A room of its own in the Van Museum holds a baker’s dozen of stone figures cut into limestone slabs. They were found by chance in July 1998 on the northern slope below the castle hill in the centre of Hakkâri, in south-eastern Türkiye near the borders with Iran and Iraq. The find turned out to be a unique group of monumental grave markers, dated to the fifteenth to eleventh centuries BC—the Bronze Age, or the very beginning of the Iron Age. They range from seventy centimetres to three metres ten in height, and each is worked on one face only.
What are we looking at? A pantheon? Gravestones? A gallery of chieftains? There is no shortage of theories. The museum label describes them as “dynamic hunters and nomads who lived in tents and belonged to a dynasty grown rich on the metal trade.”
The visual code: wineskins, daggers and codpieces
Of the thirteen, eleven are male. The figures are shown with arms schematically bent, holding a leather drinking skin in both hands. At the waist, a broad belt with a short curved dagger; below it, a band with a characteristic knob—a codpiece, by which the sex was evidently indicated. The two female figures carry no weapons and hold nothing at all. This is hardly accidental: in a visual system where every gesture signifies, such details read as code.
On one stele a warrior holds an axe by the blade; on another he extends a staff, as though proposing an alliance. The face on a third gazes out with mournful superiority; on an eighth, almost with defiance. These stones are silent, but the gestures and the eyes speak for them.
A comic strip in stone
On another stele there is a miniature female figure with a jug: a servant, perhaps. On another, a naked youth with raised arms: perhaps a defeated enemy. These scenes are fitted into the space around the principal figure, like commentary on his life or his standing.
One stele turns into an outright comic strip: in the upper left corner a snake with a frog, in the right a long-tailed horned creature, and beneath the elbow of the central figure a little man with his arms up, holding what look like miniature copies of the weapons ranged around the warrior. This is not only a portrait but a plot.
Look, too, for the tents. Several stelae carry dome-shaped shelters of the kind used on the steppe—the detail that gave the museum its line about people who lived under canvas.
From the Altai to the Pyrenees
The composition, iconography and scale of these monuments align them with funerary stelae from the Pyrenees to the Altai. The Hakkâri series is unusually rich in detail, but it sits at the core of a whole chain: the map on the museum panel shows stelae of this type distributed across Eurasia, from Hungary to Mongolia. A figure with hands at the belly and implements ranged alongside is a universal archetype of the steppe—but only at Hakkâri is it cut with such sharp individuality. The faces are alive, expressive, very nearly portraits.
Portraits of the dead, or faces of gods?
Precisely so—hands at the belly, a skin in the hands, weapons at the sides—is how skeletons often lie in ancient burials across the steppe belt. The stelae seem to record not only the appearance but the position of the body, remembering the posture of the dead as something ritually significant.
The parallels suggest themselves. In Middle Kingdom Egypt there are funerary reliefs where the deceased is shown with offerings, in a strictly prescribed pose, surrounded by symbols of status. In Roman Egypt, the Fayum portraits, set into the coffin as a personal likeness. And at Hakkâri we have carefully recorded figures, each with his own face, his own set of objects, his own arrangement of hands. These stones are not only signs but portraits.
A country known only from its enemies’ files
And there may be names to go with the faces—though not names these people wrote down themselves.
Many scholars place in this region an independent kingdom called Hubushkia, centred on the headwaters of the Great Zab, which appears in the Assyrian annals of the tenth and ninth centuries BC. Assyrian expeditions crossed it repeatedly, taking tribute from its kings, or taking it by force when they declined to offer any. Squeezed between Assyria to the south-east and Urartu to the north-west, Hubushkia eventually lost its independence and disappeared.
The excavator of the stelae has suggested they may have belonged to the rulers of Hubushkia while the kingdom was still its own. And here is the part worth pausing on: we know the names of some of those rulers—Kaki, Data—because Assyrian scribes wrote them down while recording what had been extracted from them.
So the pattern from the previous room repeats itself. There the self-description was Biainili and the label was Urartu, supplied from Nineveh. Here we may have the faces of a people who left no writing at all, whose kings survive as two names in somebody else’s tribute list, and who look out at us holding a wineskin, with an expression that gives nothing away.
