Two Finds, 2,000 Years Apart, From the Same Turkish Mound

One mound. Two objects. Nearly two thousand years between them. A stone seal bearing the name of a Bronze Age official and a gold leaf that a child wore against illness in Late Roman Anatolia were found at the same site in central Turkey, and together they sketch the remarkable depth of human occupation at a place the Konya Plain held important across civilizations that had almost nothing else in common.

Archaeologists excavating Turkmen Karahoyuk announced the discoveries on July 27, 2026. The project is co-directed by Michele Ruzgar Massa of Bilkent University and James Osborne of the University of Chicago, now in its third field season following six years of preliminary survey. Around 150 participants, including approximately 60 researchers from 13 countries, are investigating five excavation areas across the mound. Institutional partners include Bilkent, Chicago, New York and Pavia universities, the British Institute at Ankara, and Konya Metropolitan Municipality.

The Bronze Age Official

The older of the two finds is a stone seal inscribed in Hieroglyphic Luwian, recovered alongside two copper seals and a clay sealing. The stone seal carries both a personal name and an official title. The name has been read as Kurunti-ziti, a name connected to Kurunta, a significant deity in the Hittite and Luwian religious traditions of Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The title accompanying the name suggests the individual was a mid-level official rather than a supreme authority, but an official with a defined role in an identifiable administrative structure.

Luwian was an Indo-European language closely related to Hittite, spoken across ancient Anatolia and recorded both in cuneiform script and in a distinctive hieroglyphic writing system. Hieroglyphic Luwian combined syllabic signs representing sounds with logograms representing complete words or concepts. The hieroglyphic system first appeared on seals during the second millennium BC. Seals of this kind functioned as the identifying instruments of Bronze Age administration: pressed into wet clay to create a sealing, they authenticated documents, verified containers, and certified goods moving through a bureaucratic system. When the clay dried, the impression remained as a durable record of who had authorized what.

The Turkmen Karahoyuk seal adds one official’s name to a record that might otherwise be completely blank. Kurunti-ziti would have left no trace in the historical record without this object. The seal places him in a structured administrative hierarchy operating at the site around 1500 to 1400 BC, working within a system that used written names and titles to manage authority. Turkmen Karahoyuk had already attracted attention through the earlier discovery of a monumental Hieroglyphic Luwian inscription on the site. The new seal deepens the picture of a significant Bronze Age administrative center at a strategically placed position connecting different political and cultural zones of ancient Anatolia.

The Child’s Gold

The second object belongs to the fourth or fifth century AD, nearly two thousand years after the seal was made and used. It was found inside a small copper container, and within that container lay a gold sheet measuring approximately 0.1 millimetres in thickness, an almost impossibly fine layer of metal on which a text had been inscribed.

The excavation team believes the text was taken from the Bible, though the inscription has not yet been fully published and the specific passage has not been announced. The identification and interpretation of the text, once completed and published, will determine whether the words invoked healing, offered general divine protection, or drew on a passage specifically associated with children or with the vulnerability of illness.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, excavation co-director Massa compared the amulet’s protective function to that of an evil-eye charm and noted that objects of this type are uncommon. A comparable example, she said, had previously been discovered in Germany. Christian amulets containing sacred words, prayers, or biblical passages were used across the Late Roman world, and gold was particularly well-suited to this purpose. It was valuable enough to carry significance and resistant enough to corrosion that an extremely thin inscribed sheet could survive for centuries without the text being destroyed. The physical presence of holy words, carried on the body, was understood to extend divine protection to the wearer.

The amulet appears to have been made for and carried by a young child. In a period before antibiotics, before germ theory, before reliable treatment for most of what could kill a person in infancy or early childhood, the written word of a sacred text sealed in gold and carried close to the skin was not a superstition but a reasonable use of the most powerful protective technology the culture possessed. Someone wanted this child to survive. They put the words of their scripture inside a metal case and gave it to them to wear.

The Same Mound Across Time

Turkmen Karahoyuk’s archaeological layers extend from the Bronze Age through the Iron Age, the Hellenistic period, and Late Antiquity. The five excavation areas currently under investigation are producing material from across this entire span. What the Luwian seal and the gold amulet illustrate, each in its own way, is how a single place can carry completely different identities across successive human generations without losing its fundamental importance to whoever happens to be living there.

Kurunti-ziti was named after a deity of the Luwian religious world. The child who wore the gold amulet was being protected by the words of a biblical text. The languages, the writing systems, the religious frameworks, and the political structures had all changed completely between these two objects. What had not changed was the place, and whatever made it worth occupying, century after century, in the middle of the Konya Plain.

The precise biblical passage on the gold sheet is still unknown. When it is published, it will add another specific line to what is already a remarkably particular record: the name of an official who worked here 3,500 years ago, and the prayer that someone wrote in gold for a child who lived here 1,600 years after that.

Sources

Anadolu Agency (AA). Turkmen Karahoyuk excavation announcement, July 27, 2026. Co-directors: Michele Ruzgar Massa (Bilkent University) and James Osborne (University of Chicago). https://www.aa.com.tr/