Ancient Iraq (6 page)
Archaeological Research in Iraq
The transformation of once flourishing cities into tells was more rapid than one might think.
13
Herodotus in the middle of the fourth century
B.C
. sees Babylon still alive, but neglects to visit Nineveh destroyed a century and a half before, and Xenophon leading ten thousand Greek mercenaries across Mesopotamia in 401
B.C
. passed near the great Assyrian capital city without even noticing it.
14
Four centuries later, Strabo speaks of Babylon as of a town in ruins, ‘almost completely deserted’.
15
A thousand years went by. As the blanket of dust over the ancient cities grew thicker and thicker, their memory gradually faded away. Arab historians and geographers still knew something of Iraq's glorious past, but Europe had forgotten the East. The peregrinations of Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century and the travels of the German naturalist Rauwolff four hundred years later were isolated episodes. It was not before the seventeenth century that western interest in oriental antiquities was awakened, when an Italian nobleman, Pietro della Valle, gave an entertaining account of his journey across Mesopotamia and brought back to Europe, in 1625, bricks found at Ur and Babylon ‘on which were writing in certain unknown characters’. Gradually, it dawned upon academics and royalty that here was a field worth investigating. For the first time, in 1761 a scientific mission was sent out east by the King of Denmark with orders to gather as much information as possible on various subjects, including archaeology. The numerous inscriptions copied at Persepolis by its leader Karsten Niebuhr – a mathematician by profession – were put at the disposal of philologists, who were soon at work deciphering the mysterious writing. From then on, nearly all those who visited, or lived in, the Orient made a point of exploring its ruins, collecting
‘antikas’ and copying inscriptions. Prominent among them are Joseph de Beauchamp, a distinguished French abbé and astronomer (1786), Claudius James Rich, a Resident of the East India Company and British Consul General in Baghdad (1807), Sir James Buckingham (1816), Robert Mignan (1827), James Baillie Fraser (1834) and that extraordinary army officer, sportsman, explorer and philologist, undoubtedly the greatest of all, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810 – 95). We should also mention here at least one important government-subsidized expedition of the early nineteenth century, the British ‘Tigris – Euphrates Expedition’ (1835 – 6) of F. R. Chesney, who studied the course of the two rivers and collected a wealth of information on the country around them.
With the exception of the two small pits dug by de Beauchamp and Mignan at Babylon, all these men confined their activities to the examination and measurement of the ruins as they saw them and were far from imagining what those ‘desolate mounds’ concealed. But in 1843 Paul Emile Botta, Italian-born French Consul in Mosul, started at Khorsabad the first archaeological excavations in Iraq, discovered the Assyrians and opened a new era. Almost at once (1845) an Englishman, Sir Henry Layard, followed his example at Nimrud and Nineveh, and soon a number of tells were excavated. In 1877 Ernest de Sarzec, French Consul in Basrah, having heard of some statues found by chance at Telloh, near Nasriyah, decided to dig there and discovered the Sumerians. Thus within thirty years a hitherto unknown civilization was revealed to a world astonished to learn that Mesopotamia could yield nearly as many treasures as Greece or Egypt. Botta, Layard, Sarzec, Loftus, Smith, the pioneers of that heroic period were all amateurs in every sense of the term. They had no experience and little method. Their main object was to discover and send to the museums of their respective countries statues, bas reliefs, inscriptions and
objets d'art
in general. They had no time for mud bricks and broken pots, destroyed much and preserved little, but they opened the road
and, despite obstacles of all sorts, worked with an energy and enthusiasm which have never been surpassed.
Meanwhile, in the libraries of Europe no less enthusiastic but more patient pioneers were engaged in the fantastic task of deciphering the written documents which by then were pouring by the thousand into the museums. The story of this intellectual adventure, which lasted no less than a hundred years and taxed to the extreme the ingenuity of many scholars from several nations, cannot be told here even briefly.
16
We feel, however, that homage should be paid to such men as Grotefend, a teacher of Greek at Gottingen University, who made the first serious and partly successful attempt at reading the Old Persian inscriptions in cuneiform script copied by Niebuhr at Persepolis; Rawlinson, who between 1835 and 1844 not only copied at the peril of his life the long trilingual inscription which Darius had engraved high up on the rock of Behistun in Western Iran but also began to translate it – the inscription in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite has been called the ‘Rosetta stone of Assyriology’, with the difference that none of the three languages could initially be read – and to the Irishman Edward Hincks and his French colleague Jules Oppert, who, with Rawlinson, deserve to be called the ‘holy triad’ of cuneiform studies, since they overcame the greatest epigraphic and linguistic difficulties and, as one of their modern successors puts it, ‘laid open the dusty pages of the clay “books” buried all over the ancient Near East’.
17
The decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian language (now called Akkadian) was considered assured in 1848, and by 1900 the other language of ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian, was broadly comprehended. The former now has virtually no secret; the latter still has its dark corners, but is read with increasing certainty. At a conservative estimate, half a million tablets are – or, since many of them have not yet been published, will eventually be – at the historian's disposal,
18
and countless more will be discovered as archaeological research progresses. It can be said without exaggeration that no other country in the world has yielded such a
wealth of ancient texts in the very form in which they were written thousands of years ago.
The entry on to the stage by the Germans at the turn of the century heralded a new approach to excavation work. Robert Koldewey at Babylon (1899 – 1917) and Walter Andrae at Assur (1903 – 14) introduced strict, even meticulous techniques in a domain where luck and intuition had long reigned supreme. The German method was soon generally adopted, and the twenty years between the two world wars witnessed what should perhaps be considered as the most brilliant and fruitful period in the history of Mesopotamian archaeology. These were the days when Woolley was digging up the past at Ur and its celebrated Royal Cemetery (1922 – 34), when Heinrich and his team were working at Uruk, Parrot at Mari, the British at Ubaid, Nineveh, Arpachiyah and Chagar Bazar, the Americans at Tepe Gawra, Nuzi and in the Diyala valley, and both the British and the Americans at Kish and Jemdat Nasr. One by one, large and small tells were opened up and yielded their secrets. The main features of Mesopotamian history were defined piece by piece, and beyond history older, fascinating cultures appeared which threw new light on the origins of civilization in that part of the world.
During this time Iraq had emerged as a nation. Baghdad now had its own museum. Young Iraqi archaeologists had been trained, and excavations, far from coming to a complete standstill during the Second World War, continued with the most interesting results at ‘Uqair (1940 – 1), Hassuna (1943 – 4) and ‘Aqar Quf (1943 – 5). The war over, work was resumed by the Germans (Lenzen) at the huge site of Uruk, by the Americans (Haines and McCown) at Sumer's religious capital, Nippur, and by the French (Parrot) at Mari, the metropolis of the Middle Euphrates. Mallowan, on behalf of the British Museum, reopened Nimrud, the Assyrian military capital city which had not been touched for over seventy years. Seton Lloyd, Taha Baqir, Fuad Safar dug up for the Iraq Museum three virgin sites: Eridu, one of the most ancient sacred cities of Iraq,
Harmal, a modest mound unexpectedly rich in texts, and Hatra, the strange capital of a pre-Islamic Arab kingdom. After 1958, the young Republic of Iraq opened its doors even wider to foreign archaeologists. Whilst the Germans and Americans continued working on the inexhaustible sites of Uruk and Nippur, whilst the Iraqis themselves discovered at Tell es-Sawwan a new prehistoric culture and sounded numerous smaller mounds, fresh excavations were undertaken by the British at Tell al-Rimah, Umm Dabaghiyah, Choga Mami and Abu Salabikh, by the French at Larsa and the Belgians at Tell ed-Der, by the Germans at Isin, by the Italians at Seleucia, by the Russians at Yarim Tepe and the Poles at Nimrud, and even by the Japanese at Telul ath-Thalathat, to mention only the main sites. At the time of writing, several of these excavations are still in progress and others are being planned. All the large cities of ancient Mesopotamia and many less renowned towns have been, or are being, unearthed and a considerable amount of restoration work has been done, or is going on, notably at Nineveh, Nimrud, Babylon, Ur and Hatra.
In the late 1970s a new and rewarding type of archaeological activity developed: the so-called ‘salvage excavations’ made necessary by the building, for agricultural purposes, of several dams on the Euphrates, the Tigris and some of their tributaries in both Syria and Iraq. The lakes created by these dams were bound to submerge a great number of tells, and it was imperative to explore as many of them as possible before this happened. These huge tasks were performed by Syrian and Iraqi archaeologists working in cooperation with colleagues from Europe, America, Australia and Japan. The first of these large-scale rescue operations was prompted by the construction of the Assad dam on the great bend of the Syrian Euphrates; then came, in Iraq, the ‘Hamrin basin project’ in the valley of a tributary of the Diyala river, the Haditha (or Qadissiyah) salvage excavations on the middle Euphrates, and the Eski Mosul project in the Tigris valley upstream of Mosul. Altogether, almost two hundred sites, ranging from prehistoric to
late Islamic times, were explored, some of them partially and briefly, others extensively and for several months or years. The results of this international effort were very interesting: they brought to light not only a few large cities, like Emar (Meskene), but also some relatively minor towns, such as Haradum on the Iraqi Euphrates, which probably would have never been excavated; they provided a great deal of information on settlement patterns at different periods and filled many gaps in our knowledge of proto-historic cultures hitherto poorly documented.
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The ‘Gulf War’ has put an end to all archaeological research in Iraq, but there is no doubt that sooner or later such peaceful activities will be resumed there. Some six thousand tells in Iraq alone are awaiting the diggers – enough to keep busy several generations of archaeologists and epigraphists. And as though in our search for the past we were proceeding backwards, after the Assyrians, after the Babylonians, after the Sumerians, after the nameless peoples of the fourth and fifth millennia B. C, the Stone Age of Iraq has been brought under the searchlight. Despite inevitable gaps in our knowledge, it has at last become possible to write a complete history of ancient Mesopotamia, starting from those very remote days when men chose the hills and caves of Kurdistan for their dwellings and left behind them the humble tools of chipped flint which betray their presence.
CHAPTER 3
Until 1949 textbooks and scientific journals alike were silent on the prehistory of Iraq. Archaeological work had concentrated on the Mesopotamian plain, where prehistoric remains, if they ever existed, would by now be buried under a very thick layer of alluvium. The lowest levels of several tells had supplied enough material for historians to build up a sequence of five proto-historic cultures which announced and explained the dawn of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization in about 3000
B.C.
, but all these cultures belonged to the late Neolithic and to the Chalcolithic ages and covered, at the most, a couple of thousand years. Prehistory proper, the Stone Age of Iraq, was practically unknown. True, a few worked flints had been found on the surface in various parts of the Syro-Mesopotamian desert,
1
and as early as 1928 Professor D. A. E. Garrod, the lady archaeologist well known for her studies on prehistoric Palestine, had visited Kurdistan and found palaeolithic artefacts in two caves near Suleimaniyah; but these discoveries attracted little attention outside a small circle of specialists. Twenty years were to elapse before Professor R. J. Braidwood publicized the Neolithic site of Jarmo and aroused enough interest to promote further research in this long-neglected field.
2
Since then, the American excavations at Barda-Balka, Palegawra and Karim-Shehir (1951), the survey of the Zab basin by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (1954 – 5) and the startling discoveries made by Dr R. Solecki in Shanidar cave
3
since 1951 have contributed considerably to our knowledge of Iraq's most ancient past and filled a very regrettable gap in Near Eastern prehistory.
Palaeolithic
Among the three classical subdivisions of the Stone Age – Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic – the first named is by far the longest. It entirely fills the geological period called Pleistocene because it is ‘the most recent’ (
pleistos kainos
) chapter in the very long history of the earth. The Pleistocene began approximately two million years ago and ended in about 10000
B.C
., to be replaced by the Holocene (‘latest’) period in which we are still living. Pleistocene and Holocene together constitute the Quaternary era.
The beginning of the Pleistocene was marked by the ultimate and weaker convulsions of the previous period, the Pliocene, which in the Near East led to the formation of the Taurus and Zagros ranges, which are part of the Alpine-Himalayan system, to the deep fault of the Rift Valley linking the Dead Sea and the Red Sea to the great East African lakes, and to the creation of the Mesopotamian plain and the Arabo-Persian Gulf due to sliding of the rigid Arabian platform underneath the not less rigid Iranian plateau. These tectonic movements were accompanied by a considerable plutonic activity, as witnessed by the numerous volcanoes, most of them nowadays extinct, that are scattered all over Turkey, the Caucasus range and Iran, as well as by the extensive lava fields to be found, for example, in Syria, south of Damascus.
About one million years ago, the surface of the earth, which by then had almost reached its present configuration, entered a period of relative rest, the main activity being erosion of the relief. This was largely facilitated by the expansion and retraction of four successive ice-caps lying over the northern parts of Europe and America: the four glaciations called, at least in Europe: Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm, and their consequences. It must be noted that in tropical, subtropical and equatorial regions long periods of heavy rains (pluvials) alternating with periods of relative drought (interpluvials) corresponded approximately to the glacials and interglacials of Europe and North America.
Stone industries in Iraqi Kurdistan: 1 – 4, microlithic (Shanidar B); 5 – 13, Aurignatian (Baradostian, Shanidar C); 14 – 16, Mousterian (Shanidar D); 17–19, Levalloisian-Acheulaean (Barda Balka).
After R. Solecki and H. Wright Jnr, Sumer, VII, 1951 and VIII, 1952.
Although there is some evidence of cyclic glaciation in the Taurus and Zagros mountains, the great ice-sheets never reached as far south as the Near East. Iraq stood at the junction of areas subjected to sub-glacial and sub-pluvial conditions, and the climatic changes which took place in that country during the Pleistocene were never as dramatic as in other parts of the world. None the less, they indirectly modelled its physiographical features. The level of the Gulf fluctuated with the variations in the polar ice-cap, as we have seen, and this influenced the profile of the rivers and their erosive action.
4
On the other hand, phases of heavy rains accompanied by active erosion alternated with dry periods marked by extensive deposition of silt and gravel in the river beds. In at least one region of the Kurdistan foothills four such successive cycles have been identified and correlated to the last two glacials and interglacials.
5
Hard as it is to imagine, there were times when large rivers flowed across the desert, when the Tigris and the Euphrates were perhaps as broad as the Mississippi and when the two Zabs and the Diyala, carrying ten times as much water as they do now, were cutting deep and wide valleys into the ridges of Kurdistan. Throughout most of the Pleistocene period both the western desert and the foothill region of Iraq were grassy steppes and uplands benefiting from a comparatively temperate and uniform climate and offering highly favourable conditions to the existence of prehistoric men.
6
Probably the most ancient traces of human presence in Iraq are limestone, flint and quartzite ‘pebble tools’ (i.e. river pebbles from which flakes have been struck off so that they can be used as hand-axes) found a few years ago in the upper Tigris valley north of Mosul.
7
These implements were diagnosed as ‘upper Acheulaean industry’, which would date them to the last quarter of the immensely long Lower Palaeolithic sub-period,
circa
500,000–110,000 B.P. Then comes, on the scale of time, the interesting site of Barda-Balka near Chemchemal, between Kirkuk and Suleimaniyah, discovered in 1949 by Iraqi archaeologists. There, around a megalith of Neolithic age, were palaeolithic
flint tools lying on the ground. A sounding made in 1951 by two American archaeologists traced their origin to a once open ‘workshop’ or ‘camp site’ now buried under three to five feet of silt and gravel.
8
The flint implements consisted of heart-shaped or almond-shaped hand-axes and of side-scrapers made out of flakes. There were also limestone ‘pebble-tools’. This industry has strong affinities with the Acheulaean, Tayacian (a derivative of Clactonian) and Mousterian cultures and has been attributed to the end of the Riss-Würm interglacial, about 80,000 years ago.
A further step into the Middle Palaeolithic is represented by the mixed Levalloiso-Mousterian industry discovered in 1928 by Miss Dorothy Garrod in the lowest level of the ‘Dark Cave’ of Hazar Merd, about nineteen kilometres south of Suleimaniyah.
9
But nowhere is the true Mousterian better illustrated than at Shanidar cave, excavated between 1951 and 1960 by Dr R. Solecki of the University of Michigan.
10
Shanidar cave is a very large rock shelter (the size of four tennis courts) in the southern flank of the Baradost mountains overlooking the valley of the Upper Zab, not far from the small town of Rowanduz. It is still used in winter by Kurdish shepherds. Digging through its floor, Dr Solecki was able to reach a depth of fourteen metres and to identify four occupation levels. In level D, the lowest and thickest (8.50 metres), successive layers of hearths and ash deposits mixed with bones and flint implements proved that the cave had been inhabited at various periods in Middle Palaeolithic times. The stone artefacts consisted of points, scrapers and borers typical of the Mousterian culture in its last phase. Animal bones were those of oxen, sheep and goats, suggesting a moderately cold climate, and there were numerous tortoise shells. Of special interest are the nine human skeletons in level D: those of two small children and of seven adults. The bones generally were in poor condition, but the skull of skeleton I – a man about thirty-five years old, 1.50 metres tall – could be restored with a fair degree of accuracy.
11
It exhibited all the features of the Neanderthal
man: the thick bones, the massive chinless jaw, the sloping forehead, the prominent brow-ridges; and there is every reason to believe that the other individuals belonged to the same race. Dr D. T. Stewart, who examined these remains, could also diagnose that the arm of one of the Shanidar men, already crippled from birth, had later been amputated with a crude flint knife. Some of these people had been killed by huge blocks falling from the roof of the cave, though by no means at the same time. The body of a cave-dweller rested on a bed of branches and flowers and these flowers, when examined, enabled the date of death to be estimated as ‘between late May and early July’. The ages of three skeletons were determined by radiocarbon: two were dated 46,000 and 50,000 B.P. respectively and the third one, stratigraphically lower, was as old as 60,000 years.
12
Level C of Shanidar cave takes us well into the Upper Palaeolithic period. By means of carbon 14 tests carried out on the charcoal of its hearths, it has been possible to fix its lower and upper limits at ‘more than 34,000 years' and ‘about 25,500
B.C
.’ respectively. The stone material was of the blade-tool type characteristic of the Aurignacian cultures. As it contained some well-made gravers of unusual form, Dr Solecki has proposed for this industry the name of ‘Baradost' or ‘Baradostian’ from the mountains in which the cave opens. The upper part of level C and the greater part of level B immediately above yielded samples of the same industry, but with a tendency for the artefacts to be undersized (microliths). This late Aurignacian or ‘extended Gravettian’ culture is represented in several palaeolithic sites of Northern Iraq. Small round scrapers and ‘pen knife’ blades, and bladelets with deeply notched edges, in particular, were found in abundance in the cave of Zarzi, near Suleimaniyah, by Miss Garrod
9
and in the cave of Palegawra, 32 kilometres to the east of Chemchemal, by B. Howe.
13
They also occur in various caves explored by Professor Braidwood and his co-workers in 1954 – 5, especially Kaiwanian and Barak, west and south of Rowanduz. It appears that some at least of
these small objects could be hafted and used as weapons to kill wild horses, deer, goats, gazelles, sheep and swine, which then lived in a still cool but already drier country.
The Palaeolithic men of Iraq were not isolated. Through the Syrian desert – where Stone Age artefacts have been found in various places – they were in contact with the Palaeolithic men of Syria–Palestine, and it is not by chance that the flint industries of the two countries have some features in common. They also had commercial intercourse with the Anatolian plateau and the Iranian highlands. The material of Shanidar D and Hazar Merd, for instance, is almost identical with that of Bisitun cave in Western Iran and in many details similar to that of Korain cave in Turkey. In Upper Palaeolithic times the men of Shanidar made some of their tools of obsidian (volcanic glass), the nearest source of which was in the Lake Van district of Armenia. Indeed, from camp to camp stone-working techniques were taken as far away as Europe, if we are to believe with some authorities that the Aurignacian culture originated in the Near East. Yet Iraqi Kurdistan, because of its semi-secluded position in a corner of the ‘Fertile Crescent’, retained its own characteristics. According to Solecki, the ‘Baradost' industry is unique in the Near East, and the Neanderthal men of Shanidar, though somewhat more recent than those of Mount Carmel, do not seem to have mixed with or evolved towards
Homo sapiens
like the latter, and remained ‘conservative’ in their physical features. Finally, the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures which, in Western Europe, succeeded the Aurignacian and flourished in late Palaeolithic times never reached Iraq – nor, for that matter, any other part of Western Asia. In those countries the passage from Aurignacian to microlithic (Mesolithic) was direct, and the Mesolithic period was but a short step from the Neolithic revolution.
