Archeology is ideology, especially in modern Turkey. Mustafa Kemal, who founded the republic, in 1923, once wrote in a cable to his Prime Minister, “More students should be trained in archeology.” The Ottoman Empire—an entity that at its peak encompassed the Balkans and much of the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Middle East—had recently been dismantled by the Allied Powers, after the catastrophic defeat of the First World War. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, asserting the principle of self-determination, was one of many signs that the age of multiethnic empires, such as the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian, was giving way to an age of ethnic nation-states. Kemal understood that, if Turkish-speaking Muslims were going to retain any land in the former Ottoman Empire, they would have to come up with a unifying mythology of Turkishness, based on the Western European ideals of ethnic nationalism, positivism, and secularism. Adopting the surname Atatürk (Father Turk), he quickly set about inventing a new national identity. Of course, it couldn’t seeminvented; that’s where archeology came in.
In 1930, Atatürk appointed a committee to establish an ethnohistorical basis for a Turkish state in Anatolia. In 1931, the Society for the Examination of Turkish History published a radical four-volume history of Turkey, propounding the so-called “Turkish-history thesis.” The thesis held that the Turks were descended from an ancient people who lived around an inland sea in Central Asia, where they basically started civilization all by themselves. At the end of the Ice Age, the sea dried up, propelling waves of Turks to China, India, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Italy, where they intermingled with the native populations and spread their knowledge of metalworking and of domesticated animals. In 5000 B.C., a core group of Turks settled in Anatolia: their second homeland. In a recent article, the historian Clive Foss enumerated other colorful tenets of the theory. In Mesopotamia, “Sumerian Turks” drained swamps and developed a written language; Turkish Thracians founded Troy. Turkish Lydians migrated to Italy, became Etruscans, and so more or less established Rome. The Minoans of Crete, having come from Anatolia, were basically Turks. The Buddha was a Turk; so was the third-century Roman emperor Maximinus.
The theory solved any number of problems. It countered the Allied Powers’ characterization of the Turks as civilization-resistant occupiers of other people’s lands. (“No other race has brought such devastations and massacres, such lasting derangements, into the life of other nations,” a British naval-intelligence publication of the time stated.) By emphasizing a pre-Islamic past, it kept the national identity separate both from the disgraced Ottoman Empire and from the Muslim caliphate. By making the Turks out to be the ancestors of Western civilization, it allowed the nation to modernize without losing face: to “Westernize” was simply to rediscover a lost patrimony. Perhaps most important, by positing a genetic relationship between the modern Turks and the prehistoric Anatolians, it protected the new republic from territorial claims by the Greeks, the Italians, the Armenians, and the Kurds.
By the logic of the Turkish-history thesis, all prehistoric Anatolian civilizations of unknown origin were determined to be Turkish. Discovering their relics became a matter of national importance, and the emphasis of archeology shifted from the Classical and Hellenistic ruins of the Aegean region to the Neolithic, Hittite, Phrygian, and Iron Age sites of Central Anatolia. Some excavations were led by German archeologists who had fled the Third Reich, and whom Atatürk had invited to Turkish universities. Vast Hittite tombs were excavated. The capital had moved from the Ottomans’ beloved Istanbul to Ankara, in the middle of the Anatolian steppe—within driving distance of the Hittite capital of Hattusha. New state banks were called Sümerbank (Sumerian Bank) and Etibank (Hittite Bank). Artifacts from all over Asia Minor were sent to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, where, as a child, I spent many hours gazing at eyeless ceramic deer and emaciated bronze stags, developing a love of Hittites, that was not totally unrelated to the snack cakes produced by the Eti (Hittite) biscuit company.
Elif Batuman
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig
