Mithraeum of Tell Atchana

TNMM 1447 ↔ CIMRM 90B

Sir Leonard Woolley, A Forgotten Kingdom, London 1953, 98f and Pl. 10a, believes to have found a Mithraeum at Atchana (Alalakh) in the Turkish Hatay, which dates from the sixteenth or early fifteenth century B.C. (cf. AJA 51, 1947, 427). In this period the people of Alalakh made common cause with Mitanni in a rebellion against the Egyptian domination. Woolley describes the temple as follows: ’Throughout the whole history of Alalakh the record of the city temples is that each was built above the ruins of its predecessor, those ruins often being utilized deliberately to make a raised platform or podium which would give to the new building a more commanding position. To this rule the Level V temple is an extraordinary exception, for the builders, instead of levelling the remains of the Level VI building, dug right through them, making a rectangular pit inside which the new sanctuary was erected; of the Level VI temple only a short stretch of the outer face of the N–E wall escaped utter destruction. The new temple consisted of a court with service-chamber apparently all round it – we found remains of them both on the N-E and on the N-W sides - and the temple proper in the middle; it seems to have had an entrance-chamber at ground level of which all traces have disappeared, but the sanctuary-chamber behind it lay six feet below ground. It was a wide and shallow room measuring twelve foot six from back to front and more than double that across (the S-W end was destroyed by the deep-set foundations of Level IV) and had a broad raised bench along its back and walls; in the front (S-E) wall was the doorway from the entrance-chamber giving on a flight of wooden steps that lead down to the sunken floor; immediately opposite to them there stood, against the back, a bench, fire-altar, a rectangle of plastered brick standing eighteen inches high with in its top a box-like depression that showed marks of heavy burning; on each side of the altar there had been an upright wooden post. As the walls were ruined down to the level of the top of the benches it was impossible to say whether they had been simple or had niches contrived in the wall’s thickness”. But H. Otten in OLZ51, 1956, 232 rejects this theory (“vielmehr Tempel einer chtonischen Gottheit?”).