The Assyrian city of Tushhan: a race against time

The ancient mound at Ziyaret Tepe in Diyarbakir province of southeastern Turkey, comprises two distinct areas: a high citadel and an extensive lower town. Since 1997 an international team of archaeologists have been excavating a site that was occupied nearly continuously for 2400 years from the Early Bronze Age (c. 3000 BCE).

Over most of this time Ziyaret Tepe was a modest village situated on the fertile Tigris floodplain. However, Professor Timothy Matney of the University of Akron, (the project director) in collaboration with Professor McGinnis of  the University of Cambridge discovered that during the Middle Iron Age (c. 882 – 610BCE) Ziyaret Tepe acted as an important urban centre situated on the northern periphery of the Assyrian Empire  and was known as the city of Tushhan.

Mapping a city

The citadel mound rises over 22 metres above the surrounding modern agricultural fields and covers an area of some 3 hectares. The lower town is larger and covers an area of 29 hectares surrounded by a fortification wall.

The site’s location on the Tigris river means that it is now threatened with destruction by the rising flood-waters of the Ilisu dam and the team has been working hard to save as much of this heritage before it disappears.

“One of the goals of the Ziyaret Tepe project was to map as much of the ancient city as possible” Matney explains, “in fact, I selected the site precisely because the large lower town appeared to have only a single period of occupation.”

Matney had previously worked on an Early Bronze Age city site (Titris Hoyuk) and managed to create a map using geophysical survey techniques. Following this success he wanted to further extend the survey work to look at Iron Age sites. At Ziyaret Tepe, he used a combination of two shallow subsurface geophysical technologies – electrical resistivity and magnetic field gradiometry – to map the major architectural elements of the lower town.

Magnetic gradiometry has been carried out over the entire lower town, while electrical resistivity which is much slower and more difficult to use provided coverage in areas where gradiometry was particularly successful.

Mud-brick walls tend to retain moisture better than the surrounding soil, so they appear as linear low-resistance features.

To overcome the problem of topsoil which has no moisture whatsoever, the team had to add water in order to overcome the issue of contact resistance. This meant each probe hole was pre-drilled, filled with water, and allowed to soak for a few minutes before the  mobile resistance metre could be used. This herculean effort was required to collect good data.

The project team combined these technologies with selected large-scale excavation and a few smaller soundings. The result was a full record for the route of the fortification wall which enclosed the entire city. The wall contained small projecting towers at regular intervals and two large gateways, one of which has now been excavated.

“We recovered the location of two major public buildings: an elite residence and an administrative structure, possibly a treasury linked to the temple of Ishtar,” Matney stated, “and across the lower town, we have documented about a dozen large buildings and a street system which may have been connected with private houses. ”

Excavation of an Assyrian palace

On the citadel mound, geophysical survey was unsuccessful and they relied upon two large areas of excavation. On the eastern edge of the high mound was situated a palace containing extensive material remains from the Assyrian period including five cremation burials in the courtyard. Elsewhere, a number of rooms of a large Assyrian building were investigated, however, they were poorly preserved and of uncertain function.

The finds to date have been impressive, with the discovery of the palace, temple complex and monumental fortifications. They have also included an archive of ancient Assyrian cuneiform tablets dating to the very end of the Assyrian empire – between the sack of Nineveh in 612 BC and the final collapse of the empire. One special text elicited worldwide interest as it suggested the existence of a language previously unknown.

Other finds from 2012 include a burial under the earlier of two floors of a large building. The individual found here has been tentatively identified as a tallish 40-50 year old male with very robust bones. Curiously, his body was extended lying face down with his grave goods placed underneath him – highly unusual for an Assyrian burial. The finds included two ceramic vessels – one in each hand – containing dozens of beads, a bronze fibula and a frit cylinder seal. He was wearing a white stone pendant and what appears to be an iron pendant or possibly a blade or tool around his neck and a bronze ornament was found near his right elbow.

The grave contained quite a few stone beads, including a banded black and white stone, as well as carnelian – perhaps decoration for his clothing. Also found loose in the grave was a stone pendant and a second cylinder seal with bronze caps.

Mosaic pavement reveals a surprise

A mosaic pavement that was first discovered in 2004 provided another surprise during the 2012 season. An unusual feature of flat stones inserted into the mosaic of black and white pebbles was seen as another potential grave, given that Assyrian burials are often found beneath the floors of buildings. The stones were carefully lifted and the excavation continued down until the archaeologists found not a grave but another mosaic floor surface – representing an earlier phase of the Late Assyrian building.

The above image shows the lower pavement beneath the cobbled surface. So, while there was no grave, the team learned that this part of the building did have a substantial earlier occupational phase. This important discovery has led them to open up a further area of the same building to see if more evidence of the earlier phase can be found.

Governing an empire

The Assyrians founded three major settlements on the Tigris in order to protect their northern frontier and to aid in the transshipment of materials from the Taurus region and elsewhere in the empire.

Although the region provided an important source of timber, stone, copper and tin ore, the geography of the Taurus mountains is such that the Assyrian army was unable to control the region militarily for any length of time.

Out of the three Assyrian cities that are known only two have been investigated to date – Tushhan (Ziyaret Tepe) and Tidu (Uctepe). The third one, Sinabu (Pornak), still remains untouched and Uctepe although excavated by a Turkish team a few decades ago, produced no city plan as only the citadel was investigated.

In addition to the major urban centres, the area south of the Tigris river (which runs east-west at this location) had numerous small settlements, several of which have now been excavated such as Kavusan Tepe and Hakeme Use. These smaller settlements were agricultural production areas which clearly fed into the network of places shipping supplies to Ziyaret Tepe and the other large urban centres.

In terms of administration, there is considerable documentation in the form of a cuneiform archive which records the dispersements and collecting of grain.   Ziyaret Tepe is located in prime agricultural land and, from the archive as well as the excavations in the temple treasury it is known that the Assyrians were producing vast quantities of grain necessary for imperial activities.

Included in the many recovered artefacts are a number that were used in accounting including a one talent duck weight and clay tokens as well as the accounts themselves, carefully recorded on clay tablets.

It is written that the king came to Ziyaret Tepe on at least one occasion and there was a strong military garrison at the site. This is evidenced by the fortification walls and gates and the substantial number of artefacts such as spears, knives, arrowheads and armour.

A network of spies

The Assyrians maintained a network of spies to keep track of events occurring north of the river and occasional raids into the hills were designed to secure interests.

Texts from elsewhere tell of large populations of deportees being moved into this region to serve as labourers for the state. The recently published tablet from this site (in an unknown language), listed the names of women and may represent the administration of one of these deported populations.

Time running out

Now though for Ziyaret Tepe time is running out. 2013 will be the last season on- site and Professor Matney will need to decide what are the most important areas to survey and excavate.

These decisions will be critical if the team is to collect the maximum information possible before Ziyaret Tepe finally disappears under the flood waters of the dam.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. “The Assyrian city of Tushhan: a race against time”. Past Horizons. Posted: October 13, 2012. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/10/2012/the-assyrian-city-of-tushhan-a-race-against-time

Q&A: Dead Languages Reveal a Lost World

Gonzalo Rubio spends his days reading dead languages that haven't been spoken for thousands of years. An assyriologist at Pennsylvania State University, Rubio studies the world's very first written languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, which were used in ancient Mesopotamia (an area covering modern-day Iraq).

Sumerian appeared first, almost 5,000 years ago around the year 3,100 B.C. This writing was scratched into soft clay tablets with a pointed reed that had been cut into a wedge shape. Archaeologists call this first writing "cuneiform," from the Latin "cuneus," meaning wedge.

Sumerian and Akkadian were the languages of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization, which flourished during the Bronze Age in a region often called the Cradle of Civilization, because it gave birth to the world's first complex urban cultures. Here not only written languages, but important advances in science, mathematics, art and politics were developed. Rubio talked to LiveScience about what these ancient people's leftover love poetry and sales receipts reveal about a lost world.

LiveScience: What's so exciting about Assyriology, and what drew you to it?

Rubio: New archives and new texts come out all the time; archaeological sites in Syria and even in Iraq – in spite of the current situation – regularly yield new materials. This is an incredibly exciting field in which perspectives and assumptions need to be constantly modified and nuanced in the light of new evidence. I felt that I needed to work in a field in which I could not only say new things but also see new things.

LiveScience: What does it mean to call Sumerian and Akkadian dead languages?

Rubio: Sumerian and Akkadian are dead languages in the most literal sense: They died out for good and no one knew them, was able to read them, or taught them, for almost two millennia. Akkadian began to be understood again in the mid-19th century and Sumerian really only in the 20th century. Differently from languages such as Latin, Greek and Hebrew, there is no uninterrupted tradition in terms of studying Sumerian and Akkadian. Their very deadness poses an incredible intellectual challenge for modern scholars, and challenges are inherently attractive.

LiveScience: What is it like to study a dead language?

Rubio: In many regards, we are resuscitating a dead civilization through the understanding of its dead languages. When one studies an economic document from ancient Mesopotamia, there are names of individuals entering a contract or making a purchase, normally in front of a number of named witnesses: These are all people who lived three or four thousand years ago, people whose names were forgotten and buried in the sand until modern scholars brought them back to a modicum of life in their articles and books.

When an assyriologist holds a tablet inscribed with cuneiform characters, be it in Sumerian or in Akkadian, there is a chance that she or he may be the first person to read that text again after millennia of oblivion. Even if one is not the epigrapher who first looks at the tablets found at an archaeological site, even as a scholar reading texts at a museum, there is an overwhelming feeling of discovery and recovery, the excitement of bringing a civilization back to life by understanding it, text by text, tablet by tablet.

LiveScience: Do you ever have conversations in Sumerian or Akkadian with other researchers?

Rubio: We don't even try. Since these are dead languages, which were not spoken or written for millennia, it makes little sense to try to generate new texts or sentences. Even the act of utterance could be complicated. In the case of Sumerian, there would be limited agreement about how to actually pronounce many words. In the case of Akkadian, there is a very interesting project by a young colleague at [the University of] Cambridge, Martin Worthington, who is asking assyriologists to record themselves reading passages from the "Babylonian Gilgamesh" and other works. ["Babylonian Gilgamesh" is the world's oldest epic poem.]

LiveScience: What kinds of documents are left from this time?

Rubio: Alongside literary compositions, myths, royal inscriptions and royal annals, we have tens of thousands of economic documents, legal texts of all sorts, thousands upon thousands of letters from all periods, and other records that open multiple windows onto the daily lives of ancient Mesopotamians.

Moreover, we have texts that cover all aspects of human intellectual life beyond economy, politics, and literature, such as scientific and scholarly texts of all genres (medical, mathematical, astronomical and astrological texts). We can delve into the subtle and not so subtle differences between official cult (as attested in many rituals) and popular religion and religiosity, for which we get glimpses in magical texts, incantations, divination texts, and so forth. Mesopotamians were particularly concerned with divination, as we have a number of fascinating omen series that go from celestial omens to liver omens –they would observe the liver of a slaughtered sheep in accordance to preexisting clay liver models and search for irregularities they interpreted as signs.

An assyriologist can go from reading a love poem or a tale of the deeds of a mythical king or a deity, to medical texts on epilepsy or omens about sexual behavior. The amount of information one can extract from these many texts and genres of texts is so impressive that many assyriologists have become more and more specialized in recent decades.

LiveScience: Do you think ancient Mesopotamians were very different from people today?

Rubio: No, not at all. The idiom used to convey one's experience may be conditioned by one's culture and context. But we all have similar fears and desires. Reading Mesopotamian letters, for instance, often opens a window into the daily life of people whose aspirations, likes and dislikes are not different from ours. It is true that some authors have talked about a dramatic difference in perception or in the nature of awareness between ancient cultures and civilizations and ours; but I strongly believe that such assumptions are mostly ethnocentric nonsense.

LiveScience: How similar are Akkadian and Sumerian to languages still in use today?

Rubio: Akkadian is a Semitic language, so it is very similar in grammar and structure to Arabic and Hebrew.

Sumerian is quite different. In terms of structure, Sumerian is much closer to American Indian languages, for instance, than it is to Akkadian. Modern languages that structurally resemble Sumerian – though they are not related at all and have no cognates in common – include Japanese, Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian.

LiveScience: How did the development of the first written language represent a major turning point for human civilization?

Rubio: Writing constitutes a very useful and transformational technology. It is important to note that one needs not to be literate for writing to be important. In ancient Mesopotamia, only a small group of people were sufficiently literate as to read a tablet or an inscription. Of all the Mesopotamian kings of all the Mesopotamian cities during three millennia, probably only one of them can be said with sufficient certainty to have been literate: Assurbanipal. [He is also called the last "great" king of Assyria.]

Still, writing, with its multiple functions and the prestige attached to it, most certainly influenced everyone. The presence of writing can modify the nature of economic transactions and legal decisions, because it creates a system of recordkeeping that has certainly practical and even cognitive ramifications.

Writing also becomes a main tool in the state apparatus, both as a means of control through records, and even bureaucracy, and as a vehicle for political propaganda. One might not have been able to read an inscription of King Hammurabi or a proclamation by Chairman Mao, but its presence and display in a public place plays an important role in the way the state influences people's opinions, shapes their will, and manufactures social consent. Even for the illiterate, an official or royal inscription is more than a conversation piece: It may often be a conversation stopper.

LiveScience: Scientists think that Sumerian was the first written language in the world, but is it likely that spoken languages were around much earlier than this?

Rubio: There were most certainly languages spoken before Sumerian, but they had no writing system. Languages without writing systems disappear when their speakers die.

Some experts in human evolution place the development of the capacity for some form of language (or language-like) communication at about 500,000 years ago. The earliest Mesopotamian written texts are about 5,000 years old. So there was a lot of talking before anyone thought of writing anything down.
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References:

Moskowitz, Clara. 2010. "Q&A: Dead Languages Reveal a Lost World". Live Science. Posted: December 28, 2010. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/history/dead-languages-sumerian-akkadian-assyriologist-q-a-101213.html

Turkish archeologists find 4,000 year-old trade deal in Anatolia

Archeologists have unearthed the tablets of first written trade agreement in Anatolia.

Archeologists have unearthed the tablets of first written trade agreement in Anatolia.

Professor Cahit Gunbatti of Ankara University's Faculty of Letters, History and Geography said the first written trade agreement in Anatolia was made 4,000 years ago.

"We have discovered the cuneiform-script tablets in Kultepe-Karum excavations in (the Central Anatolian province of) Kayseri," Gunbatti told AA correspondent.

Archeologists have been carrying out excavations in Karum hamlet near Kultepe tumulus, where Assyrians used to live, since 1948. They have unearthed some 23,000 cuneiform-script tablets so far.

"Around 4,500 tablets have been smuggled abroad since 1948," Gunbatti said. Gunbatti said Assyrian tradesmen who settled in the region 4,000 years ago sold the tin and fabrics they brought from Mesopotamia.

The two tablets indicated that the oldest trade agreement in Anatolia was made 4,000 years ago, Gunbatti said.

"The Assyrian Kingdom in Mesopotamia made written trade agreements with Kanesh Kingdom and Hahhum Kingdom near Adiyaman," he said.

Kultepe is a modern village near the ancient city of Kanesh, located in Kayseri.

Kanesh, inhabited continuously from the Chalcolithic period down to Roman times, flourished most strongly as an important merchant colony (karum) of the Old Assyrian kingdom, from ca. 20th to 16th centuries BC. A late (c 1400 BC) witness to an old tradition includes a king of Kanesh called Zipani among seventeen local city-kings who rose up against the Akkadian Naram-Sin (ruled c.2254-2218).

It is the site of discovery of the earliest traces of the Hittite language, and the earliest attestation of any Indo-European language, dated to the 20th century BC.
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References:

2010. "Turkish archeologists find 4,000 year-old trade deal in Anatolia". World Bulletin. Posted: August 29, 2010. Available online: http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=63181

Researchers Shed Light on Ancient Assyrian Tablets

A cache of cuneiform tablets unearthed by a team led by a University of Toronto archaeologist has been found to contain a largely intact Assyrian treaty from the early 7th century BCE.

"The tablet is quite spectacular. It records a treaty -- or covenant -- between Esarhaddon, King of the Assyrian Empire and a secondary ruler who acknowledged Assyrian power. The treaty was confirmed in 672 BCE at elaborate ceremonies held in the Assyrian royal city of Nimrud (ancient Kalhu). In the text, the ruler vows to recognize the authority of Esarhaddon's successor, his son Ashurbanipal," said Timothy Harrison, professor of near eastern archaeology in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations and director of U of T's Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP).

"The treaties were designed to secure Ashurbanipal's accession to the throne and avoid the political crisis that transpired at the start of his father's reign. Esarhaddon came to power when his brothers assassinated their father, Sennacherib."

The 43 by 28 centimetre tablet -- known as the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon -- contains about 650 lines and is in a very fragile state. "It will take months of further work before the document will be fully legible," added Harrison. "These tablets are like a very complex puzzle, involving hundreds of pieces, some missing. It is not just a matter of pulling the tablet out, sitting down and reading. We expect to learn much more as we restore and analyze the document."

The researchers hope to glean information about Assyria's imperial relations with the west during a critical period, the early 7th century BCE. It marked the rise of the Phrygians and other rival powers in highland Anatolia -- now modern-day Turkey -- along the northwestern frontier of the Assyrian empire, and coincided with the divided monarchy of Biblical Israel, as well as an era of increased contact between the Levantine peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, as well as the Greeks of the Aegean world.

The cache of tablets -- which date back to the Iron Age -- were unearthed in August 2009 during excavations at the site of an ancient temple at Tell Tayinat, located in southeastern Turkey. A wealth of religious paraphernalia -- including gold, bronze and iron implements, libation vessels and ornately decorated ritual objects -- was also uncovered.

TAP is an international project, involving researchers from a dozen countries, and more than 20 universities and research institutes. It operates in close collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Turkey, and provides research opportunities and training for both graduate and undergraduate students. The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), and receives support from the University of Toronto.
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References:

2010. "Researchers Shed Light on Ancient Assyrian Tablets". Science Direct. Posted: April 10, 2010. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100408134519.htm