A Great Queen on the Sphinx Piers at Alaca Hüyük

Since the first European visited Alaca Hüyük 150 years ago the site has been noted for its gateway dating from the Hittite empire, fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. Within a few decades of the discovery, excavations revealed a large number of sculptured orthostats flanking the entry, but the piers with sphinx protomes have always been above ground and have given the entrance its name, the Sphinx Gate. Nineteenth-century travellers noted on the inner face of the eastern sphinx pier the fragmentary representation of a figure above a two-headed eagle clutching two rabbits (Pl. XXXIX, a). The relief is visible to everyone entering the city through this gateway. The parallel figure on the other pier, the subject of this report, has rarely been mentioned.

The late morning sun highlights remnants of a female figure on the inner face of the western sphinx pier (Fig. 1, Pl. XXXVIII, a, b). The upper part, from a point below the waist, and the whole front are destroyed, but there is no doubt of the back contour of the long robe, its surface covered by a series of striations sweeping down and back into the train.