Tarhunt and the Bull of Storms: The Çineköy Bilingual

Artifact of Inevitability

Through the Glass

You stand before a stone that was once the body of a god. Wheels, bulls, a platform—like a cargo drone of the Bronze Age fallen from the sky and frozen in the museum’s climate control. On its surfaces—two lane markings of time: Luwian signs, like pictograms from a dream, and angular Phoenician lines, smooth as PCB traces.

This is the Çineköy Bilingual—an inscription where an ancient ruler speaks in two languages at once, in two realities: the local and the imperial. Found in 1997 on a plowed field near the village of Çineköy, 30 km south of Adana, it dates to the second half of the 8th century BC; today it resides in the Adana Archaeology Museum.

Matter and Myth

Before us is the Late Hittite image of the storm-god Tarhunt: the figure once stood on a chariot-platform drawn by a pair of bulls; the whole ensemble reached about 2.5 meters in height. The stone is dark, the kind loved by cutters on the Anatolian-Syrian frontier; on its sides are reliefs of towers, like pictograms of fortresses. The text runs along the edges of the base, across the ribs, between the bulls’ legs—like a whisper you cannot bypass or jump over.

The voice belongs to Warika (known in Assyrian chronicles as Urikki), ruler of Hiyawa (called Que by the Assyrians). He speaks of fortresses, of power, of gods who sign his decrees with lightning. And he does it with two ciphers—Luwian “hieroglyphs” and the Phoenician alphabet. This is not just a Tarhunt stone. This is an interface.

Eye of the Past

It was born as a manifesto of loyalty and strength on the edge of an imperial field of vision. In Hittite skin and Assyrian stride, with a Phoenician mouth—an artifact assembled from incompatible ecosystems, like a hybrid car. It saw Warika negotiating with the northern giant—“the house of Ashur, like father and mother”—accepting technological dependence as a new form of piety. It saw builders counting fifteen fortresses—on one line they are “built,” on another “destroyed,” and truth here is not scalar but interference of meanings.

It heard the name of Mopsos, the ancestral hero, pulsing in the text like a viral myth, rewriting local memory. It stood while names changed—Hiyawa, Que, “Suriya”—and one day learned that the word “Syria” was no orphan: it had an older brother—Assyria. The bilingual laid the linguistic cable between them and turned on the light.

From here the arrows point in all directions. Toward Karatepe-Aslantaş, where governor Azatiwata also speaks in two languages, cementing rule over the valley. Toward the courts of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II, where the name Urikki flickers in bureaucratic darkness—a line of tribute, a date, a vassalage. Toward our time, where we read this as code and argue over every letter.

Legacy in Dust

This thing teaches two simple, unpleasant rules.

First: power is translation. When you want to be heard by all neighbors at once, you speak bilingually. You carve not just ideology into stone, but also the protocol of compatibility. That’s why bilinguals are the best archaeologists of empires: they show how the myth of local legitimacy (“I am from the house of Mopsos”) connects with the iron infrastructure of the hegemon (“we are one house with Ashur”).

Second: language is geopolitics. The quarrel about the origin of “Syria” shut down when scholars linked Phoenician ’ŠR/’ŠRYM (“Assur/Assyrians”) with the Luwian su-ra-i… written on parallel lines of this stone. The stone said: “Syria is the shadow of Assyria.” No romance—just a direct connection. And for us—a rare case when philosophy of history is confirmed by seams on the base of a statue.

Bonus lesson: matter remembers better than we do. We forget names, re-check dates, argue about transliteration. The stone stands. It has survived the collapse of the Hittite Empire, the redrawing of Cilicia, Assyrian “subscription,” Hellenistic reboot, Rome, Byzantium, everyone. Our civilizations are interfaces, not eternal entities. And all we have is the glass of the display case and letters carved into basalt.

How Did We Get Here?

Go to the Adana Archaeology Museum (the complex on the site of a former factory), Iron Age halls. Look for the platform with bulls and wheels: the base with the inscription is the key. Read left to right and top to bottom—but remember that meaning here flows in two channels at once. To see the network into which this artifact is wired, hold three anchors in your head:

Çineköy Bilingual — the Tarhunt stone itself, second half of the 8th century BC, discovered in 1997.

Karatepe-Aslantaş — the “sister” bilinguals of governor Azatiwata, key to the decipherment of Anatolian “hieroglyphs.” There is a Tarhunt statue/

Urikki/Warika in Assyrian sources — documentation of vassalage (tribute ca. 738 BC) and the political backdrop of Cilicia.

If time remains—study the mosaics from Misis, then return to the stelae: after this stone, the others begin to speak louder.

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