April
5, 2010
In Syria, a
Prologue for Cities
New York Times, by JOHN
NOBLE WILFORD
Archaeologists
have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen
understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for
the rise of the world’s first cities and states and the invention of
writing.
In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site
known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered
a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban
settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two
millenniums, until 4000 B.C. — a little-known but fateful period of human
cultural evolution.
Scholars of antiquity say that Zeidan should reveal insights into
life in a time called the Ubaid period, 5500 to 4000 B.C. In those poorly
studied centuries, irrigation agriculture became widespread, long-distance
trade grew in influence socially and economically, powerful political leaders
came to the fore and communities gradually divided into social classes of
wealthy elites and poorer commoners.
Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, a leader of the excavations at Zeidan, said the site’s northern
location promised to enrich knowledge of the Ubaid culture’s influence
far from where the first urban centers eventually flourished in the lower
Tigris and Euphrates Valley. The new explorations, he said, are planned to be
the most comprehensive yet at a large Ubaid settlement, possibly yielding
discoveries for decades.
“I figure I’m going to be working there till I
retire,” said Dr. Stein, who is 54.
There are several reasons for excitement over the Zeidan
excavations. Warfare and ensuing unstable conditions have locked archaeologists
out of Iraq and its prime sites of Mesopotamian antiquity. So they have
redoubled research in the upper river valleys, across the border in Syria and
southern Turkey. And Zeidan is readily accessible. Having never been built upon
by subsequent cultures, it is free of any overburden of ruins to thwart
excavators.
Above all, a driving ambition of archaeologists always is to dig
beneath the known past for more than glimpses of the little known.
For almost two centuries, the glory went to expeditions unearthing
the houses and temples, granaries and workshops of earliest urban centers like
Uruk, seat of the legendary Gilgamesh, and the later splendors of Ur and
Nineveh. The challenge was to decipher the clay tablets of a literate
civilization with beginnings in what is known as the Uruk period, 4000 to 3200
B.C.
Uruk remains overshadowed the traces of Ubaid cultures, the
region’s earliest known complex society. Only a handful of ruins —
at Ubaid, Eridu and Oueili in southern Mesopotamia and Tepe Gawra, in the north
near Mosul, Iraq — had produced at best a sketchy picture of these older
cultures. A few Ubaid sites in northern Syria were either too small to be
revealing or virtually inaccessible under other ruins.
A decade ago, Richard L. Zettler, a University of Pennsylvania
archaeologist with extensive experience in Syria, said, “Our real focus
now should not be on the Uruk period, but the Ubaid.”
Last week, Dr. Zettler, who is not associated with the Chicago
team but has visited the site, said that Zeidan preserves artifacts over a long
sequence of Ubaid culture at a junction of major trade routes. “We should
see the transition as the Ubaid spread from the south up to farming regions in
the north,” he said.
Guillermo Algaze, an anthropologist at the University of
California, San Diego, and an authority on early urbanism in the Middle East
not involved in new research, said recently that Zeidan “has the
potential to revolutionize current interpretations of how civilization in the
Near East came about.”
Tell Zeidan is a two-hour drive southeast of Aleppo and three
miles from the modern town of Raqqa. Muhammad Sarhan, a curator of the Raqqa
Museum, is co-director, with Dr. Stein, of the excavations, formally known as
the Joint Syrian-American Archaeological Research Project at Tell Zeidan.
The site consists of three large mounds on the east bank of the
Balikh River, just north of its confluence with the Euphrates. The mounds, the
tallest being 50 feet high, enclose ruins of a lower town. Buried remains and a
scattering of ceramics on the surface extend over an area of 31 acres, which
makes this probably larger than any other known Ubaid community.
It would seem that the mounds had long stood on the semi-arid
landscape as an open invitation for archaeologists to stop and dig. A few
stopped. The American archaeologist William F. Albright identified the place in
1926. The British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, husband of the mystery writer
Agatha Christie, was intrigued
and made a brief survey in the 1930s. A Dutch team led by Maurits van Loon took
an interest in 1983, finding that the site appeared to date to the Ubaid
period. A German group asked the Syrians for permission to excavate but was
turned down.
Finally, after initial visits to Zeidan, Dr. Stein said the Syrian
government “encouraged me to submit an application” to dig. Why the
change?
“I was incredibly thrilled, but can only speculate on what
their reasons were,” Dr. Stein said in a recent interview, referring to
the Syrian decision. “Perhaps they were waiting for the right team to
come along. Our institute had worked in Syria for something like 80 years, and
we were interested in a long-term commitment. We also pointed out that the site
was endangered from agricultural development along its edges. Parts of the site
had already been bulldozed for fields and a canal.”
In the summers of 2008 and 2009, Dr. Stein directed mapping of the
Zeidan ruins and digging exploratory trenches. He said the initial findings
confirmed this to be a “proto-urban community” in the Ubaid period,
most likely the site of a prominent temple.
A description and interpretation of the discoveries so far was
published in the Oriental Institute’s recent annual report, followed by
an announcement this week by the University of Chicago.
The international excavation team, supported by the National Science Foundation in
the United States, is to resume fieldwork in July.
Four distinct phases of occupation have been identified at Zeidan.
A simpler culture known as the Halaf is found in the bottom sediments,
well-preserved Ubaid material in the middle and two layers of late Copper Age
remains on top. From the evidence so far, the transitions between periods
seemed to have been peaceful.
Archaeologists have turned up remains of house floors with
hearths, fragments of mudbrick house walls, painted Ubaid pottery and sections
of larger walls, possibly part of fortifications or monumental public
architecture. The ceramic styles and radiocarbon tests date the wall to about
5000 B.C.
One of the most telling finds was a stone seal depicting a deer,
presumably used to stamp a mark on goods to identify ownership in a time before
writing. About 2-by 2- 1/2 inches, the seal is unusually large and carved from
a red stone not native to the area. In fact, archaeologists said, it was
similar in design to a seal found 185 miles to the east, at Tepe Gawra, near
Mosul.
To archaeologists, a seal is not just a seal. Dr. Zettler said it
signifies that “somebody has the authority to restrict access to things
— to close and seal jars, bags, doors — and so once you have these
seals you must have had social stratification.”
The existence of elaborate seals with near-identical motifs at
such widely distant sites, Dr. Stein said, “suggests that in this period,
high-ranking elites were assuming leadership positions across a very broad
region, and those dispersed elites shared a common set of symbols and perhaps
even a common ideology of superior social status.”
Other artifacts attest to the culture’s shift from
self-sufficient village life to specialized craft production dependent on trade
and capable of acquiring luxury goods, the archaeologists reported. Such a
transition is assumed to have required some administrative structure and produced
a wealthy class. The expedition will be searching for remains of temples and
imposing public buildings as confirmation of these political and social
changes.
In what appears to be the site’s industrial area,
archaeologists uncovered eight large kilns for firing pottery, one of the most
ubiquitous Ubaid commodities over wide trading areas. They found blades made
from the high-quality volcanic glass obsidian. An abundance of obsidian chips
showed that the blades were produced at the site, and the material’s
color and chemical composition indicated that it came from mines in what is now
Turkey.
“We found flint sickle blades everywhere,” Dr. Stein
said, noting that they had a glossy sheen “where they had been polished
by the silica in the stems of wheat that they were used to harvest.”
Zeidan also had a smelting industry for making copper tools, the
most advanced technology of the fifth millennium B.C. The people presumably
reached as far as 250 miles away to trade for the nearest copper ore, at
sources around modern-day Diyarbakir, Turkey. Getting the ore home was no easy
task. In a time before the wheel or domesticated donkeys, people had to bear
the heavy burden on their backs.
A site like Tell Zeidan, Dr. Zettler said, is “telling us
that the Uruk cities didn’t come out of nowhere, they evolved from
foundations laid in the Ubaid period.”
Until recently, Dr. Algaze said, “accidents of data
recovery” had led scholars to think the origin of cities and states in
Mesopotamia was “a fairly abrupt occurrence in the fourth millennium that
as concentrated in what is southern Iraq.”
The southern cities may have been larger and more enduring, he
said, but increasing exploration on the Mesopotamian periphery, especially the
spread of trade and technology among interacting Ubaid cultures, suggests that
“the seed of urban civilization” had been planted well before 4000
B.C.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/06archeo.html?src="">
PAULO ALEXANDRE MONTEIRO
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