Mopsos

In 1946 an expedition led by Professor H. Bossert and his Turkish colleagues of the Institute for Research in Ancient Oriental Civilisations at the University of Istanbul investigated a site, now called Karatepe, in Cilicia, in a wild and remote part of the Taurus Mountains overlooking the Ceyhan River. There they found a small citadel fortified by a wall and ornamented with lions in the gateways. They excavated the gateways and found them to be flanked by sculptured slabs and inscriptions partly in Phoenician, partly in Hittite hieroglyphs. A further excavation on the summit of the hill found other inscriptions in these two languages, which finally, when compared, proved to be versions of the same text. The long-sought bilingual which would interpret Hittite hieroglyphic script had been found. Confirmation was now to be available of the slow and hesitant interpretations of the hieroglyphs which had been attempted over ninety years.