Imag[in]ing Hartapu: Reconsidering the rise of an Iron Age kingdom

Abstract Since the discovery of the TÜRKMEN-KARAHÖYÜK 1 inscription in 2019, Iron Age Anatolian scholarship has been energised by the appearance of a hitherto unknown kingdom in the Konya Plain ruled by ‘Great King Hartapu’. While the historical context of Hartapu’s inscriptions have undergone dramatic reassessment in light of the new text as well as the archaeology of the associated site Türkmen-Karahöyük, little attention has been paid to the conditions that would have contributed to the rise of this kingdom in the first place. Although archaeological data remains scarce for south-cen- tral Anatolia during the early first millennium BCE, this article proposes several factors that likely played a role in the emergence of the kingdom: cultural and economic interaction with the Neo-Assyrian Empire, similar relations with Phrygia, emulative competition with its Tabalian peer polities and a propitious ecological setting at a time of significant environmental transformations. Interspersed with these arguments are reflections and anecdotes about Hartapu, and especially the way we represent Hartapu visually, that evoke how the effort we have spent on understanding political dynamics in Hartapu’s kingdom has been disproportionately imbalanced toward Hartapu himself, with insufficient consideration having been given to longer term, structural forces. Such reflections lead us to reconsider the potentially disproportionately impactful effect of Hartapu’s monuments in antiquity, and the extent to which Hartapu’s kingdom in fact consisted of his own self-imaging.