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.