Page 159 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

PART two: the peripheral regions
cliff. The royal name is generally added in hieroglyphs, and there is sometimes a second
figure.51 Three works of a different nature require notice here. Two of them arc located
in Lycaonia, the third in Cappadocia.
On a hill-side at Fasilar lies a stele, twenty-two feet tall.52 It represents a god with up­
lifted arm standing upon supporters who bow their heads under his weight. Their atti­
tude and their pointed caps remind one of the similar bearers of deities at Yasilikaya
(Plate 130c) and Imamkiilu (Figure 56). At Fasilar the supporters arc flanked by lions.
The comparisons we have just made suggest that the stele belongs to imperial Hittite
times, although no other free-standing steles arc known from that period and the lions
do not resemble those we have described above. But the stele of Fasilar docs not re­
semble monuments of the first millennium either, and its style is hard to judge. Its rough
surface may either be due to weathering or it may have been intended to receive the
final finish at its destination, but it was abandoned on the way.53 Such evidence as we
have favours, therefore, the attribution to imperial times.
The next monument is, unfortunately, badly damaged and weathered, but its composi­
tion is unusually bold, and it enables us, moreover, to assign an important ivory carving
to the imperial period. The relief appears on the outside of a building of rectangular
stone blocks standing at a spring at Iflatun Bunar.54 Figures support winged disks with
uplifted arms. Such figures recur 011 the third monument which must be mentioned,
the rock relief of Imamkiilu (Figure 56), where, at the bottom, three figures carry the
personified mountains which in their turn support the god and his chariot.53

Ivory plaque, found at Mcgiddo
Figure 57*
130

1