The Arslantepe Mound, a 8000-year old archaeological mound was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites positioning Turkey as a destination with a number of recognition for its cultural heritage sites. This was announced during the recently concluded extended 44th UNESCO World Heritage Committee online session in Fuzhou, China.
According to a statement by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey, Arslantepe Mound had been on UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List since 2014, and it is one of Turkey’s “earliest religious and civil sites.”
With the mound, the number of Turkish sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List has reached 19.
“The archaeological site of Arslantepe is located on Southeastern Turkey on the Malatya plain, 5 kilometers from the city center and 15 km from the Euphrates River. Malatya is merely a one-hour flight distance from Istanbul. It is a 4-hectare and 30-meter high archaeological mound dominating the plain and formed by the superimposition of settlements for millennia from at least the 6th millennium BCE to the late Roman period,” UNESCO said.