Arslantepe, Malatya: Recent discoveries in the 2015 and 2016 seasons

The many decades of extensive and stratigraphic excavations in the mound of Arslantepe in the Malatya plain, not far from the right bank of the Euphrates, have revealed in detail a very long historical development bringing to light an uninterrupted series of superimposed settlements from the 5th to the 1st millennium BCE, which have highlighted fundamental processes of social, political and economic change, and intercultural interactions. Two periods, in particular, have clearly shown the centrality of the site and its important political role in the Upper Euphrates region, and, more generally, its historical significance as a place of cultural boundary in the network of interregional relations of the Near East: the first is the Late Chalcolithic period, which covers the entire course of the 4th millennium BCE, when a very early hierarchical and politically centralised society developed on the site; the second period refers to the 2nd and early 1st millennium BCE (Late Bronze-Iron Age), when Arslantepe was first affected by the expansion of the Hittite State towards the Euphrates, and then, after the "collapse" of the Central Anatolian empire, was the capital of a new autonomous political entity, the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Melid