Ancient Kadesh Peace Treaty Fragment Unearthed in Turkey

A small fragment of clay, roughly 3,200 years old, turned out to carry a striking detail: rules for welcoming back the people who fled a war.

Archaeologists excavating Hattusa, the former capital of the Hittite Empire in central Türkiye, have identified a cuneiform tablet fragment as part of a copy of the Kadesh Peace Treaty, the agreement between the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III that ended decades of war in the 13th century BCE. It counts among the oldest known international peace agreements, and this newly confirmed piece adds to the surviving copies scholars have been piecing together for more than a century.

According to Türkiye's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which announced the identification on September 21 to mark the International Day of Peace, the fragment came from near Building E in the Büyükkale area of Hattusa, the citadel of the ancient city in the Boğazkale district of Çorum Province. Researchers spent roughly a year studying the piece before concluding it belonged to one of the Akkadian cuneiform copies of the treaty.

A treaty written on clay, silver, and temple walls

The Kadesh Peace Treaty followed the Battle of Kadesh, a huge clash of chariot armies fought over control of ancient Syria. Tens of thousands of soldiers took part, and the result was effectively a stalemate. The two kingdoms negotiated an agreement that promised what the United Nations describes as eternal friendship, lasting peace, territorial integrity, nonaggression, extradition, and mutual help, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.

The diplomatic originals were inscribed on silver tablets, which have not survived. What remains are copies: hieroglyphic versions carved onto the walls of Egyptian temples, and Akkadian cuneiform copies on clay tablets kept in the Hittite archives at Hattusa. The first fragments of the Hittite copies were recovered during excavations at the site between 1906 and 1912, and pieces now sit in museums in Istanbul, Ankara, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.

This latest Kadesh Peace Treaty fragment preserves portions corresponding to Articles 12 through 20 of the treaty. Only one side of the tablet survived, but the remaining cuneiform text addresses the people who fled from one kingdom and sought refuge in the other. The agreement required fugitives to be returned while placing limits on what could be done to them afterward, including provisions relating to the protection of their homes from destruction. According to ZME Science's account of the ministry's release, the rules barred punishments like gouging eyes or cutting ears and feet, and extended protection to the fugitives' families as well.

Ancient rules for displaced people

The ministry's announcement carried a deliberately modern note. "We have found traces of peace, thousands of years old, in the soil of Anatolia," said Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Türkiye's minister of culture and tourism, in a translated statement, as reported by ZME Science. It is hard to miss the parallel with today's arguments over how displaced people are treated when they cross borders, and the September 21 timing made the connection explicit.

Scholars caution against reading the fragment as a modern human rights document. As Popular Science reported, the regulations differ from present-day asylum protections and read more like mutual obligations agreed upon by Ramesses and Hattusili. Still, the section shows two worn-down rival kingdoms finding common ground on the treatment of displaced people more than 3,000 years ago, which explains why the find drew attention beyond archaeology circles.

More pieces may surface. Fieldwork at Hattusa continues under the Istanbul branch of the German Archaeological Institute, led by Andreas Schachner, and researchers hope further fragments will help reconstruct the full Hittite Akkadian tablets of the treaty. Hattusa, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, was the political and administrative center of one of the dominant powers of the Late Bronze Age, and its archives keep adding new material, and this Kadesh Peace Treaty fragment is the latest, from one of the ancient world's earliest experiments in written diplomacy. It lands in a busy season for archaeology, alongside the effort to read the burned Herculaneum scrolls and the search for Empress Dowager Huayang's tomb in China.