The 2,700-year-old inscriptions in the Karatepe Aslantaş Open Air Museum in the Kadirli district of southern Osmaniye province have been listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.The Karatepe inscriptions were put up in a site in Cilicia now known as Karatepe by an official named Azitiwada, perhaps in the eighth century BCE. He boasts of his military and political achievements, including rebuilding a city on the site (which he modestly names after himself). He also makes arrangements for sacrifices to Baal etc. at the local temple. He calls down the blessings of Baal upon himself and he curses anyone who removes his name from the inscription. (See, e.g., John C. L. Gibson, Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, Vol. 3: Phoenician Inscriptions [Oxford: Clarendon, 1982]), 41-64).The inscriptions, which feature both Anatolian hieroglyphs and Phoenician languages, in the Karatepe Aslantaş Open Air Museum, are on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, and studies about them have yielded interesting results.
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