422 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 2 



has been able to place on the map several score of ancient settlements 

 and town sites wliich were unknown before may illustrate the fact 

 that almost nothing has been done in this region. In excavation 

 the institute has been occupied with the great mound of Alishar, 

 southeast of Ankara. The recent decipherment of Hittite cuneiform 

 has made it possible to read their clay-tablet records which had 

 heretofore been found at only two places in Asia Minor — the ancient 

 Hittite capital of Hattusas and a commercial settlement now known 

 as the Kiil Tepe. The institute's discovery of cuneiform tablets at 

 Alishar therefore added a third Hittite city to those already known 

 to have left records in cuneiform writing. One of these tablets from 

 Alishar contains the name of the earliest known Hittite king, en- 

 abling us to date it from a very early stage of Hittite history, reach- 

 ing back a century or two earlier than 2000 B. C. The excavation at 

 Alishar is the first such investigation which has carefull}'^ plotted all 

 the ancient levels stratigraphically. These excavations have there- 

 fore disclosed for the first time the successive stages of ancient life 

 in Anatolia, from the Stone Age at the bottom, over 85 feet below, 

 to the latest Seljuk Turkish levels at the top, a range of some 5,000 

 years. Thus for the first time this expedition has identified and 

 listed the types of Anatolian pottery, which are the archeologist's 

 fossils for dating the levels in an ancient city mound, as the fossils 

 found in the rocks date the strata for the geologist. These types of 

 pottery, thus stratigraphically recorded and dated, now furnish the 

 history of pottery so fundamental to further archeological investi- 

 gation, available for the first time in Hittite territory, in the pub- 

 lished reports of the institute on this excavation. 



EXCAVATION OF THE PALACES OF DARIUS AND XERXES AT PERSEPOLIS 



The Hittites must have occupied the region of Anatolia at the 

 west end of the Highland Zone, well back toward 3000 B. C, if not 

 earlier. The outstanding people on the east end of the Highland 

 Zone, however, familiar to us as the Persians, were very late intruders. 

 The Highland Civilization of this region in pre-Persian days was 

 of great importance in its influence on early Babylonia, and, as 

 already mentioned, the institute is investigating several sites in the 

 neighboring lowlands which the Highland invaders founded or cap- 

 tured as they shifted thither. In the study of the rise of civilization 

 it is necessary to investigate the earliest culture discernible at the 

 eastern end of the Highland Zone in very remote pre-Persian days. 

 As a first step toward such investigations the institute is just begin- 

 ning the excavation of the magnificent Persian capital of Persepolis. 

 This Persian expedition is under Prof. Erfist Herzfeld, of Berlin. 



