The underground cities of Cappadocia

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Will Williams
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The underground cities of Cappadocia

Post by Will Williams » Tue Oct 27, 2015 1:54 pm

What's the big deal about Mexican drug cartels digging tunnels under their prison walls and the U.S. border when elaborate underground cities were excavated centuries ago like this?:
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In 1963, a man in the Nevşehir Province of Turkey knocked down a wall of his home. Behind it, he discovered a mysterious room. The man continued digging and soon discovered an intricate tunnel system with additional cave-like rooms. What he had discovered was the ancient Derinkuyu underground city, part of the Cappadocia region in central Anatolia, Turkey.

The elaborate subterranean network included discrete entrances, ventilation shafts, wells, and connecting passageways. It was one of dozens of underground cities carved from the rock in Cappadocia thousands of years ago. Hidden for centuries, Derinkuyu‘s underground city is the deepest...

The underground tunneling would also serve a bigger purpose: Protect the Hittites from attack. The exact dates are unknown, but estimates range the tunnels first appeared between the 15th century and 12th century BCE. The Hittites were believed to have used the tunnels to hide from Phrygian raids.

Those who subscribe to this theory point to the historic account of the Phrygian destruction of Hittite city Hattusa, along with the identification of a small number of Hittite-related artifacts found in the tunnels.

An alternative suggestion has the Phrygians first building the tunnels later, between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. They explain the discovered Hittite artifacts as being remnants from the spoils of war.

This theory is reinforced by reputation: Phrygian architects are considered by archaeologists to be among the finest of the Iron Age, and known to have engaged in complex construction projects.

Because the Phrygians are known to have possessed the necessary skills and inhabited the region for a long time, they are often credited with first creating the underground city at Derinkuyu.

[Side Bar: Phrygia was known for stories of its heroic kings in mythology, one of the more well-known being the tale of King Midas.]

Less popular is the theory the underground city was the work of the Persians.

Although no direct reference is made to Derinkuyu, the second chapter of the Vendidad (part of the Zoroastrian Avesta) includes a story of “the great and mythical Persian king Yima” who “created palaces underground to house flocks, herds, and men.”

But with no other evidence, this theory has struggled to gain traction among the cognoscenti.

The oldest written reference to the underground cities of Cappadocia was by Xenophon in Anabasis. He mentions the Anatolian people living underground in excavated homes large enough for entire families, their food, and animals.

Because the city was carved from naturally-formed rock, traditional archaeological methods of dating the underground city would fail to discern the origins.

Archaeologists believe the underground cities of Cappadocia could number in the hundreds. To date, just six have been excavated.

The Cappadocia region of Anatolia is rich in volcanic history and sits on a plateau around 3,300 feet (1,000m) tall.

The area was buried in ash millions of years ago creating the lava domes and rough pyramids seen today. Erosion of the sedimentary rock left pocked spires and stone minarets.

Volcanic ash deposits consist of a softer rock – something the Hittites of Cappadocia discovered thousands of years ago when they began carving out rooms from the rock. It began with storage and underground food lockers; the subterranean voids maintained a constant temperature, protecting the contents from exposure to harsher surface weather extremes.

The underground city at Derinkuyu is neither the largest nor oldest, but it fascinates as it is the deepest of the underground cities and was only recently discovered in 1963. (The largest, Kaymakli, has been inhabited continuously since first constructed).

While there is no consensus for who is responsible for building Derinkuyu, many groups have occupied the underground city over the centuries...
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Tourist map of Derinkuyu Underground City (en Español)
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Read more here, with fascinating images of the caves:
http://sometimes-interesting.com/2014/0 ... appadocia/
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Alexander Noble

Re: The underground cities of Cappadocia

Post by Alexander Noble » Tue Oct 27, 2015 4:46 pm

I had forgotten this one over the years, and I never knew that much to begin with. I'll assume since you're posting it these were built by ancient kinsmen?

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Will Williams
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Re: The underground cities of Cappadocia

Post by Will Williams » Tue Oct 27, 2015 5:30 pm

Alexander Noble wrote:I had forgotten this one over the years, and I never knew that much to begin with. I'll assume since you're posting it these were built by ancient kinsmen?
No, I posted it because I try to average at least one post a day to this forum. I'd received an email featuring these underground cities, found it fascinating historically, and can't post those pictures here from emails for some reason, so went to the source of the article.

Ancient kinsmen? That I don't know. The article says they were Hittites and I've only heard of Hittites from Jewish scriptures. They spoke an Indo-European language, apparently. Found this:
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The Hittites of Anatolia

Turkey's soil is rich in ruins: Ottoman, Roman, Seljuk, Byzantine, Greek. But far older than any of those cultures—and forgotten almost entirely for 3000 years—are the remains of the first Indo-European power in the Mediterranean area: the Hittites.

Their arrival in Anatolia—the Asian part of Turkey, known also as Asia Minor—some 4000 years ago changed the political map of the Middle East, at that time dominated by the civilizations born in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Although the Hittites ruled in Anatolia and beyond for almost 1000 years thereafter, they then vanished from human memory, to be rediscovered only at the beginning of the 20th century. Only the Bible carried some short references to the Hittites, presenting them as one of the tribes of Palestine in the first millennium BC. It was a "son of Heth—a Hittite—who sold the Prophet Abraham the land to bury his beloved wife Sarah.

Who were the Hittites? Their discovery is still one of the most fascinating stories of the early archaeological and philological explorations of the Middle East. The ruins of their once monumental palaces and temples, their rock-reliefs in the middle of the wilderness of the Anatolian steppes, and their stone inscriptions in the least expected places were known by local people but overlooked, or ignored, by Europeans... Since both the Bible and Egyptian written sources referred occasionally to the Hittites as a power comparable to Egypt itself, scholars concluded that something like a Hittite empire must have existed in Anatolia some time in the second millennium BC...
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Read more about the Hittite people here: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde ... 455AAgPOhH

Found this about the Etruscans: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/354799276867185548/
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Etruscan Statue from Anatolia - The region dominated by the ancient Hittites,
a Caucasian Indo-European race, originally from the west.
This culture is one of
the oldest in Europe, going back over 7,000 years BC. The capital city of the
Hittites (or "Children of Heth") was known as the "City of the Eagles."
Sounds like kinsmen to me, Alexander. :) I'll leave it to an historian to confirm and elaborate.
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