Are you there, gods? It's me, Michael

I'm currently seated on a Turkish bus that is, as I cross-media promoted to my Facebook account, nicer than my own apartment, by a considerable margin. Through the immense, spotless windows, we roll through Anatolia, which is barren and lovely--sort of like the American southwest, but with more scrub-brush. It's probably the Turkish hospitality culture making everything just a little bit comfier. The wifi is working, something which America--the country that put a man on the moon--apparently cannot manage on its transportation networks. (England can't do it either, but, and I mean this with love, this isn't exactly a shocker.)

I realize that it's weird for me to be addressing you--or anything, really--from a state of contentment. Let it be known that the man behind me is doing a not-showering/cologne/cigarette thing. That's sort of icky. Nevertheless, I wanted to catch up on some antiquity-related events, since this is pretty much serving as my diary. Whether my diary proceeds in the Judy Blume or the R. Kelly directions, we'll see.

Anyway, a number of weekends ago, the university sent a busload of international faculty to Hattusa, which was the Hittite capital of Central Anatolia about 4,000 years ago. Greater (if probably more imperialist) minds than mine have grappled with just how old so many of the things around here are. As there are people living now in the same area, having even put up some mildly posh-looking hotels and whatnot, this means that the area has been continually settled since well before the Ancient Greeks. I'm told that some of the Epic of Gilgamesh manuscripts were found among these ruins--certainly, there are statues of characters from the epic that were found here--so that's primally festive, to those of us chained lovingly to teaching it.

Philip Larkin, at a moment of weakness, says that what will survive of us is love. Hattusha reminds us: in fact, what will probably survive of us is walls. The buildings survive primarily as walls, which give us the outline of the surprisingly (to me, anyway) vast city. Because I receive dozens of emails every day requesting photos of "old walls in Turkey," here goes:

This is from the Acropolis, the highest part of the city and, naturally, where the royalty lived. Reading "Ozymandias" in high school in London, Ontario, is a really dreadfully flat way to learn about the ends of empires: living in London, one couldn't help but feel that the end of civilization would be a sort of "meh" moment. I wish I'd encountered the thought for the first time at Hattusha: literally kilometers of old foundations, including literally hundreds of temples. Having had my look-on-my-works-etc. cherry popped soundly and early, my thoughts at Hattusha went more towards the similarly-minded imperialists of various nineteenth-century nationalities who must have crawled over the site, no doubt thinking that this time, we'll get it right. 

And Hattusha was the Hittite capital, remember: so, off in the Anatolian hinterlands, some eager young swineheard was looking away to the city, dreaming of running off to a bigger, more sophisticated placed. (Unless social mobility hadn't been invented yet.) It's so hard to keep them on the farm once they've seen what was allegedly called the "City of a Thousand Temples." (Actual Hittite conversation: "God, mom, I'm, like, so bored here. There's only pigs and fifty-six temples. We only have, like, two octopus gods. I hate you!")

Here is a picture of a green stone found in the middle of Hattusha. No-one knows why it was put there. (Those of you educated in and around the Anglo-American tradition are no doubt thinking "druids.")

Because we have no idea what it was, we can say the following things about it:

1. It was "clearly important," because it "came from a long way away." 
2. It was "probably used in ritual behavior."

Ritual behavior, as I learned at the Hattusha museum, is what anthropologists say when they don't have the faintest clue what something is. The ancient world was heavy in ritual, so what the hell: maybe they tripped over it during the feast of the moon-otter or something. (Our guide also told us that this stone was said to bring babies, which is why I now have a uterus.) In the comments, you may write your own suggestions for what rituals this stone was used in. Given its muted green-blue color, I think this was used as the basis for the Hittite equivalent of Ralph Lauren paint colors. I call it "seastone," and I think we're doing the study in it. 

Hattusha also has a series of absolutely stunning bas-reliefs, the best of which are in a chamber that was used for--wait for it!--accounting. By which, of course, I mean rituals. The clarity of these reliefs was preserved by being covered under river silt and only recently recovered; this was also, oddly enough, the process followed by my dissertation's prose. (Rim shot.) And here they are, some Hittite deities:

Seeing these, the Hittite cosmopolite knew that he had arrived: twelve gods of pointed hats alone! And he smiled a smug little smile and thought of those peasants back on the farm, with their cruelty and their limited set of ferret-themed deities.

Whereupon, he was devoured by locusts. The ancient world kind of sucked, after all. I'm glad I have wifi.