Arslantepe & Battalgazi

Five thousand years ago, on a mound at the edge of the Malatya plain, a scribe was sealing the mouth of a storage jar with clay and pressing his seal into it… An ordinary day, an ordinary task. Yet who could have guessed that, thousands of years later, this small gesture would be read as the trace of one of the world’s oldest bureaucracies? Arslantepe, right on Malatya’s doorstep, is just such a place…