Category: ZT Logbook

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!

Tina, our faunal analyst, reports that a find unique to Ziyaret Tepe was uncovered last week coming from the building, perhaps the residence of a wealthy person, that Kemalletin is excavating located in the lower town (Operation M). The ulna (lower forearm) of a lion (Panthera leo) was uncovered from inside a tannur (oven) in a room of the residence. It appears that the bone was modified into a tool, and although not evident from this photo, the bone is significantly polished. The shape of the original bone has been modified due to the intense polishing; however, it is unclear at this point what function the tool/ornament played. This discovery is quite exciting since it is rare to have lion bones uncovered from Late Assyrian contexts.

The lion was a symbol for royalty during the Assyrian Empire and one has to wonder what this bone represented in this context at Ziyaret Tepe. Many people are familiar with the Assyrian fascination with lions from the famous wall reliefs of King Ashurbanipal from the North Palace at Nineveh in northern Iraq. While we don’t have any carved limestone wall reliefs at Ziyaret Tepe, we do now have a lion!

In an earlier post, I explained that we reached the lower floor of the pebbled courtyard in Operation W, demonstrating that there was an earlier phase of the large mudbrick building we excavated there as Operation G/R in 2001-2010. This building was tentatively identified as a treasury associated with a temple to the goddess Ishtar at Ziyaret Tepe, which we have yet to locate, based on a cache of cuneiform texts discovered in 2002-2003 and published some years ago by Prof. Simo Parpola of the University of Helsinki. Most of those texts were economic in nature, although they also contained a very important letter from the end of the Assyrian empire.

In order to test whether other parts of the building show the same stratigraphic sequence, John laid out a trench over Room 10 of the Operation G/R which was a storage room filled with pithoi, and was one of two rooms which yielded cuneiform texts earlier. In 2003, we stopped the excavations at the floor level and, given that there was now the possibility of an earlier floor based on our 2012 sounding in Courtyard 11, we decided to reopen Room 10.

Having cleared away the soil down to the plastic sheeting that we use to cover the bottoms of our trenches before we backfill them, John proceeded to remove the upper floor and began excavation in the fill below. Within a few hours, a new cuneiform tablet – unfortunately broken into several pieces – was recovered from the new Operation W excavations.

The tablet is covered in loose dirt and is still damp and we are waiting for it to dry out before Lourdes can reassemble the tablet and clean it. Once it has been repaired and consolidated, John will make an exact transcription of the text and begin the process of translation. With luck, we should be able to at least describe the contents in broad terms before the end of the season.

We have only two more digging days left in Operation W (after a three day holiday starting tomorrow and marking the end of Ramadan), so there is still a chance that more cuneiform tablets might be found above the lower floor of Room 10.

The last few days have been a whirlwind of activity at the dig as all of the excavation units are now down to the floor levels and we are uncovering the important primary contexts. We have made some really interesting finds and I’ll be putting up a number of posts in the next day or so to catch everyone up on the action.

You’ll recall that Operation W was a small sounding to learn whether or not an unusual stone feature interrupting a mosaic pavement that we excavated back in 2004 was a grave. We had suspected that it might be a grave based on its size and the observation that Assyrian burials are often found beneath the floors of buildings. In the case of the Bronze Palace, the cremation burials we found earlier were beneath a courtyard pavement, so it made sense that there might be a grave beneath the mosaic.

John carefully lifted the stones, putting wooden shoring around the cut to ensure that the mosaic itself would not be harmed. He then excavated the soil beneath, which was harder and more compact than is typical of a grave. After about 20cm he found another cobbled floor which represents an earlier phase of the Late Assyrian building.

The photograph above shows before (left) and after (right) pictures of the sounding beneath the stones. As you can see, we have taken care not to damage the mosaic. In fact, when we were done, John replaced the large stones exactly in their original position.

Here you can clearly see the lower pavement beneath the cobbled surface. So, while there was no grave, we learned that this part of the building did have a substantial earlier occupational phase. This is important and has led us to open up another area of the same building to see if we find evidence of a similar earlier phase there. For now, we have to conclude that the larger stones represented a simple rough repair in the finer mosaic floor of the Late Assyrian building.

Work is progressing steadily in Operation V. The photograph below was taken just at daybreak this morning, when the light is still gentle enough to get a decent exposure. What you see here is our normal excavation square, 10 meters on a side (the red and white scale bar in the back is 2m (6 feet) long. There’s a lot going on in this photograph, but it takes archaeological training to know what you’re seeing.

I’ve annotated the photograph here so I can describe what we have discovered so far in terms of architecture and other features.

We have two phases of occupation. We think they are both Assyrian in date, although we need to finish excavating to know for sure. The earlier building phase is below the later and is represented by the mosaic floor that you can see in the foreground, outlined in purple. On either side, the courtyard is flanked by very poorly preserved mudbrick walls, shown here in red. As you can see, on the right side of the mosaic floor there is a place where the mosaic makes a jog. We know from experience that this represents a doorway from the courtyard into another room, unexcavated, to the right of our current trench. The mosaic has been damaged by two later pits, the green circles, which cut into the mosaic.

About halfway across the trench, you see a low rise where we have not yet excavated to the earlier floor. This higher level is also a floor, stratified above the mosaic, that may represent a later use of the same room, or another building altogether. On top of this floor is a tannur, or bread oven, highlighted in yellow. In fact there are two tannurs, but the other one is impossible to see in this photograph. There are a few later stone features, including a door socket, sitting atop the earlier (red highlighted) walls which also belong to the later floor.

You see that we are less than a meter below the surface, so preservation is not very good. You can also observe that these two occupational layers are right on top of one another. There is very little depth to the deposit. That said, we can’t yet tell how much time elapsed between the lower and upper building phases; it could be a matter of a few years, or decades, or even centuries.

The tannur is also instructive. Those of you who read earlier postings will recall that I talk about the discovery of a pithos (large storage jar) whose rim was torn off but was otherwise appeared intact. Well, as we continued to excavate, we discovered that this was not a pithos at all! Rather, whoever built the tannur seen above incorporated the rim sherds of a discarded pithos into the oven walls. Ancient recycling! Our initial idea that these were storage jars appears wrong; one learns to revise interpretations as new data are uncovered.

When I left them a few hours ago, John and his team were busy sampling and excavating the later earthen floor and removing the last traces of that phase. Stay tuned.

Continued excavation by John, Kristina, and Charlie in Operation V has brought to light some interesting details regarding the building we thought might represent an Assyrian barracks or storeroom. The mudbrick walls are quite close to the surface and badly preserved, as I noted in a previous post “Some Early Finds”. We have now defined the pebbled floor and the lines of the walls surrounding it.

To the south, in the interior of the southernmost of the two large buildings, we found the tops to two large storage jars immediately below the plow zone. These vessels are called pithoi (singular, pithos) and some from Ziyaret Tepe are nearly 2m (6 feet) tall. They are a well known Assyrian type. The Operation V pithoi appear to be standing on a floor, or set into the floor or possibly into a mudbrick bench. The tops of the vessels are badly damaged, almost certainly by the modern plows which can penetrate up to 35-40cm in depth. The rest of the vessel bodies, as far as we have excavated, seem to be intact.

This suggests that the Operation V buildings were used for storage and when the building was abandoned, the huge storage jars were left behind. What were they storing in the pithoi? That’s a great question and we will only know through continued digging. With luck we should be able to answer that question sometime in the not-too-distant future once we get to the floor of the building and the bottom of the jars.

In our search for Assyrian domestic houses in the lower town, we once again appear thwarted, this time by the presence of a very large Late Assyrian building. Today, Kemalletin uncovered the top of a 2m (6 ft) thick mudbrick wall in Operation M where we had hoped to find the modest dwellings of commoners.

Digging at a depth of just under 1m (3ft), Kemalettin recovered the first faint traces of mudbricks: two walls forming a corner at the northern edge of the trench. Adjoining the 2m thick wall is a perpendicular wall, perhaps about 80cm thick. At first glance, it seems possible that the thicker wall is an exterior wall for a large building, while the smaller wall may be an internal or partition wall, but at this point this is largely conjecture.

Importantly, we also found no evidence (or failed to find evidence) of the Romans, whose remains in the western lower town in 2011 foiled our search for Assyrian private houses in an area where geophysical survey was very suggestive. Kemalettin’s area in Operation M this year has a few pits cut into it, but no significant occupational levels above the Late Assyrian building.

We are dating the walls on the basis of the associated pottery, but according to our earlier work in Operation M, the floors should be located about 50cm (1.5 ft) below where we are excavating now so even this dating must remain tentative. By mid-week, we should be down to a primary Late Assyrian floor and hopefully the artifacts found on the floor will provide some clues as to the function of this large building in Operation M. We should know a lot more in a few days.

I keep posting about Operations M, N, V, and W so I figured I should show you a map and a picture to orient you to their locations.

During the 2004 excavation season in the lower town (Operation G), we recovered a beautiful pebble mosaic pavement in a large Assyrian building which we think belonged to the treasury of a temple dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, based on a cache of cuneiform tablets found there. The mosaic comprised alternating squares of black and white river pebbles from the Tigris, each square contained dozens of small stone set edgewise in a mud mortar.

Into this courtyard mosaic, a number of features were set which disturbed the checkerboard pattern. These included four baked bricks set in a rectangular arrangement which was probably a stable place for a heavy bench or some other piece of furniture. There were also a few places where the small neatly laid black and white river pebbles had been dug up and replaced with much larger stones.

We hypothesized that some of these disturbances might be graves dug into the courtyard while the building was still in use. In two other areas of the site, in the Bronze Palace and in the Operation Q gate, we also found burials beneath the floors of public buildings, so it seems probable that some of these disturbances were burials.

In 2004, we did not have permission to disturb the mosaics, but this year we requested and received a government permit to test our hypothesis in Courtyard 11. Now, all this large building had been backfilled after our excavations in 2004, so after surveying this year, we set a small team of men to remove the backfilled earth down to the mosaic pavement. It was easy to find since we had covered the pavement in a thick plastic sheeting to protect it from the modern agriculture.

Here is what the stone feature looks like in 2012, immediately prior to excavation. John will start work today by removing the large stones and shoring up the pebble mosaic at the edges of the possible grave. I will let you know what he finds. It should be clear pretty quickly if this area was a grave, or served some other, yet unknown, purpose.