Agreement to the Sphinx of Hattusha
Press release from 05/13/2011
The German-Turkish expert talks on the Hittite Sphinx were concluded today in Berlin. It has been agreed that the fragmentary sculpture, which is over three thousand years old and has been in the Pergamon Museum on Berlin's Museum Island since 1934, will be handed over to Turkey as a gesture of German-Turkish friendship. The transfer is to take place by 28 November 2011. This day marks the 25th anniversary of the inclusion of Hattusha, the site where the artefact was found, on the Unesco World Heritage List. The handover marks the start of a series of measures to intensify German-Turkish cooperation between museums and archaeological projects.
Both sides agree that the sculpture is an individual case that cannot be compared with other cases. The legal assessment of the ownership situation has always been different on the German and Turkish sides because neither party has been able to clearly prove its legal position with documents. "As a special sign of the solidarity between the two countries, the SPK has decided to make this voluntary gesture," explained Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. "I am delighted that this agreement paves the way for long-term cooperation of a new quality in the cultural and scientific fields. Both sides will benefit enormously from this."
The sphinx comes from a gateway of the Hittite capital Hattusha (today Bogazköy) and is dated to the beginning of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC (14th/13th century). The fragments were found in 1907 during Turkish excavations in which German archaeologists were involved and were therefore not affected by the division of finds that applied to German excavations at the time. In 1915/1917, fragments of this sphinx and another and 10,000 Hittite clay tablets were sent to the Museum of the Ancient Near East in Berlin for restoration and scientific processing.
The two sphinxes from the gateway were found in a badly damaged condition, having been shattered into numerous individual pieces by fire. The sculpture fragments were reassembled in Berlin in the 1920s, but larger sections were irretrievably lost and had to be replaced with plaster. The better-preserved sphinx was returned to Istanbul in 1924, together with the first clay tablets, which had already been worked on, cleaned and restored, and is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The second, less well-preserved sphinx was placed in the Pergamon Museum together with the copy of its Istanbul counterpart. It remains unclear to this day whether the whereabouts of this second figure were agreed with the Turkish side. The handover of this second Sphinx, which was located in Berlin, was first demanded in 1938. In 1987, the remaining 7,000 clay tablets, which had remained in Berlin due to the war, were handed over to Turkey by the then government of the GDR. After reunification, Turkey intensified its efforts with regard to the sphinx remaining in Berlin.