Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC the Hittite Empire dominated ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey), the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The administrative and sacred heart of the Old Anatolian Empire was the city of Hattusa, in north-central Anatolia. In 1834, the Bogazkoy texts were discovered in the royal archives and a Hattusa library comprising approximately 25,000 tablets dating to the 2nd millennium BC. The archive says “the holy city Zippalanda” was an important place where the Hittite storm god was worshipped, but this sacred site has never been found. However, a team of archaeologists from the University of Pisa and the Turkish Archaeological Mission were recently exploring the heart of the Anatolian plateau when they unearthed a mysterious circle-shaped Hittite era construction. Has the ancient holy city of Zippalanda and Temple of the Storm god finally been identified… (READ MORE)

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