Arslantepe,[a] also known as Melid, was an ancient city on the Tohma River, a tributary of the upper Euphrates rising in the Taurus Mountains.

[10] On the other hand, according to Martina Massimino (2023), the connections of this tomb with the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya kurgans are quite clear based on architecture and the metalwork.

After the end of the Hittite empire, from the 12th to 7th century BC, the city became the center of an independent Luwian Neo-Hittite state of Kammanu, also known as 'Malizi'.

[12] The encounter with the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (1115–1077 BC) resulted in the kingdom of Melid being forced to pay tribute to Assyria.

The site was visited by Gertrude Bell and Hansen van der Osten in the earliest part of the 20th century.

It was first investigated by the French archaeologist Louis Delaporte from 1932 to 1939, focusing on the Neo-Hittite remains in the northwest section of the mounds slope.

[19] The first Italian excavations at the site of Arslantepe started in 1961, and were conducted by a Sapienza University of Rome team under the direction of Professors Piero Meriggi and Salvatore M. Puglisi until 1968.

[23][24] In the early 21st century, the archaeological investigation was conducted by a Sapienza University of Rome team led by Marcella Frangipane.

[26] A few shards of Halaf period pottery were found and in Level VIII (early 4th millennium BC) there was a modest, village type Late Ubaid settlement.

In Level VII (LC 4, Middle Uruk) an isolated monumental building was found and the settlement grew to cover the entire mound.

[7] Most settlements formed as part of the Uruk Expansion, such as Jebel Aruda, Tell Sheikh Hassan, and Habuba Kabira, were abandoned at the end of the Late Chacolothic 5 period and anything of note removed, leaving little for archaeologists but walls and bits of pottery and clay sealings.

[28] In Level VIB1, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, a large cist burial was found, traditionally called the "Royal Tomb" amongst an otherwise low level settlement consisting of light wooden structures along with one mudbrick structure (Building 36) which appeared to be out of use at the time the tomb was built.

the 33rd to 31st centuries BCE, during the Early Bronze Age, and have been founds at Arslantepe by Marcella Frangipane of Sapienza University of Rome.

This is the rich “Royal Tomb” where high quality pottery, and a large number of refined metal objects, made with several kinds of copper based alloys, were found.

There’s a considerable similarity between these two groups of objects in the “hall of weapons”, and in the “Royal Tomb”, and the times of manufacture of some of them must have been pretty close together.

To the north were the metal-rich areas of the Black Sea coast; ores and metals from there were traded to Upper Mesopotamia in the south.

Already during the older Arslantepe VII period, metal objects could be found with a signature of ores from near the Black Sea coast.

[39] Nevertheless, according to Martina Massimino (2023), the widespread metal trade was rather conducted by the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya kurgans group which constructed the big chiefly tomb at Arslantepe.