Sedat Alp

Who was Sedat Alp?

Professor Sedat Alp was the first archaeologist in Turkey with a specialization in Hittitology, and is among the foremost names in the field.

Sedat Alp was born in Karaferye, present-day Veroia in Greece. His family moved to Turkey as a result of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923. In 1932, he earned a state scholarship opened under the personal auspices of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and was sent to the University of Leipzig to study prehistory, history, Hittitology, Sumerology, Assyriology, ancient Anatolian languages and cultures, as well as archaeology in general. Having earned his doctorate in the University of Berlin, he returned to Turkey in 1940 and started to teach Hittitology within Ankara University's Faculty of Languages, History and Geography. He became the dean of the faculty in 1959, continuing at the same time his work in the field. One of his most notable discoveries was the mound of Maşathöyük, which in the quantities of Hittite cuneiform tablets was second only to the Hittite capital at Hattusas modern Boğazkale, near Çorum.

Outside Turkey, Prof. Alp was awarded the Italian Commandatore of the Order of Merit of the Republic in 1957, the Order of Merit of the Presidency of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972, the French College of France medal in 1980, the German Great Cross of Merit with star and the Grande Ufficiale Order of Merit of the Italian Presidency of the Republic in 1991. From 1997 he held an honorary doctorate at the University of Würzburg, and from the following year was made a member of the British Academy and, for the contributions he made to the promotion of knowledge on the region's historical treasures, an honorary citizen of the city of Çorum in north-central Anatolia, where the Hittite capital was situated. He died in Ankara.