Month: August 2011

Categories
Team members ZT Logbook

Assyrian language heard again at ancient Tushhan.

It has been over two millennia since the Assyrian language was last spoken at Ziyaret Tepe/Tushhan, but during a recent visit by Saliba Ozman, His Grace the Bishop of Mardin and Diyarbakir of the Syriac Orthodox Church (with the scarlet shirt in the photo) and Dairoyo (monk) Yousif Said of Halab (Aleppo), one of our team, Nineb Lamassu, gave them a tour in a modern variant of the ancient Assyrian tongue.

Nineb (on right) explaining the excavations to our visitors.

The bishop and his party came from the monastery of Deir al-Zafaran, so named because the monks used to produce the aromatic spice saffron to support the monastery located some 60km south of Tepe. Our team has visited the monastery in past seasons and enjoyed the hosipality of His Grace, so it was our pleasure to host him in return and provide a brief tour and lunch.

 

Kemalettin provides a tour of the excavations in Operation T.

 

We made an audio recording of Nineb’s tour and I have a brief five minute audio clip (link below) that I hope you will be able to download and enjoy.

Ozman Visit

Nineb is a language scholar and speaks most of the languages of the region, including Arabic, Turkish, Syriac, and Kurdish. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and is planning to start a PhD in philology and/or archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He’s been a member of the Ziyaret Tepe team for several years now and has learned a great deal about archaeology and the material culture of southeastern Turkey.

If you are ever in Mardin, a beautiful old city overlooking the northern plains of Syria from the Turkish mountains of the Tur Abdin, then plan a stop to see the monastery and enjoy the bishop’s hospitailty, the grand architecture and stunning views.

Categories
ZT Logbook

All work and no play?

You may have gotten the impression that at Ziyaret Tepe, it’s all work and no play. Well, we do work very hard. We start work just after sunrise, and work throughout the morning with a brief breakfast break. There is a siesta after lunch for a few hours, before returning to work at 4:30 after tea until the official end of the workday at 7pm. That’s a ten working hours at a minimum each day. We work six days a week, so our average work week is 60 hours. Some of us add considerably to that total by working through the siesta, in the late evenings, and on Fridays.

We do, however, enjoy some time to relax. At 7pm each evening, we gather before dinner for our official “happy hour” to enjoy a cold beer, some fresh hazelnuts, almonds, and other treats for which Turkey is famous, and to wind down from the days’ work and savor a brief respite from the heat.

After dinner, most of the team will spend some time sitting beneath our party lights (seen in the photograph above) in front of one of the houses, lounging in the hammock, chatting and rehashing the day’s events. An occassional backgammon, okey, chess or poker game has been known to break out in the somewhat cooler evening hours, but since the alarm rings at 4 or 4:30am, it’s typically early to bed.

On Fridays, we sometimes visit other sites for a brief tour and some time away from Tepe. A few weeks ago, we piled in the van for a trip to the spectacular medieval city of Hasankeyf carved out of cliffs on the Tigris just over 50km downstream from Ziyaret Tepe. We were treated to a presentation of some of the medieval pottery by the excavation team at the Hasankeyf dighouse, took a hike up the cliffs into the ruins of the 13th to 15th century city, and then cooled off at a fish restaurant overhanging the Tigris for lunch.

View of the Tigris River and a part of the city from inside one of the many rooms cut into the cliffs.

Last night, as a farewell party for Chelsea who left on the 4am flight this morning, we broke out a stash of marshmallows, chocolate bars and graham crackers after dinner, started up a bonfire, and made s’mores. For some of our European colleagues this was their first introduction to this most American of treats! We are grateful to an anonymous friend who donated the supplies from an American military base as marshmallows and graham crackers are not (yet) a staple in Diyarbakir.

The alarm clocks still rang at 4am, but Chelsea was already on her way home. Safe travels!

Categories
ZT Logbook

More on ancient dog burials.

One reader had asked for more information about the dog burial (or “canid” as it will be called in the professional literature) in Operation N and Tina has kindly supplied the following.

In general, we don’t have a large population of domestic dogs at Ziyaret Tepe found in any of the time periods. There have been seven canids from Assyrian contexts and four from Medieval contexts. According to Tina’s preliminary assessment, there is no evidence for wild dogs or wolves at the site. There are only a couple of butchered canids at the site, both from the Medieval period. Other than that, there are no other in situ articulated dogs at Ziyaret Tepe.

Here are some very general references about canid burials and the concept of “pets” in the Near East and Mediterranean and Europe. They cover a range of time periods as well. Tina also mentioned that there are numerous depictions of dogs in hunting scenes, looking rather nasty, from Assyrian artwork, but these are probably not pets in our sense of the word.

There was a pet cemetery found at Ashkelon dating to the 5th century BC.

In Mesopotamia, we find dog burials as well as dogs buried in association with humans.

There were also burials of dogs from medieval Germany, for example in Halberstadt from the 13th/14th cent. AD and from Siegburg, ca. 1600 AD.

Finally, there are also several instances of the Greeks having dog burials as well as dogs buried in association with humans.

Hope these references are useful! It is not an exhaustive list, but something to get people interested in the subject started.

Categories
ZT Logbook

Ancient Assyrians emerge in the lower town.

After excavating a considerable amount of Roman material in Operation U, John has finally reached the Late Assyrian building for which we’ve been searching! Immediately below the earlier Roman level in the lower town, John and his team found mudbrick walls of a different construction type and alignment, which we think are the Late Assyrian walls.

Unlike the Roman builders, the Assyrians did not use stone foundations for their walls at Ziyaret Tepe, instead digging trenches into the earth and setting their mudbrick wall foundations sometimes as much as 50cm (1.5 feet) below ground. While the mudbrick walls in Operation U appear to conform to the expected plan, what we don’t know yet is whether or not there are any preserved floor levels, or any in situ finds, which would help us definitively date the building and determine its function and history.

In this photograph, which is laboriously stitched together by Hilary from a number of different exposures, you can see the very tops of the preserved walls emerging. There is a long wall running diagonally across the trench from the lower left to upper right. The black and white scale is alongside the right edge of the wall and it is cut by a later burial, which you can see near the smaller scale in the foreground. There is a second wall, perpendicular to the first, in the lower right hand part of the trench. At this point the walls are only exposed for a few centimeters.

Finding mudbrick walls in such a difficult trench is part science, part art, and a lot of experience and patience. John is an expert at delineating the often elusive mudbrick walls at Ziyaret Tepe, and we hope to have a clear plan of the Assyrian building (if our suspicion on the dating is correct!) by the early part of September.

Categories
ZT Logbook

A brief note on the Assyrian palace.

We are making excellent progress in our excavations on the citadel mound. Dirk is busy planning out the northern part of the Bronze Palace and, we think, may have recovered evidence of an even earlier palace below the 8th century BC walls that we have been digging since 2000. Earlier I mentioned that an inscription, found elsewhere, mentions that king Ashurnasirpal II rebuilt the city of Tushhan in 882 BC and constructed a palace in the city, but we have not yet found any evidence for the 9th century BC remains, so this latest discovery might prove to be a real breakthrough. There’s not enough evidence yet to put a certain date on the earlier construction, but the early results are quite interesting. Stay tuned!

A view of the palace from the north. The area of interest is in the foreground of this picture next to the baulk (profile) on the right hand side. Despite being badly disturbed by later pits, Dirk has managed to patiently reconstruct the plan and building sequence of this area of the palace.
Categories
Team members ZT Logbook

Unexpected on the citadel mound.

On the citadel mound, a Medieval pit has revealed a surprising find – a completely intact canine burial at the bottom of what otherwise appeared to be a simple refuse pit.

As you know from earlier posts, we have lots of pits from the Medieval period cutting into the Bronze Palace, many of which have animal bones in them. Usually, though, the bones show evidence of butchering and burning and this dog was clearly different. In the photograph above you can see some baked bricks which are part of a Late Assyrian floor, clearly disturbed by a later pit.

Tina Greenfield, a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, is our team’s zooarchaeologist and she was out of the lab and into the field to help with the excavation and recording of the dog as soon as word got back from the excavations.

Tina has worked as a zooarchaeologist at sites across the globe, in Serbia, Romania, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, and Canada, where she's at home in Winnipeg. Her lab here in Tepe includes a modest comparative collection of the most common animals found at the site.

Tina has been on the project for a number of years and has analyzed tens of thousands of animal bones from all periods and many of our operations. She is writing her dissertation on the animal bones from the Late Assyrian period, comparing butchery and consumption practices in different areas of the ancient city. Just like today, the most common animals consumed in the Assyrian period were sheep and goats, the descendents of whom still are frequent visitors to the excavations.

Visitors in the lower town.

Back to the canine burial, Tina tells me that this was an adult male dog, at least 7-9 years old based on the fusion of his bones and his morphology (e.g., very long canines). We’re not sure how he died but interestingly we found five fish bones in association with the dog burial, a very rare find at Ziyaret Tepe. While we can’t be certain, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the dog’s last meal may have been fish from the Tigris River! Dirk has reported that in addition to the animal bones, the pit contained pottery sherds (they are ubiquitous on the site) and a small iron knife. The latter is now in the conservation lab where Lourdes and Friederike will have an opportunity to examine it more carefully and do some restoration work.

 

The dog skeleton was carefully cleaned in situ by Tina, then drawn by Paola, and photographed by Hilary. Dirk made precise measurements of its location and condition and then we removed the bones to the lab, where Tina will give the dog a full description in our project database. We don’t know the dog’s breed, but is was clearly a domesticated dog and, given his burial treatment, perhaps even a family pet.

Categories
ZT Logbook

ZT blog back on-line.

Apologies for the long wait for a post from the Ziyaret Tepe project. We temporarily lost internet connectivity, but are now back up and live from sunny Tepe. There has been plenty of action here over the past five days; I’ll try to catch you up on the highlights in a series of posts over the next day or so.

Categories
ZT Logbook

Roman architecture comes to light.

Our work in the lower town, Operations T and U, continues to be dominated by the Romans. We now have two clear levels of architecture in both areas with similar stone wall foundations, unknown in the Assyrian buildings, and associated pottery, glass, and a few coins, alas not very legible, suggesting a Roman occupation. In Operation T, there are at least two large rooms, with floors containing smashed pottery and small artifacts. For archaeologists, this is a real prize because it allows us to associate the artifacts with the actual last use of the floors. We are even more fortunate because one of the vessels on the floor of the northern room had a thin pocket of burnt (carbonized) seeds in the bottom. These seeds were carefully collected and wrapped in aluminum foil. They should provide excellent radiocarbon dates for the end of this structure giving us our first fixed point in time for these levels that post-date the Assyrian abandonment of Tushhan.

Judith and Kemalettin share a laugh during a break in digging in Operation T. You can see the Roman wall foundations to the right of the photograph.

In Operation U, we also have two levels which look very much like those in Operation T. The one difference we can see in this case is that the later stone wall foundations follow the line of an earlier mudbrick building, suggesting that the two phases of architecture were not separated by a large span of time. I’ll post a few photographs of some of the artifacts coming out of these levels soon. In the meantime here is one of Hilary’s great panoramic shots of the Roman walls in Operation T.

 

Categories
Team members

Lourdes and Friederike provide expertise in artifact conservation.

You may have noticed in my last post that the coin in the photograph was clean, even if it was old, worn, and hard to read. Of course, artifacts don’t come out of the ground looking that good. At Ziyaret Tepe, we have two trained artifact conservators who spend endless hours mechanically cleaning, stablizing, chemically treating, and restoring artifacts so they are ready for study and display. Theirs is one of the most technical and challenging fields of archaeology.

We have two excellent professional artifact conservators, both experienced team members at Ziyaret Tepe. Lourdes Mesa Garcia (above in our conservation laboratory) works as a freelance conservator out of Madrid, Spain and has worked at a number of sites. Most recently, she was senior Conservator for the “Colossi of Memnon Conservation Project of Amenhotep III Temple” in Egypt.

Friederike is cleaning the fibula under the microscope. Bronze requires specialist treatment to stop active corrosion ("bronze rot") and to stabilize the material once excavated.

Friederike Moll-Dau (above) works as a freelance conservator at different institutions in Germany and most recently spend a long period as Conservator at the China Project of the Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum of Mainz, Germany. This was collaborative project between the German Ministry of Education and Research and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology. Friederike worked in particular on fabrics from a queen’s tomb while in China.

Before and after photographs of a few artifacts. Notice how much more detail you can see after Lourdes and Friederike have completed their work. These artifacts are ready for the museum.

So here are some before and after pictures featuring some of Lourdes and Friederike’s work. From left to right are an Assyrian bronze arrowhead, a bronze fibula, and a frit stamp seal with a tree motif. As you can see from the scale, these are small objects and for most of each day Lourdes and Friederike are working at their microscopes, using scapels, drills, and brushes to clean even the most delicate artifacts. Some of our most exciting discoveries are made in the conservation laboratory, when the details of the corroded and encrusted artifacts we dig up are finally revealed.

Artifact conservation takes a great deal of training and a solid science background. Lourdes has a Diploma in Conservation and Archaeology and Paper Conservation, an MA in Preventative Conservation and Exhibitions, a degree in Geography and History, specializing in Art History, and an MA in Art History. Friederike has both a Diploma in the conservation of archaeological objects and an MA in Prehistoric Archaeology. They both have a wealth of knowledge and experience in ancient materials, modern chemistry, and patience! I’ll show you more of their work in future posts.

Categories
ZT Logbook

Roman coin provides clues to dating of Ziyaret Tepe.

One the more difficult parts of doing field archaeology is figuring out how old things are. There are a number of common techniques, such as radiocarbon dating which can be used to provide a rough date for organic materials like wood and seeds. Often we date artifacts stylistically since the manner in which people make things like pottery, stone tools, and houses changes through time. However, most of these techniques only provide a range of possible dates, often covering spans of decades or even centuries.

Coins provide an unusual dating possibility because they can often be dated to a much shorter period of time, sometimes even to a single year. We have to be careful in using coins as dating devices, however, because they are usually in use long after their manufacture. You still occasionally get US pennies with “wheat ears” on the reverse in change at stores even though they went out of use a few years before I was born (i.e., a long time ago, I guess I’m dating myself!).

In Operation N, we found a very nicely preserved coin which we think is datable to a very short time period in the early third century AD. We don’t have an expert numismatist on site, but Willis was able to track down a very similar coin on an internet database. If anyone knows better, let us know!

 

Our best interpretation at this time is that our find is a bronze coin with the bust of Elagabalus on the obverse and the initials “S.C.” on the reverse.

Willis explained to me that not all Roman coinage was minted from precious metals and much like today the Roman senate minted coins that were worth less than their denomination.  In these cases the reverse of the coin was inscribed with “S.C.” or “Senatus Consulto” meaning “by decree of the Senate”, i.e. the Senate has decreed its worth. This practice seems to peter out by the end of the 3rd century A.D. 

Elagabalus or “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus” (218-222 A.D.) was a young emperor from the city of Emesa (modern day Homs) in the Roman province of Syria. He was installed as emperor at 14 and assisinated by the Praetorian Guard at the age of 18. He was widely regarded as one of the most hated emperors by early historians; his reign was characterized by general debauchery and an attempt to depose Jupiter as the head of the pantheon in favor of a local Syrian diety El-Gabal. We think our coin was minted in Antioch at some point during his reign and helps date the locus in which it was found to a period during or after the early 3rd century A.D.