Visitors both welcome, and not so welcome.

On Friday, the village of Tepe was enveloped in a great dust cloud which dropped visibility down to less than 200m (we couldn’t see the Tigris River from the citadel mound or the village from the dig house) and trapped in the heat, which rose to 48 degrees Celcius (118 degrees Fahrenheit). The nights, usually considerably cooler in late July, remained uncomfortably hot. Usually dust storms blow in with a great wind and are gone within half a day, but this unwelcome visitor stayed with us through Saturday night.

Sunday morning came with welcome relief, the skies had cleared and temperature dropped considerably. We cleaned off the layer of brown dust that had blanketed everything in the camp and life got back to normal.

We then had some welcome visitors on Sunday morning; a rare treat in Diyarbakir province. Professor David Schloen from the University of Chicago and team of archaeologists and specialists working with him stopped by during a long weekend trip from their excavations at the Iron Age site of Zincirli, ancient Sam’al, some 360km west of Ziyaret Tepe. They toured the mound and our current excavations and came down to the dig house to meet our staff and see some of the recent finds. You can find out more about the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli at their website, including more details on the discovery of the inscribed stelae of Katumuwa in 2008, which many of you read about in the New York Times.