Guide
Kültepe lies about twenty kilometres north-east of Kayseri, two kilometres off the Kayseri-Sivas road. It is made of two parts: a mound some twenty metres above the plain and five hundred metres across, and the lower town around it known as the Karum, which reaches two kilometres in width.
The mound has been excavated systematically since 1948, first under Tahsin Özgüç. The earliest settlement is Late Chalcolithic, followed by Early Bronze, Hittite, Phrygian, Hellenistic and Roman levels. The Karum, on the eastern and south-eastern skirts of the mound, was where Assyrian merchants settled between about 1950 and 1650 BC while trading in Anatolia.
What a visitor sees is the excavation itself, displayed in the open air: the religious and official buildings, houses, shops and workshops uncovered on the mound and in the Karum. The cuneiform tablets found here began reaching museums after 1881, long before anyone could say where in the ground they came from, and the finds are the source of much of the Kayseri museum collection.
