Author: matney

In a pit cutting into the earliest level of the Bronze Palace, Dirk and his team made an unexpected discovery – a complete, unbaked clay tablet with cuneifom writing. Here’s a photo of what it looked like when it came out of the ground. Not much to look at! There were two small fragments that were broken off during excavation; the tablet was damp and very fragile.

Under the expert attention of our project conservator, Lourdes Mesa Garcia (a private conservator from Madrid), the fragments were joined to the tablet and the entire artifact was cleaned using a needle, a tiny soft paint brush, and a very gentle air blower. We let the tablet dry for four days (yes, I’ve been holding out on you) before cleaning it to clarify the signs.

Look at the difference!

John has made a preliminary assessment and determined that the tablet is an accounting list of 25 textiles of several different types. There is a date on the tablet, but only giving the day and month. Sadly, no year is recorded. There are also two Assyrian personal names.

What is particularly important about this tablet is that it appears to be Middle Assyrian in date, meaning that it was written between (very roughly) 1300 – 1050 BC, several centuries before all the other tablets we have found. Assyriologists like John can date tablets according to their paleography (broadly, the study of ancient languages, including their written form)

In ancient Assyrian, just like other languages, the vocabulary, grammar, and shapes of the letters (here cuneiform wedges) change over time. Think of the differences in language and writing between Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and a modern novel – all written in English. Over time, the written form of cuneiform changed and two of the cuneiform signs used in our tablet were used during the Middle Assyrian period, but are not found in Late Assyrian texts; their archaic form suggests the earlier date. This is the earliest written material we have from Ziyaret Tepe. We also know that the palaces in Assyrian cities were often involved in textile production and although we can’t say that this tablet proves this was the case at Assyrian Tushhan, it is one possible explanation for why such a tablet would have been stored in the palace archives.

One of our on-going projects this year has been the recovery and analysis of paleobotanical samples: charred seeds, wood charcoal, and other plant remains recovered via flotation. When we reach a floor deposit, or a hearth with ashy remains, or a storage pit, we take a sample of the soil and separate out the earth from the organic remains by floating the samples in water. The earth dissolves, rocks, pottery and small artifacts sink, and what is left floating are charred seeds.

After the samples are dried, our specialists – Melissa Rosenzwieg and Lucas Proctor – examine the ancient plant remains present in the soil under a microscope and identify them by comparing them to a reference collection taken from known species. This is a time-consuming and tedious task, and Melissa and Lucas have been working hard all season to classify the plants used for food, animal fodder, fuel, and even the weeds that tell us about the diet, economy and environment of Ziyaret Tepe’s ancient inhabitants.

Melissa, a PhD student from Chicago, has been here previously and is primarily concerned with our Assyrian levels. Lucas is one of our new faces. He is a new PhD student at the University of Connecticut and was working in northern Iraq before coming to Turkey. Here they are consulting over a sample in our field laboratory.

Lucas’ task at Ziyaret Tepe was to analyze the paleobotanical remains from the Roman period buildings excavated in earlier seasons. He just finished the identification of the last sample this morning and now will undertake a statistical analysis of the counts before writing his final report. Overall, the Roman samples generated an array of botanic species that have not been found in the Assyrian samples, suggesting that the flora surrounding Ziyaret Tepe was in some ways quite different 1,000 years after the Assyrians left Tushan.  Lucas also told me that we have evidence for the Romans growing grapes and utilizing poppies.

There was also a single grain of rye from his samples, the first we’ve seen of rye at Ziyaret Tepe. What to make of a single piece of rye? Well, we have to wait for the analysis before drawing any conclusions, but our picture of Roman life here has already improved.

We’ll, we’re two weeks into the digging and making good progress in four excavation areas.

On the citadel mound, Dirk Wicke has been continuing to excavate the earliest levels of the Bronze Palace. As you might recall from earlier posts, the Bronze Palace is a monumental mudbrick building on the eastern edge of the citadel. We had previously established that the building had three major building phases during the nearly three centuries in which it was in use (c. 882 BC to 611 BC). Because it is deeply buried under later rennovations, the earliest phase of the palace has been the least explored. This season, Dirk has removed a section of the second phase building over an area of about 10m by 10m (30 feet by 30 feet) and has exposed more of the earliest building level, which we believe to be 9th century BC in date. In a few places, Dirk and his team have reached the very bottom of the Late Assyrian palace and, below the foundations, have found a cobbled floor and parts of two walls that belong to an even earlier large building dating to the Middle Assyrian period (very roughly 1300-1050 BC here). We know that around 882 BC, the late Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II claimed to have completely rennovated an abandoned palace built by an earlier ruler at Tushhan. We hoping for more evidence to help us securely date these earliest levels below the Bronze Palace.

In the lower town, we have three operations running simultaneously. Mary Shepperson, a recent PhD from University College London, has returned to the project after several years away. It is great to have Mary back on site (and congrats, Dr. Shepperson!). Her excavation area is Operation Y located in the southwestern corner of the lower town. This is probably our most ambitious trench given it’s size (10m by 20m) and that we have less than five weeks of actual digging time. In Operation Y, our past geophysical surveys suggested that the city wall makes a sharp jog here and for years I have thought that there was a large building with rooms arranged around four open courtyards tucked into the jog in the city wall. Mary is now looking for physical proof of that building. She has found the city wall as well as a few later graves – you can see her excavating one above. Mary is close to the depth where we expect to find the tops of the walls of my hypothetical building. Fingers crossed.

John MacGinnis is overseeing the excavations in Operation W where he is looking at the earliest levels of a large mudbrick building that was excavated in the lower town from 2001-2010. Like with Dirk’s project, John is hoping to find traces not only of the earliest Late Assyrian building phases, but to see if there were even earlier building levels. You can see his excavation area below.

Finally, Kemalettin is making great progess on the private housing located adjacent to the city gate in Operation K, as I reported earlier. He extended his trench to the east and now has three clearly defined rooms. I’ll get you more details soon.

About 90km north of Diyarbakir there is a place in the Taurus Mountains where the Dibni Su, one of the two main sources of the Tigris River, comes flowing out of a large cave. The Dibni Su actually originates much deeper in the mountains, but the ancient Assyrians thought this to be the source of the Tigris and it is a dramatic landscape that had great significance to them. The modern name of the place is Birkleyn Gorge.

 We know that the Assyrians marked this spot as significant since there still exist four small rock inscriptions made by the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 BC) and Shalmaneser III (858-824 BC): three in the lower cave from which the Dibni flows, and one in an upper cave a few hundred feet so higher up in the mountains. We have textual and other representational art that tells us that the kings presided over commemorative events that happened here three thousand years ago. This was an area far from the Assyrian frontier and one has to imagine that this was an arduous journey for the Assyrian king and his court to make, deep into territory outside of their military control.

If you look at the above photograph you will see two black spray-painted graffiti on the far left (a modern form of rock inscriptions, I guess). The Dibni Su flows out of the cave in this photograph and in places within the cave is well over one’s head in depth. The photograph below shows the area with the two black graffiti in greater detail and you can see that just above the spray paint, and a bit to the right of a circular broken area on the rock face, is a figure of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. To the king’s left is a cuneiform inscription, barely legible on the uneven surface. He is seen in profile, with a flat topped hat and flowing robes.

During our bayram holidays, we made the long drive from Bismil north across the last vestiges of the northern Tigris River valley and into the mountains to see the inscriptions. It was quite an adventure. The lower cave (seen in the photographs above) requires a bit of shallow wading and navigating some steep slopes to find. The upper cave in the Birkleyn Gorge can only be accessed by a trail crossing a narrow rocky ledge at one point and requiring a scramble over boulders with uneven footing well-worn by visitors. The inscription at the upper cave sits at the entrance. Here Willis is pointing to part of a cuneiform inscription (it is the word “Assur”) and you can see the cuneiform wedges quite clearly (again beneath a modern graffiti). The figures of the king in all four inscriptions are small, maybe three feet tall.

It was quite an interesting trip and a nice break from work at the dighouse. The next day I heard a bit of (cheerful) grumbling about aching legs from the climb and a few calls to revisit the cool caves and icy waters of the Dibni Su as we returned to hot and dusty Bismil and to work on site at the end of bayram.

It was certainly a busy week for us and there is plenty to report from the field. The end of Ramadan in Turkey is marked by a long bayram holiday that just started, so after a shortened working day yesterday, our local workers, government representative, and house staff left for their homes and families to celebrate. We will be working at the dighouse during the holiday which ends on Saturday. This is a perfect time to catch up on my blog entries and tell you about some of the interesting finds we’ve made.

One of our most important goals for this season is the excavation of Assyrian private houses in the lower town. Archaeologists are just as interested in the lives of everyday people as we are about the “great events” of history, palaces and kings and this season we are reopening excavations in Operation K, an area we first excavated nearly a decade ago, where Kemalettin found the remains of a modest house built adjacent to the interior of the southern city wall. One focus of this new study is an intensive study of the ancient plant and animal remains preserved within the house which tell us about the diet, economy, and environment in which the Assyrians lived.

Kemalettin started work in a 5m by 10m area (roughly 15 feet by 30 feet), in a trench immediately adjacent to the original Operation K excavations. His trench is located in a field that was recently plowed, so the top 25 or 30cm (10-12 inches) of the soil were completely jumbled up and our workers quickly removed this layer. Immediately below, Kemalettin and his team found an area of paved cobbles with part of a ceramic drain in the northern part of the trench. The whole area was badly disturbed by modern plowing, so it is difficult to say much about this pavement other than it was perhaps a courtyard or a street and, given what we have learned elsewhere on the site, may be of Late Roman date. We found part of a Roman period roof tile, but very little in the way of clearly Roman period materials.

More importantly, Kemalettin was also able to find the tops of the mudbrick walls that form the extension of the plan of the Assyrian house we excavated earlier. This is very exciting since it means that we will have plenty of time to explore the house even with a shortened digging season.

We found a grave to the south of the OpK house, outside of the house itself but adjacent to the wall, which appears to be Assyrian in date. One of the questions that we hope to answer this year is where the non-elite Assyrians at Tushhan buried their dead. There is no external graveyard for the site (although some of you will remember Operation S where we explored an area south of Ziyaret Tepe where local farmers said they found a possible burial site or graveyard, but where we were unable to locate any cultural remains). At the end of this week, Kemalletin found two additional burials, both inside of the house and immediately below the floor so we now know that at least some of the dead at ancient Tushhan were buried inside their houses. I’ll share some details in later blog post.

It’s late July and some of you have been wondering if the Ziyaret Tepe project was ever going to come on-line! We had a few delays in getting our excavation permit this year – it is a complex process and changes in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism over the winter meant that our usual start date in early July was pushed back nearly three weeks, but the good news is that the team has made it to the field and we are starting work. This is our last excavation season and we have a great deal we want to accomplish. I hope you have time to follow along.

The first few team members arrived last Friday evening in Diyarbakir, hurried down to the schoolhouse in Bismil that is our base of operations again this year, and started setting up the camp. Over the weekend, while we transformed the schoolhouse into a dighouse, our numbers swelled to over a dozen archaeologists. There are some familiar names and faces, and a few new ones. I’ll introduce them to you over the coming weeks.

On Monday morning, we were joined by our government representative for the year, Ms. Esme Bedirhanoglu, an archaeologist who works at the Diyarbakir Museum. Esme hanim will be helping us navigate the local bureaucracy and overseeing our progress. On Monday, we also registered our work force of 48 local laborers for social security and tax purposes, and went on a shopping spree to make sure Necmi had enough food to feed our hungry team. In the evening we negotiated with local land owners for the rental of two parcels where we want to work, planned out our first day’s work, and got the equipment ready to go. A long, productive Monday.

Alarm clocks rang at 3:30am this morning and by four o’clock the breakfast table was buzzing with excitement for the first digging day. (Mind you, that 4am buzz quiets down pretty quickly as the season works it’s way into a routine). Tractors, shovels, wheelbarrows, canvas for shades, surveying equipment, and nearly sixty people ascended the high mound on Tuesday morning to start work. Hard to believe we landed in Diyarbakir less than four days ago!

On the high mound, the workmen spent the day cleaning out Operation AN, which was filled with a good thistle crop after heavy spring rains. Readers of our previous blogs will remember that this is the area of the Bronze Palace, where Dr. Dirk Wicke from Mainz University has been working for a number of seasons.

We have three excavations planned in the lower town this summer, which I will tell you much more about in a later post. Here the workmen are just breaking ground in Operation Y, directed by Dr. Mary Shepperson of University College London. The lower town is not currently being used for crops, as you can see, although many of the fields surrounding the site have a healthy crop of corn, which makes a change from previous years. Very few of the agricultural fields are still being planted in cotton, and a few were planted in wheat (already harvested), a traditional crop grown in this region for many millennia. Below the surface here in Operation Y, we think that there is a large mudbrick building of Late Assyrian date (c. 9th – 7th centuries BC) of a type typically called an “arsenal”. More on that later. As you can see Mary has quite a bit of digging over a 10m x 20m area before we get down to architectural remains.

By the way, the new header and these photographs were taken by our new photographer for the 2013 season, Ian J. Cohn. You’ll meet him later as well.

David Connolly of the British Archaeological Jobs Resource just published a nice write-up of our work on his Past Horizons website. Check it out, and send the link to anyone who may be interested. Thanks, David, we appreciate the support!