In the narrow valley where the Yeşilırmak divides Amasya in two, the sheer limestone face of Mount Harşena on the northern bank is visible from almost every corner of the town. On its southern slope, in the area known as the Middle Fortress, broad façades cut into the rock and doorways opened high above the ground stand in a row. Known as the Royal Rock Tombs, these monuments were built by the Pontic dynasty that made Amaseia its capital, and they count among the largest rock-cut tombs in Anatolia. Some 21 rock tombs of various sizes are known along the Yeşilırmak valley; five of them stand together in the area of the Maiden's Palace (Kızlar Sarayı) and are attributed to the first five rulers of the Kingdom of Pontus.

The tombs have stood in the same place for roughly 2,300 years. Over the centuries their chambers were emptied, their façades were at times used as prisons and as hermitages for monks, and some architectural details were lost; yet the rock itself and the form given to it have been largely preserved. Mount Harşena and the Rock Tombs of the Pontic Kings were placed on UNESCO's Tentative List of World Heritage in 2015.

Location and Surroundings

Amasya lies where the roads linking the Black Sea coast with Central Anatolia meet, in a deep valley cut by the Yeşilırmak between high mountains running east to west. The pointed, cone-shaped limestone mass rising north of the river is Mount Harşena. The UNESCO nomination file gives its height as 272 metres, while some publications say about 300 metres. Dated to the Jurassic period, the mountain's name is thought to derive from the Hattic phrase "Harşuwana-Arşuawana", meaning "pretty, blessed river city". The mound and fortress area on the mountain's southern slope were inhabited without interruption from the Early Bronze Age until the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The fortress area is treated in three parts. The Upper Fortress comprises the two plateaus at the summit and some two kilometres of walls. The Middle Fortress is the zone of the Maiden's Palace and the Royal Rock Tombs; it holds the five monumental royal tombs, two Ottoman baths, the Ceylan Road, the Cilanbolu Cistern, the Ceylan Tunnel and the Hellenistic walls. The Inner Fortress (Enderun Fortress) lies on eight terraces parallel to the mountain and takes in the Hatuniye Quarter, which sits between the Middle Fortress and the roughly 1,200 metres of walls along the Yeşilırmak. The tombs are still reached from this quarter today.

The Kingdom of Pontus and Amaseia

The Kingdom of Pontus was founded by the Persian satrap Mithridates I Ktistes, who made Amaseia his capital. The sources do not agree on the date of the foundation. The UNESCO nomination says 301 BCE, some publications give 302 BCE, one local record writes 333 BCE, and certain academic assessments hold that an independent Pontus began around 281 BCE. Strabo relates that Mithridates Ktistes used the fortress of Cimiata as his base when he made himself master of Pontus, and that his descendants kept the throne down to Mithridates VI Eupator. The date at which Amaseia ceased to be the capital is equally disputed. Some official records name the town as capital until 26 BCE, while another assessment places its tenure between 281 and 183 BCE. The move to Sinope, the kingdom's second capital, falls in the early second century BCE and bears directly on how the royal tombs were built.

Natural defensibility seems to have decided the choice of Amaseia. Strabo, a citizen of the town, describes it as an admirably devised place, able to serve as city and fortress at once, set on a high and precipitous rock that drops sheer to the river. In his account the two peaks are joined by nature, a narrow neck lies between them, and within the walled circuit stand both the palaces and the monuments of the kings. Water reservoirs were opened inside the rock, two tube-like channels were hewn, one towards the river and the other towards the neck, and two bridges were built over the river. The arrangement Strabo describes matches the cistern and tunnel remains seen in the Middle Fortress today. According to the nomination file, the 300-metre Cilanbolu Cistern, the 186-metre Dungeon Tunnel and the Ceylan Tunnel descending to the river are vaulted structures with stone steps, opened into the bedrock in the first century BCE by the rock-tunnel technique. The Cilanbolu Cistern is placed in the Upper Fortress by some official records, while the Zindan Cistern lies on the steep slope north-west of the Maiden's Palace; both were cleaned by the Amasya Museum in recent years. Part of the Hellenistic walls also still stands; they were built in isodomic courses of smooth, thick, bossed ashlar.

The Five Royal Tombs and Their Owners

The royal necropolis in the Maiden's Palace area consists of the rock tombs of five kings, from Mithridates Ktistes to Pharnakes I. The nomination file gives the sequence as Mithridates I, Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II, Mithridates III and Pharnakes I. Reign dates vary between sources, but in the common chronology Mithridates I falls in 281-266 BCE, Ariobarzanes in 266-250, Mithridates II in about 250-220, Mithridates III in about 220-185 and Pharnakes I in about 185-170. An inscription found near one of the tombs allowed that tomb to be dated precisely, and it ties the fifth tomb to Pharnakes. Death dates for the same five kings are commonly given as follows: Mithridates I in 266 BCE, Ariobarzanes in 250 BCE, Mithridates II around 210 BCE, Mithridates III around 190 BCE and Pharnakes I around 155 BCE. This sequence does not fully agree with the reign spans above; the deaths of Mithridates II and III fall around 220 and 185 BCE in one account and around 210 and 190 BCE in the other, and the end of Pharnakes' reign lies between 170 and the 155 given as his death. The sources reach no agreement, and the discrepancy is merely noted here. For the others no direct written evidence exists, so the assignment of each tomb to a particular king is an inference based on the sequence of architectural development and the order of the dynasty.

The nomination file numbers the five tombs from east to west, I to V. Tombs I, II and III lie in the east, close to the well-preserved Hellenistic walls; IV and V are in the west. Tomb I is reached by a staircase cut into the rock, and another staircase leads to the upper level where II and III stand. The way continues northwest through a tunnel; from its end one can climb into the acropolis by a long, deep stepped water tunnel, or walk west to the broad terrace in front of Tomb IV. Tomb V is reached by a staircase cut into the almost vertical rock in the form of a gallery. A local record also notes that beside one of the large tombs lies the start of a tunnel believed to have run down to the river. Popular tradition holds that this passage was cut to bring water to the palace during sieges or to allow escape in moments of danger; no document confirms this, and where the tunnel actually leads is not known. It is the passages carved behind the tombs, more than their interiors, that draw attention.

Architecture and Construction

The shared principle of construction is to make the monument look like a free-standing building. The façade and body of each tomb were separated from the bedrock, leaving an inverted U-shaped gallery around it. The rock thus recedes on three sides of the tomb mass, and in the middle there stands a stone structure that looks as if it had been lifted out of the rock and set there. According to the local record, the wide space left in this way allowed some of the tombs to be walked around, in the manner of a circumambulation, and also protected the burial chamber from the contact of seepage water with the air. The nomination file states that it was planned to surround all the tombs in this manner during construction, but only the galleries of Tombs II, III and IV were fully completed. The gallery of Tomb I was abandoned half-finished because of the crumbling, fissured rock, and that of Tomb V stopped before completion.

The façade designs do not show a steady line of development. Tomb I has a hexastyle portico with a pediment. Tombs II and IV are tetrastyle and pedimented. Tomb III has no columns and ends in a rounded top. Tomb V is also columnless, with a stone-faced front and a round-arched upper termination. The nomination file notes that many parts of the tombs were made separately and fastened to the rock with dowels and clamps. Some of the steps in front of the façades, the antae (the pilaster-like wall ends), the thresholds and the door lintels were attached in this way, and traces of the fixings are still visible. The tomb just below the Maiden's Palace, directly above the railway tunnel, differs from the others according to the local record. It was carved from a block of rock but not separated by a surrounding gallery; no stone steps were built up to its chamber, and the columns at the sides of the chamber were broken off later.

This form approaches the ancient notion of the heroon, a free-standing tomb monument dedicated to heroes, in the sense of tomb masses cut loose from the rock and left free on all four sides. The tombs range between 8 and 15 metres in height. The largest is Tomb V at the western end, also called the Great Royal Tomb, measuring 15 metres in height, 8 in width and 6 in depth. While the later phases of other Anatolian rock tombs show a growing Greek appearance, development at Amaseia ran the other way: in Tomb V the Greek influence disappeared altogether and a new style peculiar to the region emerged. The nomination file lists this style as free-standing stone burial chambers cut from the rock, the galleries surrounding them, and round-arched façades.

The High Doorways

A feature common to all the tombs is that the entrances to the chambers are set high above the ground. These openings, 2 to 3 metres in height and now without their doors, can be reached only by ladder. The UNESCO nomination suggests that this position was very probably chosen according to Iranian rules of purity, and that the doorways may be compared with the entrances of the Achaemenid tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Persepolis. The same assessment states that the Pontic aristocracy retained its Persian origin and Iranian cults, and that the five royal tombs and twelve priestly tombs would not have been out of place in Persis. The placement of the tombs on the slope that looks down over the town and is easiest to defend is often linked with the idea that the kings went on watching over the city after death; this is an interpretation, and no source states it outright. The precursors of the façade design and of the idea of a tomb block detached from the rock are seen in fourth-century BCE examples at Kaunos and Telmessos in Caria; in the tombs of Amaseia the Persian and Greek traditions thus meet in a single structure.

The Fifth Tomb and the Move of the Capital

The unfinished gallery of the fifth tomb is read in the nomination file as the trace of a political event. When Pharnakes I decided to make Sinope, which he had conquered a short time before, his capital, that is, after about 182 BCE, work at Amaseia was abruptly given up. Sinope was an important port city with international connections and a more suitable centre for the growing political and economic weight of Pontus. Pharnakes therefore seems to have preferred to be buried in his new capital. This interpretation is an inference and does not rest on a direct document; it is nevertheless consistent with the working traces on the stone.

The tradition of rock tombs begun at Amaseia did not continue at Sinope. The nomination file regards this necropolis as the first and only known royal necropolis of the Pontic kings in the world. On the rock face above Tomb V there is an inscription. According to it, the castle commander (phrourarchos) Metrodoros dedicated an altar and a flower bed to the gods for King Pharnakes I. The steps cut into the rock leading up to the inscription are partly visible today. The inscription suggests that the tomb was not merely a burial place but was regarded as a ceremonial and cult site in memory of the king. Since no written document on the content of the rites has survived, every detail on that subject is conjecture.

Place in the Rock-Tomb Tradition

The Amaseia tombs form the latest group of the rock-tomb tradition that runs from the Archaic to the Hellenistic age in Anatolia, following precursors in Urartu, Phrygia, Lycia, Caria and Paphlagonia. In Phrygia, Lycia, Caria and Paphlagonia the local forms were first enriched with imported Greek elements and later took on an entirely Greek appearance. At Amaseia, by contrast, the façade inspired by the Greek temple was finally replaced by the un-Greek form of Pharnakes' Tomb V. This form set a new standard in Pontus and was imitated. Among the imitations are the Tomb of Tes, known for its large inscription and for a second inscription from a later reuse, and the tomb of Hikesios near Laçin in Çorum Province, about 80 kilometres west of Amasya. The tomb of Hikesios, some 13 metres high, is the largest rock tomb in Anatolia.

From the Roman Era to the Ottomans

In the Third Mithridatic War (73-63 BCE) Amaseia was taken by the Roman armies under Lucullus. When Pontus became a Roman province, the town became the administrative centre of Bithynia-Pontus, was transferred to Galatia in 2 or 3 CE and to Cappadocia in about 112. In 47 BCE Pharnakes II, the son of Mithridates VI, was defeated by Caesar at Zela (Zile); Caesar's words "veni, vidi, vici" are remembered in connection with that victory. The nomination file records that the town passed under Ottoman rule in 1386, that from 1402 it was organised as a princely sanjak (Şehzade Sancağı), and that twelve princes served there, seven of whom ascended the throne.

According to local records, the Royal Rock Tombs were at certain periods also used as a prison and a place of punishment. By one account Mithridates VI imprisoned in the tomb just above the railway passage the Roman envoys who had made difficulties in peace negotiations with him. The same record states that Melik Ahmed Danişmend Gazi, who conquered Amasya in 1075, had the Pontic-period burials inside the tombs removed, and that Christian monks withdrew to these caves as hermits. These interventions could be offered as the reason why no sarcophagi are found in the chambers today; but there is no detailed record of finds of Pontic-period burials.

The Maiden's Palace area above the tombs is also multi-layered. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and medieval fortification walls, together with remains of Roman, Eastern Roman, Seljuk and Ottoman buildings, are being brought to light in the area. According to the local record, the Seljuk Sultan Mesud I had a mosque, madrasa, bath and palace built here in 1146 and spent part of his life in this palace. In the Ottoman period the harem built in the fifteenth century by Firuz Ağa, the Chief Gatekeeper of Bayezid II, that is the Maiden's Palace itself, housed princes, consorts and governors for more than 150 years and remained in use until 1852. A palace in which İsfendiyar Çelebi lived in the sixteenth century also stands here. The two baths in the area date from the fifteenth century and can be visited.

Other Rock Tombs in Amasya

The name Royal Rock Tombs is usually used only for the five tombs in the Maiden's Palace area, yet rock-cut tombs are far more widespread in Amasya. According to the nomination file, there are nine rock tombs within the walls of Amasya Fortress and 21 in total in the valley and around the town. Official records state that only a few of them have survived to the present day. Because the five tombs in the Maiden's Palace area form the most important part of the royal necropolis, they are singled out under the name Royal Rock Tombs.

Protection and Research

Mount Harşena is a first-degree natural conservation site. An area of about 350,000 square metres covering Mount Harşena, Amasya Fortress, the Maiden's Palace area and the Inner Fortress is registered as a first-degree archaeological site. The Hatuniye Quarter is an urban conservation site, and 64 of the 137 registered historic buildings in the town lie within its boundaries. The Helkıs Quarter on the eastern slope is also an urban conservation site. Responsibility for protection lies with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation. Survey, restitution and restoration projects for the fortress walls were prepared in 2007, and most of the walls have been repaired. Excavations were carried out in the Maiden's Palace area and Amasya Fortress in 2006-2008 with support from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and since 2009 the fortress excavations have been conducted by the Department of Art History of Istanbul University.

The excavation data show that the site is older than the tombs. The work is led by Emine Naza Dönmez of Istanbul University. Fragments of painted pottery with floral and geometric motifs and Scythian-type spurred bronze arrowheads point, at the Maiden's Palace locality, to a settlement under Achaemenid (Persian) political control and Phrygian cultural influence. In a 2008 rescue excavation by the Amasya Museum, after the squatter houses on the terraces descending to the river were demolished, a fragment of a painted jug with a pistachio-type motif was found, showing that the Iron Age settlement extended toward the Yeşilırmak. A fragment of a terracotta rhyton from the museum's excavations also stands out. The Pontic kings made their tombs above this settlement, in the area protected by the strong walls that Strabo mentions.

Over the centuries the tombs have suffered damage and lost some architectural details; traces of elements such as columns and altars can still be found in front of them. Even so, their position and size shape the silhouette of Amasya. Mount Harşena, the Yeşilırmak and the valley landscape, the royal tombs cut into the rock and the Yalıboyu Houses together form an integrated composition. The UNESCO nomination considers this unity under Criterion (vii). Criterion (iii) rests on the uniqueness of the royal necropolis, and Criterion (vi) on the town's scientific and cultural past, associated with names such as Strabo, Saint Theodore, Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu, Şeyh Hamdullah and the princes.

Visiting

The tombs are reached in the Hatuniye Quarter by stairs that begin at the railway line. On the route, which runs through the quarter's narrow streets and across the railway, paths and steps cut into the rock connect the tombs. The walk is sloping and footwear should be chosen accordingly. Because the chamber entrances are set high, the façades are mostly examined from below and from the galleries. From the terraces where the tombs stand one sees the bends of the Yeşilırmak, the Yalıboyu Houses and the historic bridges over the river. The façades are lit at night, and the silhouette of Harşena above the town can be made out in the dark as well.

Chronology

301 BCE (302, 333 or 281 according to the source): Mithridates I Ktistes founds the Kingdom of Pontus and makes Amaseia its capital.

Third century BCE: Rock tombs are made in the reigns of Ariobarzanes, Mithridates II and Mithridates III.

About 182 BCE: Pharnakes I takes Sinope; the gallery of Tomb V is left unfinished.

73-63 BCE: In the Third Mithridatic War Amaseia is taken by the armies of Lucullus.

47 BCE: Pharnakes II is defeated by Caesar at Zela.

1075: Records state that Melik Ahmed Danişmend Gazi conquered Amasya and had the Pontic-period burials removed from the tombs.

1146: Mesud I has a mosque, madrasa, bath and palace built in the Maiden's Palace area.

Fifteenth century: The Chief Gatekeeper Firuz Ağa builds the Maiden's Palace (harem).

1852: The active use of the Maiden's Palace ends.

2006-2008: Excavations are carried out in the Maiden's Palace and Amasya Fortress; from 2009 the fortress excavations are continued by Istanbul University.

2015: Mount Harşena and the Rock Tombs of the Pontic Kings are placed on UNESCO's Tentative List of World Heritage.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geography XII.3.39 (H. L. Jones translation).

Official sources

  • UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Mount Harşena and the Rock-tombs of the Pontic Kings", Tentative Lists, Ref. 6039 (2015). whc.unesco.org
  • Amasya İl Kültür ve Turizm Müdürlüğü, "Kral Kaya Mezarları"; Türkiye Kültür Portalı, "Kral Kaya Mezarları". kulturportali.gov.tr
  • T.C. Amasya Belediyesi, "Kral Kaya Mezarlıkları".

Other sources

  • Burcu Soykök Ede, "Harşena Dağı ve Pontus Kral Kaya Mezarları", Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi (2019). turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • Jona Lendering, "Amasia", Livius.org. livius.org
  • Süheyla Golcheshmeh, "Harşena Kalesi / Kızlar Sarayı", Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi (2020); E. N. Dönmez, Amasya-Harşena Kalesi ve Kızlar Sarayı Kazısı 2010 Dönemi Çalışmaları, Arkeometri Sonuçları Toplantısı 33 (2011). turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • "Kingdom of Pontus", Wikipedia (auxiliary source). en.wikipedia.org