Arslantepe is a tall mound on the plain just outside Malatya in eastern Turkey, and it hides one of the longest continuous stories of human settlement in the region. The name means lion hill, after the stone lions found at its gate, but the earliest layers go back to around 6000 BC, and the people who lived here over the next seven thousand years built, burned and rebuilt a succession of towns on the same spot. In the fourth millennium BC the site held a palace complex with storerooms, administrative rooms and wall paintings, which archaeologists regard as one of the earliest signs of organised state power in the Near East, with clay seals used to control the goods. Arslantepe also yielded some of the oldest known swords, made of arsenic bronze.
In the Iron Age the city became a capital of a small Neo-Hittite kingdom, called Melid, and a monumental gateway guarded by carved stone lions led into the citadel. The Assyrians took it in the eighth century BC. A pair of the stone lions is now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, though copies and parts of the gate remain on site. The mound was added to the World Heritage list in 2021, and visitors can walk among the mud-brick walls under a protective roof.
The setting is the broad valley of the Euphrates, with Malatya, the city of apricots, nearby, and the area is one of the biggest producers of dried apricots in the world. In early spring the orchards bloom white and pink across the plain. Malatya was badly damaged by the earthquake of February 2023, which hit eastern Turkey hard, and the city is still rebuilding, so visitors should expect road works and some closed buildings.
The riding in the area is generally easy, on wide roads across the plain, with the high Taurus mountains to the south and the river gorge to the east. Traffic around Malatya is dense, and trucks use the main roads heavily. The summer heat is very strong, and the best times are spring and autumn. Malatya, about five kilometres away, has fuel and every kind of service, so planning is not an issue. Buy a bag of apricots, fresh in June or dried at any time of year, and have a glass of tea with them.