At the site of Tayma, excavators work at an area outside what is thought to have been the settlement’s temple. A deep well now covered in wood (far right), may have been connected to it in antiquity.

In the harsh landscape between the stark Hijaz Mountains and the vast Nefud Desert in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the very existence of the town of Tayma hinges on a quirk of geology. This is one of the world’s driest places, receiving less than four inches of rain annually on average. Yet until about 6,000 years ago, when the climate turned from wet to arid, a saltwater lake a saltwater lake covered eight square miles on the northern fringe of what is now a lush oasis. While today that lake is a forbidding salt pan, or sabkha  in Arabic, its ghost remains in the form of an aquifer that rises close to the surface on its southern edge. Even in the hottest and fiercest summers, when no precipitation falls and temperatures regularly top 115 degrees Fahrenheit, farmers here can depend on shallow wells for a seemingly endless flow of cool, fresh water for their luxuriant gardens and shady date palm plantations.

The Bir Hadaj, perhaps the oldest well on the Arabian Peninsula, has been in use for thousands of years and was recently restored under the leadership of Muhammad al-Najem and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities.

This unceasing bounty in an inhospitable land made Tayma famous. For millennia, merchants and missionaries, kings and caravans, halted here to refresh themselves and their animals and to take on provisions for the hard journey through the desert to Egypt, the Mediterranean coast, Iraq, or Yemen. The settlement, also called Tema in ancient records, earns a passing mention in the Old Testament for its wells: “The inhabitants of the land of Tema brought water to him that was thirsty,” says the book of Isaiah, perhaps a reference to Bir Hadaj, the largest, most famous, and possibly oldest working well on the Arabian Peninsula, which sits in the middle of Tayma’s old town and still supplies water to some of its residents. Local lore places the well’s origin in the third millennium B.C., although there is no archaeological evidence to date it. Yet it must have been such wells that watered the gardens that made Tayma green year-round since before recorded history.

For some, Tayma may be best known as the temporary seat of power of one of the ancient world’s most enigmatic rulers. Cuneiform tablets and inscriptions record that, in the sixth century B.C., Babylon’s King Nabonidus left what was then the largest and wealthiest city on Earth for this obscure oasis. He returned home a decade later, only to lose his empire to the Persians, effectively ending 2,500 years of Mesopotamian civilization. Little else has been widely known about Tayma before or after Nabonidus’ ignominious end as a Persian captive. However, it has a surprisingly rich history, dating back more than 3,000 years
before the king’s arrival, which has captured the attention of a Saudi-German research team managed by the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities. Overseen by Ricardo Eichmann and directed by Arnulf Hausleiter, both of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), with the support of the commission’s Tayma chief Muhammad al-Najem, in 2004 the team began the first comprehen-sive excavations at what has become the country’s largest archaeological site. Tayma’s main mound covers more than 200 acres, and is now fenced off from palm groves and the encroaching modern town.

Temples decorated with Egyptian statues, South Arabian inscriptions, and carvings with Mesopotamian motifs attest to Tayma’s cosmopolitan nature. Piped-in water once
splashed through one large sanctuary where it pooled in massive carved-stone troughs outside the doors, perhaps for ritual ablutions. Rock carvings from the area, dating at least to Nabonidus’ time, suggest that the people of Tayma were literate, wealthy, and well traveled. What the excavators are uncovering is reshaping not just our understanding of this remote location, but also how trade operated in the ancient Middle East, spreading ideas and beliefs as well as goods. “Tayma is an incredibly important site, and scholars are scarcely aware of its significance,” says Daniel Potts, a New York University archaeologist specializing in ancient Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Iran.

Called the “al-Hamra cube,” this sandstone pedestal or altar found at Tayma dates to the 5th or 4th century b.c. and depicts ritual scenes combining elements of local, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian artistic styles.

THE SABKHA ITSELF, just north of Bir Hadaj, is flat and featureless. But thousands of years ago, even as it dried up, it drew people to its salty shores. Over the past two field seasons, archaeologist Max Haibt from the Free University of Berlin has uncovered thousands of unfinished carnelian beads and hundreds of thousands of pieces of worked flint that, according to radiocarbon dating of charcoal associated with the stones, date back as early as 4000 B.C. In one trench measuring only three feet square and six inches deep, Haibt excavated 700 flint drills used to bore holes in the carnelian. Yet after surveying the area, he found only 10 finished beads made from the deep-red stone that was highly prized across the ancient Near East and Indian subcontinent. Haibt believes that large numbers of artisans were producing these exotic manufactured goods to sell elsewhere. Based on the shape of the beads and the quality of the carnelian, he suspects that the market in this era was pre-Dynastic Egypt, where large numbers of carnelian beads have been discovered in tombs. If he’s correct, it would provide evidence that Arabia and Egypt may have been linked by trade long before the rise of the Old Kingdom around 2700 B.C. That Tayma was part of an international trade network six millennia ago, producing luxury goods for export, is surprising. Although Jonathan Kenoyer, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is skeptical of Haibt’s theory, given that carnelian was worked in the fourth millennium B.C. at Egyptian sites such as Hierakonpolis, the sheer numbers of unfinished beads at Tayma impress him. “This may have been one of the big production centers that supplied the Arabian Peninsula, and probably also parts of Mesopotamia and the Levant, with carnelian beads,” Kenoyer says.

Aside from the scatter of beads, little is known about the early settlement. Hausleiter and his team explored the edges of the sabkha and found no architecture. They did, however, find remains of oat, millet, wheat, and barley cultivation dating from the third millennium B.C., as well as evidence of olives, grapes, and figs, all of which require irrigation. This suggests that Tayma was likely an established settlement centered on wells that provided life-giving water for farms. That may signal a need for a change in thinking, since most scholars have assumed that interior Arabia consisted mainly of small bands of herders and hunters until domestication of the camel after 1000 B.C.

Extending along the southern edge of the sabkha is Tayma’s most enduring and mysterious feature: a sandstone and mud-brick wall that runs an astonishing 11 miles, punctuated along the way with sturdy rectangular towers. The wall encloses more than 2,000 acres, and, in places, still stands as high as 25 feet. Celebrated in texts written by medieval Muslim travelers, it may have functioned as a defensive perimeter, a dam to prevent an incursion of saltwater from the sabkha during rare heavy rains, a corral for animals, or a combination of all three.

Historians and archaeologists had long thought that the wall, given its tremendous size and extent, was likely built dur-ing the time of Nabonidus, or perhaps even later. When Haus-leiter’s team sampled sediments at the foot of one section and used optically stimulated luminescence to determine how long it had been since the sun shone on the base, the results were wholly unexpected. Parts of the wall were created during the Bronze Age, between 2500 and 2000 B.C., during the heyday of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, Mesopotamian city-states such as Ur, and the distant Indus Valley civilization, according to Nicole Klasen from the University of Cologne. The towers, says Hausleiter, date to as early as 1900 B.C. “The new data from northern Arabia, particularly Tayma, fundamentally challenges this reconstruction of settlement history in this area,” adds Bryn Mawr College archaeologist Peter Magee. The dating indicates that Tayma—and possibly other Arabian oases—was a bustling, wealthy, and sophisticated town a thousand years earlier than scientists once suspected.

Yet the Saudi-German team has uncovered frustratingly little evidence of the people who lived at Tayma during this period. An ax and a ribbed dagger found in a modern industrial area by Saudi archaeologist Mahmoud al-Hajiri likely date to the time of the wall and tower construction, and have parallels in Syria and the Levant, but weren’t found in a datable context, and might have been brought there long after their production. On the south side of the mound, excavators did locate skeletons in graves from this era. The bones are badly deteriorated and have yet to yield much data, though the pot-tery in the graves suggests they come from the same time as the wall construction. Specialist Emmanuele Petiti of the DAI says that some arm bones show signs of continuous muscle stress, a hint that at least some of the townspeople engaged in repetitive physical labor. Petiti is hopeful that additional analyses will provide clues to this period when Tayma could brag of having one of the ancient world’s most extensive walls.

A mid-6th-
century b.c.
sandstone stela, showing
Babylon’s King Nabonidus, was found
in debris near one of Tayma’s main temples, a
further indication of the time the ruler spent at the oasis.

TAYMA’S TIES TO the outside world before and during the Bronze Age are intriguing but unclear. With the dawn of the Iron Age in the twelfth century B.C., however, the picture sharpens. In 2010, Saudi archaeologists found an inscription bearing the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III (r. 1187–1156 B.C.) on a rock face outside Tayma, the first pharaonic inscription found in Saudi Arabia. It matches similar examples found on a trading route passing from the Nile across the Sinai and into what is now Jordan. Tayma by then was part of an organized long-distance network. A couple of centuries after Ramesses’ reign, the domesti-cated camel began to make large caravans across forbidding desert terrain possible. Frankincense that could only be produced in southern Arabia, in what is now Yemen and Oman, could be car-ried in large quantities to the temples of Egypt and Mesopotamia using well-watered Tayma with its protective walls as a stopping point.

Evidence shows that Tayma’s prosperity and interna-tional contact continued to increase between the twelfth and ninth centuries B.C. On the southwestern edge of the site, archaeologists found a building that Hausleiter believes was a temple. It measures 40 by 65 feet, with pilasters and a paved forecourt, all protected by a six-foot-thick wall. Within, they found the remains of bone, ivory, wood, and faience objects such as amulets, gaming pieces, and glazed vessels, as well as statues of Egyptian deities and a scarab with a human head, attesting to close relations with Egypt during and after the reign of Ramesses III.

Centuries later, the temple was covered by a cemetery of rock-cut graves that may provide some insight into the lives of Tayma’s residents in the Hellenistic era of the fourth and third centuries B.C. Currently Petiti is working on the bones of 62 individuals from this period. What impresses him the most, he says, is the health of the people buried in these tombs. “Perhaps they didn’t have to work that much, and they had regular and high-quality food,” Petiti says. This may be why he has found little evidence of tooth decay. Further-more, he explains, women appear to have had a better lifestyle than men, since female bones show less stress and fewer inci-dents of trauma. The team has also found stone friezes from this era that show women feasting. These discoveries hint at a society where women may have played a larger public role than in neighboring Mesopotamia or Egypt.

Assyrian inscriptions show that, by the eighth century B.C., Tayma was even more closely linked with the lands beyond it. The oasis emerged as a key stopping place for caravans traveling between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and to and from southern Arabia. The settlement grew rich on this regional trade. Assyrian kings claimed that Tayma paid them tribute through the Desert Gate of Nineveh, the one-time capital of the Assyrian Empire in what is now the Iraqi city of Mosul. The sixth-century B.C. Hebrew prophet Jeremiah prophesied against the city’s wealthy merchants, and the Book of Job, which likely originated in this period, mentions the city’s caravans. Tayma drew even more international attention in 556 B.C. when Mesopotamian texts say that the king of the biggest power on Earth settled here for a decade during what proved to be the twilight of a mighty power. But aside from some stone grave chambers dating from 1000 to 500 B.C., surprisingly little from this era has been found.

Archaeologist Alina Zur examines a frieze of rosettes and animals that was reused as a funeral stela in the 1st century a.d.

NABONIDUS ABANDONED TAYMA in 543 B.C., and his empire collapsed soon after. But the oasis continued to flourish, even as it became embroiled in power struggles with neighboring towns and kingdoms. On top of a 30-foot-high mound, the DAI’s Sebastiano Lora has been attempting since 2006 to piece together the history of the temple that dominated the latter days of ancient Tayma. Unlike the older temple to the south, this site is a puzzle of fallen stone reused over generations. “This is my dream and my nightmare,” he says. In the narrow trench at one end of the temple, he has found pottery dating to Nabonidus’ era, as well as finely hewn stone. After 400 B.C., the building was renovated and expanded to cover more than 5,000 square feet. The imposing structure, with its view of the sabkha and mountains, had large stone pillars, three niches, eight-foot-thick walls, and a 12-foot-wide entrance leading to a monumental terrace with enormous stone steps and carved stone basins, as well as large stone statues of a distinctly Arabian style. Another part of the team, led by Alina Zur, recently exca-vated a tunnel, almost high enough to walk through, that con-nects the east side of the temple with a deep well a few dozen yards away. “We have a lot of questions to resolve,” she says. “A stela was reused to cover the tunnel. And this was clearly a group effort in antiquity—we needed a heavy-duty crane to move some of these slabs.” The water features, which, Lora says, “define the building,” are still not well understood, but they point to the influence of the Nabataeans, who created a large trading empire in the late centuries B.C. and early cen-turies A.D., centered in Petra, the rock-cut city just across the border in Jordan. Just south of the temple is a maze of residences built in a variety of styles over the centuries, from Nabataean times until the Byzantine period of the fifth and six centuries A.D. Some houses had two stories, some rooms have no doors, and one can only be accessed by a hole in the roof. “There is pottery from every period,” says the DAI’s Friedrich Weigel. “And there is a late Roman courtyard house that is completely different from the other buildings.” He adds that the residential area seems to shift to the north over time, possibly because access to the plentiful underground water gradually migrated in that direction. Eventually, the temple was converted into makeshift dwellings before being abandoned shortly thereafter. By A.D. 600, just before Islam swept up the peninsula from Medina and Mecca, the residents of Tayma moved their settlement a few hundred yards as the water table continued to move northward. The ancient city was left to the sun, the blowing sand, and archaeologists. Hausleiter hopes to work at the site for many years to come in order to grasp how Tayma evolved and to gain further insight the settlement can provide into a much wider area. “Our goal is to understand a region that is fully connected to other parts of the ancient Near East, and our work shows that Tayma is not just a distant place on the periphery of Egypt and Mesopotamia,” says Hausleiter. “Now we know that the old idea that Arabia was a desert wasteland doesn’t work anymore.”

The post Where the Wells Never Go Dry appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Ideal conditions within an ancient cave system are revealing a rich history that reaches back to a time before humans settled the island and extends to the present day

Some six million years ago, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, volcanic activity bubbling up from deep beneath the Earth’s crust formed Kauai, the most ancient of Hawaii’s major islands. Over time, volcanoes dotting the island spewed magma that cooled and turned to igneous rock, forming steep mountains. Rainwater flowed down the mountains, and, as that runoff reached the Mahaulepu Valley on the island’s southeast coast, it encountered fossilized sand dunes, where, through a process called dissolution, a network of caves was formed.

For more than 100,000 years, groundwater seeped in and eroded the limestone. Some 7,000 years ago, the sea encroached and a large portion of the ceiling of one of these caves collapsed, leaving behind a vast oval, mostly open to the sky and filled with brackish water that didn’t dry up until the middle of the twentieth century. It also created what would turn out to be a unique and fortuitous set of conditions that preserved a long, dramatic story of geological change and biological invasions, and of the waves of humans that successively altered the island in radical ways. Paleoecologists and archaeologists working there, surrounded by the high, ancient limestone walls, are beginning to read that record.

Wedged in a crease of hills just above a long white-sand beach favored by sailboarders, the sinkhole sits in a setting so picturesque that Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow leaped off the lip of one of its high cliffs in the recent Pirates of the Caribbean  movie On Stranger Tides . There, everything from a 352 ,000-year-old lava flow to a Sty rofoam cup washed in during a recent hurricane has been preserved. For the past quarter century, husband-and-wife paleoecologists David Burney and Lida Pigott Burney, along with dozens of colleagues and volunteers, have been digging down through the black mud that fills the sinkhole. There they have uncovered millions of fossils—in fact, the site, referred to as Makauwahi Cave, may be the richest fossil site in the entire Pacific region. The upper levels contain thousands of artifacts, ranging from animal bones to stone tools and carved wood, all of which were washed, blown, or thrown into the cave. But despite the richness of the site in terms of the evidence, Burney doesn’t need expensive drilling equipment or a massive dig project to plumb the site’s secrets. “It’s the poor man’s time machine,” he says. Small trowels, a very good water pump to keep groundwater under control, and wood-framed screens, along with a great deal of tenacity, are all that’s required.

On a recent winter day, Burney is shin-deep in the tar-black ooze at the bottom of one of the excavation pits. He typically locates them at the periphery of the sinkhole, against the cave’s walls, where the stratigraphy is clearer. He motions to me to clamber down a 20-foot aluminum ladder and gives me a history lesson as I descend. After the first few rungs, I leave behind the period after Captain James Cook landed on Kauai in January 1778 , the first European known to have visited Hawaii. Plastic, glass, and metal artifacts abruptly cease and are replaced by giant boulders, gravel, and sand in the level below, dated to about four or five centuries ago, unmistakable signs of an enormous tsunami which Burney and his colleagues believe originated from a massive earthquake in the eastern Aleutian Islands. This event, no doubt a catastrophe for the people living on the Kauai coast, deposited a great deal of debris and sealed off the prehistoric layers deposited in the cave from those of the later era of Western contact, leaving the material below undisturbed and uncontaminated.

Natives and tourists had long known about Makauwahi Cave, but it was Burney who, in August 1992 , first grasped its significance for understanding Hawaii’s long and varied history, when he, Lida, and researchers Storrs Olson and Helen James from the Smithsonian Institution stumbled on the site while on vacation. At the time, the Burneys were at New York’s Fordham University and had a keen interest in ecological history and paleontology. One afternoon, while walking on a nearby beach, Burney spotted fresh footprints that appeared to lead into the brush. Curious but cautious, he followed the prints to a small hole at the foot of a cliff, just big enough to crawl through. Inside, he found himself within a giant oval bowl, but he couldn’t see much else through the dense growth and the afternoon’s lengthening shadows.

The next morning, before the sun had reached the interior, the two couples were back with a bucket augur, a small hand-powered drill that can pull material up from below ground, making only a small puncture in the surface, not greatly disturbing the site. The first bore went down 10 feet, and Burney found three species of extinct land snails, important indicators of ancient environmental conditions. In the second sample was a small bird skull. “If you got that much good stuff by drilling two small holes, then I couldn’t imagine what was waiting,” he says. “I’ve spent much of my life looking for two things—lakes and caves that have fossils in them,” says the peripatetic scientist, who had flitted in this pursuit from the North Carolina sounds to the Serengeti plains to the jungles of Madagascar before moving to Kauai to devote himself to studying Makauwahi Cave. “If you can find a lake inside a cave, it’s more than twice as good because you get the benefit of both types of fossil-forming environments.” At Makauwahi, the conditions are remarkable. The alkaline limestone and the acidic groundwater cancel each other out and create the perfect neutral pH. “This is the Goldilocks zone—just right,” he says. “Everything in here is preserved. It’s like pages in a diary. And this process has been operating for thousands of years.” An acidic environment would have destroyed bones, while an alkaline environment would have destroyed plant fossils. But here, not just animal fossils, but also shells, seeds, leaves, and wood, as well as billions of microscopic algae, pollen, and spores are embedded in the layers that extend as far as 33 feet deep to the sinkhole’s floor.

Since they settled there permanently to devote themselves to studying the cave full-time 10 years ago, the Burneys, along with their team, have been working almost year-round to clear the thick tangle of foliage inside the sinkhole and dig small but deep trenches. Each bucket of mud must be hauled by hand up a ladder while a loud water pump keeps the hole from filling up. Once up top, the mud is washed through mesh screens using garden hoses, and the remains are collected for cataloguing and analysis. In the topmost layers, which go down a few feet, the team retrieved eight-track tapes and Polaroid film packs, a bottle that might have contained the opiate laudanum, perhaps used by Chinese workers who snuck into the cave a century ago, and a coin dated to 1895. Below that, the team found a piece of glass and an iron nail, possibly bartered from the crew of a passing clipper ship on its way to or returning from China, probably in the mid-nineteenth century.

Artifacts of the more recent past found in Makauwahi Cave are abundant. But the finds that are proving to be the most exciting are those that reveal the impact the first people to settle in Hawaii had on its ancient environment. Hawaii is one of the last places on Earth to have been settled by humans. Thousands of years after people had made their homes on the tip of South America, the heights of the Tibetan plateau, and even the icy edges of Greenland, no human had yet set foot on this volcanic archipelago. When people pulled double-hulled canoes onto Hawaiian shores for the first time, it marked one of our species’ greatest triumphs of exploration. Yet, until recently, archaeologists have been unsure how and when this feat took place.

The ancestors of today’s Polynesians, who settled most of the Pacific, including Hawaii, were part of what is called the Lapita culture. They fanned out from East Asia more than 3,000 years ago, but questions about their origins and route remain. Archaeologists have found hundreds of sites across the western Pacific littered with artifacts such as stone axes and organic remains that suggest the island-hopping seafarers traveled great distances with goods, plants, and animals from the large islands along the coast of China and Southeast Asia. This collection of materials, dubbed the Lapita package, made colonization possible. “But we don’t know where the package comes together,” says Alan Cooper, an archaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

By about 1000 b.c., these people had moved east as far as Samoa and can be identified as early Polynesians. The vast distances required to reach the islands beyond, such as the Society Islands—another 1,500 miles across open ocean—halted further successful migration for nearly 2,000 more years. Then the Polynesians were suddenly on the move again, though it’s not clear why, into the central and eastern Pacific, an area as big as North America. They eventually landed on the Hawaiian islands, possibly first on Kauai, not far from Makauwahi Cave.

The timing of these voyages has been hotly debated, largely because archaeological evidence is difficult to recover under the destructive conditions created by the warm and wet climate that dominates the scattered islands of the Pacific, and because of the prevalence of acidic volcanic soils. These two factors wreak havoc on organic material such as the wood, plant remains, and animal bones that can provide firm dates through radiocarbon dating. “There aren’t enough bones,” explains Cooper, “because the preservation is a mess. The Pacific is a hard place to work.” And the ancient seafarers didn’t leave behind texts or inscriptions. But, unlike at many other sites, the conditions inside Makauwahi Cave have preserved a great deal of evidence. “It’s a really fantastic snapshot of the environment just before and after humans arrive,” says Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon. “I can’t think of a single site that has yielded as much information about Polynesia in this period.”

Some of the most prized discoveries in the cave are found below the 400 -year-old tsunami layer that Burney believes was deposited in less than an hour. They are the tiny and fragile remnants of ancient fowl. “This is where the chicken bones are,” he says when I am halfway down the ladder, pointing at a dark layer of earth several feet below the tsunami layer. “We can be pretty sure they are not mixed with modern stuff. There is no KFC chicken in here at all.”

When Polynesians set out for new places, chickens were an essential part of the settlement package, providing not just meat and eggs and entertainment— cockfighting is still popular across the region—but also bones that could be made into tattooing or sewing needles or musical instruments. Polynesians sometimes left dogs or pigs behind, but they invariably carried chickens to their new destinations. Since domesticated chickens are not native to the Pacific Islands, the presence of chicken bones is a clear marker of human activity, and following the movement of chickens provides a handy way to track the spread of settlement across Polynesia. Realizing this, Burney bagged the chicken remains he discovered and sent them to Cooper’s lab. When compared with the DNA from other samples around Polynesia, researchers found that a distinct set of genes characterized the ancient chickens. The resulting DNA map reveals two distinct waves of exploration, one moving northeast toward Micronesia, and the other moving east to Samoa  and Hawaii. Rats traveled extensively with Polynesians as well, but they could hop boats back and forth to different islands, making them difficult to track, says Cooper. Pigs and dogs, apparently, did not make it to some outposts, such as Easter Island.

The mud of Makauwahi Cave has also preserved the residue of charcoal that blew into the cave and settled into the muck. Radiocarbon dating of the samples suggests that charcoal is a rare occurrence until a.d . 1200 . Its sudden appearance is another marker for human occupation and activity as people began to burn off foliage to plant taro and other staples. Cores taken from ancient stone-lined fish ponds on the island produced charcoal that provides comparable dates, clear signs and possible confirmation that humans arrived a good deal later—as much as 800 years later—than many historians had thought.

In the same levels as the chicken bones, the Burneys discovered large quantities of fishhooks made from bone and mother-of-pearl and the shells of 16 different kinds of mollusks. These artifacts are evidence of the earliest stages of ancient Hawaiian culture.

Burning was only one way in which the new settlers transformed Kauai’s landscape. Along with the rats, insects, such as ants, stowed away on their canoes. The combination of human activity and changes wrought by the animals and plants they brought makes it difficult to imagine the island’s environment as it existed before people arrived, but the cave is providing proof that it was once radically different. Standing almost at the bottom of the ladder, Burney says that bones, seeds, and other organic material embedded in the mud around us are below the level of the Polynesians’ appearance on the island, predating their arrival.

The Burneys’ work suggests that, in contrast to the weedy fields where sugarcane was long cultivated, the area around the sinkhole was wooded, dominated by a species of small palm. The trade winds blew birds to the island chain, and though these ancient Hawaiian birds had no predators, being blown back to sea meant certain death. Wings, therefore, constituted a risk for larger birds, and thus flightless species arose. More than 50 species of finches hopped through the forests, each adapted to a tiny ecological niche. Two sorts of small birds called rails crept along the ground looking for the eggs of other species to snag. The only mammals on the island before humans arrived were small bats. Avians filled the ecological niches that elsewhere were occupied by grazing animals such as wild sheep and cattle, which could not survive the long journey across the ocean. “The mallard duck gets here and suddenly grows 10 times as large, stops flying, develops a beak like a tortoise, and goes out and eats the vegetation,” Burney says, gesturing up through the hole. “It’s a laboratory of evolution.”

The island’s most fearsome predator was a type of long-legged owl that caught what flying birds there were in mid-air during the day—there were no nocturnal rodents to eat—and pierced their skulls with pincer claws. “You can tell by the holes in the skulls of the victims,” says Burney. By now we are standing at the bottom of one of the excavation trenches with cool muck rising halfway to our knees.

Eventually we climb back up, passing the centuries as we go. When we emerge from the pit, Burney’s legs are caked in the black ooze and his black helmet is spotted with dried dirt. He ambles over to the volunteers sorting through the mud using garden hoses and rectangular boxes with one-sixteenth- inch mesh. “Don’t save every last little snail, but every bird bone and every seed we want to keep,” he says to one woman. “The biggest problem is that people try to screen too much at once,” he explains. “Just keep it to a double handful so you don’t miss anything.”

Archaeologists have long suspected that the arrival of humans on Hawaii spelled doom for innumerable plant and animal  species. Nearly four dozen bird species, many of them extinct, have been recovered from Makauwahi Cave, and other excavations, particularly along the coastal plains, confirm the rapid transformation of the environment once people got there. Though the original settlers likely were a small band of 100 people or so, based on genetic data, rats rapidly populated the islands, posing a deadly threat to the large flightless birds vulnerable to scurrying mammals. The rats also quickly ate the seeds of the native palms, while humans may have overexploited the trees for thatch, causing them to almost disappear from the island. Early engravings made by Europeans who began coming to Hawaii in the late 1700 s show the area around Makauwahi Cave to be virtually treeless by this point—coastal plains had been transformed by way of irrigation and ponds, and mass burning had driven the forest back to areas too steep to cultivate. By the time the Europeans arrived, 600 or so years after the islands’ first settlers, Hawaiians numbered perhaps 200 ,000 or more, and the landscape was a combination of field and forest with few signs of the strange birds that once dominated the chain. One of the surprising finds Burney and his colleague, Australian paleoentomologist Nick Porch of Deacon University, have made is that the accidental introduction of insects, particularly ants, may have devastated the native species of beetles, many of which were wingless and therefore defenseless against the invaders. “It was insect Armageddon,” Burney says. “When people come to a new land, there is always mass extinction.”

Although today only a few native species of plants and animals survive in the lowlands of Kauai, the Burneys are working hard to change this. The land that includes the cave complex is owned by the Grove Farm Company, but it is now managed by the nonprofit Makauwahi Cave Reserve, which the Burneys created. In combination with their archaeological work, they are trying to bring ancient Hawaii back to life, at least on a small scale. Inside the sinkhole, based on what they have found during more than two decades of excavation, they are slowly replacing plants brought by Europeans with both native Hawaiian and Polynesian species. In acres of plant restorations that Lida Pigott Burney has created outside the cave, she and a host of volunteers have planted examples of native plants the Burneys identified in the cave’s fossil record. These species had retreated into largely inaccessible areas, but can thrive in the lowlands if given a chance. The reserve is also home to a few acres of traditional taro and other early Polynesian crops, as well as native palms and indigenous flowering plants that have replaced what was a 200-year monoculture of sugarcane.

More than 20 ,000 visitors, including many students, come to Makauwahi Cave each year to rediscover Hawaii’s lost past. There they learn to plant traditional crops such as bananas and breadfruit, and they visit the Burneys’ fenced restoration containing not only newly cultivated native plants, but also a dozen and a half tortoises that mimic the feeding habits of the long-extinct grazing birds and keep invasive weeds at bay. For Burney, the effort is an innova tive way to use archaeological and paleontological data to restore native species to the landscape and revive ancient practices. “I’m just as much interested in the future as the past,” he says. As we part, Burney is off to feed his chickens before dusk.

The post Inside Kauai’s Past appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The 100-foot-high, oval-shaped citadel of Erbil towers high above the northern Mesopotamian plain, within sight of the Zagros Mountains that lead to the Iranian plateau. The massive mound, with its vertiginous manmade slope, built up by its inhabitants over at least the last 6,000 years, is the heart of what may be the world’s oldest continuously occupied settlement. At various times over its long history, the city has been a pilgrimage site dedicated to a great goddess, a prosperous trading center, a town on the frontier of several empires, and a rebel stronghold.

 Read the article in PDF format

The post Erbil Revealed appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Deep beneath the sea off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, a diver examines a pottery vessel from the oldest known shipwreck in the Indian Ocean. Photo: Susannah H. Snowden

One bright Decenber morning in 2003, fishermen B.G. Preminda and R.P. Sunil were diving for conchs and lobsters in about 100 feet of water some two miles off the southern coast of the island nation of Sri Lanka, near the small port town of Godavaya. Instead of shellfish, however, they spotted the rim of a giant ceramic jar pok-ing out of the sandy seabed. They headed for the surface and noted the location on their GPS device. A week later, the divers returned for another look and this time discovered a small, bench-shaped stone carved with the image of a fish.

Read the article in PDF format

The post Seafaring in Ancient Sri Lanka appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Inside it was worse. The administrative area was in shambles. Filing cabinets were turned over, and papers dating back to the museum’s founding by British archaeologist Gertrude Bell in the 1920s, were strewn about. Small fires had destroyed some offices. In the display area, angry mobs had shattered the cases and smashed 2,000-year-old statues. The primary storage facility had been breached, and some 15,000 objects—no one knows exactly how many—were gone. Among the missing pieces were thousands of tiny cylinder seals, as well as several iconic artifacts such as the Lady of Warka, a stone head of a woman found at Uruk, which is considered the world’s oldest city.

Had museum officials not hidden 8,366 of the most valuable artifacts in a safe place known only to them, this event might have been a catastrophe for cultural heritage in Iraq. For a while, no one knew for certain how much damage had been done; I was with a team of U.S. archaeologists who arrived to assess the situation. Most of the museum’s estimated 170,000 artifacts were eventually found to be safe. The rampage had earned front-page headlines across the world. It was entirely preventable.

Some 2,500 years earlier, the Persian king Cyrus the Great was able to storm nearby Babylon, then the world’s largest city, but texts from the time relate that there was no chaos or looting. However, in 2003, American troops failed to secure what was second on their own list, after the Central Bank, of important places to protect in the modern Iraqi capital. Archaeologists had visited the Pentagon prior to the invasion to provide military officials with detailed coordinates of all major Iraqi cultural heritage sites.

The looting of the museum was over less than 48 hours after it began on April 10, 2003. But it was only the start of a decade of disaster for Iraq’s cultural heritage, a heritage that includes the world’s first cities, empires, and writing system. More than ancient vases and display cases were affected. The invasion began a grim era of sectarian violence and lawlessness in the very land that developed the state, legal codes, and recorded history itself. That era continues. “These are still very tough days,” says Abdul-Amir Hamdani, an Iraqi archaeologist who today is working on a doctorate at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. I first met Hamdani in May 2003 on the sidewalk outside U.S. military headquarters in the southern city of Nasiriya, where he was desperately attempting to get help to stop the vandals poaching ancient sites. “There is still nothing protecting many sites from looting and destruction.”

Looting, particularly in southern Iraq, which was the center of ancient Mesopotamia, had already begun in earnest in the late 1990s and grew to alarming proportions by 2004 and 2005, long after the National Museum was secured. The United States, its allies, and the fledgling government of post-Saddam Iraq did little to address the sources of the problem. Looting notwithstanding, Hamdani says that today’s principal threat is unbridled development; he served time in jail a few years ago for protesting construction on ancient sites. It is true that, now, foreign archaeologists are working in the northern part of Iraq called Kurdistan. A few western excavators are even digging in the southern regions that have long been off-limits. Looting at archaeological sites has decreased. But young archaeologists in the country long ago drifted to other less controversial and more remunerative work as the older generation retired, emigrated, or died.

More ominously, a new generation of Iraqis has grown up without any access to the impressive network of museums across the country that were once crowded with schoolchildren. They know little of their ancient past. Many Iraqi politicians today have a bent toward Islamic fundamentalism that is no friend to secular archaeology. Liwaa Semeism, the tourism minister overseeing the State Board of Antiquities, is a member of a splinter Shiite party. He has reduced the board’s authority and is openly hostile to foreigners. American archaeologists are now forbidden to excavate in Iraq until a trove of Jewish artifacts removed by the U.S. government is returned. And Semeism recently suggested that Germans might not be welcome either until the famous Babylonian Ishtar Gate—the model for the National Museum gateway—is returned.

The National Museum of Iraq today has beautifully renovated galleries and state-of-the-art climate control and security systems run by a staff that still consists of a core of underfunded but dedicated curators. But despite all the effort and money lavished on it by foreign governments, the museum remains closed to all but the most senior VIPs in an attempt to protect it. The fear is that throwing the museum’s doors open to the public exposes the collection and the newly-restored building to risk from another attack.

New elections later this month could bring greater political stability to the country. Eventually, as they have done from Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam, Iraqi leaders may again see their heritage as a major asset. “If you want to think about unity, then the ancient past is a broadly shared culture,” says Elizabeth Stone, a SUNY Stony Brook archaeologist who spent years excavating in Iraq. “Ancient Mesopotamia was real, and that could be used as a basis for natural unity.”

Hamdani will be returning to his home country this summer to continue his research. More than half of the stolen objects from the National Museum have been recovered, the gaping hole in the gate has since been carefully patched, and the tanks are gone. It is worth noting that there were no follow-up congressional hearings or independent investigations to pinpoint the parties responsible for the negligence connected to the museum debacle. No one in the U.S. military was criticized, demoted, or court-martialed. A Marine, who blamed Iraqis for using the site as a base to fight the Americans, wrote the only formal report on the matter.

The chaos that engulfed this land may finally be receding. A decade later, however, the true cost to our understanding of such a rich share of humanity’s heritage has yet to be tallied.

SEE: http://www.archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/779-national-museum-baghdad-looting-iraq

The post National Museum Baghdad 10 Years Later appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Built more than 5,000 years ago, the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro was likely the Indus River civilization’s largest and most populous city.

When the Indus River swelled two years ago in central Pakistan, the floodwaters came within just three feet of overtopping an earthen embankment protecting the ancient city known as Mohenjo-Daro. At the time, archaeologists breathed a sigh of relief. But in September 2012 monsoon rains again threatened the site, lashing at the exposed walls and sparking new fears that this 4,000-year-old metropolis may be destroyed before it yields its secrets. Those secrets remain legion. Archaeologists still don’t know the city’s true size, who ruled there, or even its ancient name—Mohenjo-Daro (“Mound of the Dead”) is the site’s name in modern Sindhi. To read more..  Dowload .pdf below.

Mohenjo-Daro.pdf

The post Mohenjo-Daro’s New Story appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

A massive citadel built atop a 150-foot-tall hill of solid rock looms over Aleppo’s old quarter. Fortresses have risen above this northern Syrian city since Roman times. But at the heart of the citadel, amid ruins of Ottoman palaces and hidden behind high walls that date to the Crusader era, a team of German and Syrian archaeologists is clearing debris from a large pit that shows this hilltop was significant long before the Romans arrived. Here, amid clouds of dust, a battered basalt sphinx and a lion—both standing seven feet tall—guard the entrance to one of the great religious centers of ancient times, the sanctuary of the storm god Adda. Kay Kohlmeyer, an archaeologist at Berlin’s University of Applied Sciences and the excavation codirector, has spent more than 10 years peeling away the layers of rubble that conceal the rich history of this temple. He’s found that it was first constructed by Early Bronze Age peoples, then rebuilt by a succession of cultures, including the Hittites, the Indo-European empire-builders whose domain spread from Anatolia to northern Syria in the 14th century b.c. Through the millennia, as Syrian, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian cultures mixed and blurred at this ancient crossroads, Adda was known variously as Addu, Teshup, Tarhunta, and Hadad. But as artistic styles and languages came and went, the storm god’s temple endured.

On a hot April morning, Kohlmeyer welcomes me into the shade of the corrugated roof that now covers Adda’s sanctuary. As my eyes adjust to the sudden gloom, I spy a row of stone friezes of gods and mythical creatures still standing in a neat row at the far end of the temple. Their modest size (most are no taller than three feet), clear lines, and almost whimsical subjects—human figures in pointy shoes and hats, a bull pulling a chariot—seem more like a series of three-dimensional cartoon panels than a powerful and magical tableau. Yet even in the shadows, the sharply chiseled surfaces are so fresh they look as if the sculptors just laid down their tools for a lunch break.

Kohlmeyer and his team were not the first to uncover the mesmerizing friezes, which were buried when the temple was abandoned in the ninth century b.c. Trenches that date to six centuries later show that Hellenistic people, perhaps digging for valuables, exposed some of the reliefs. Awed by what they found, and possibly fearful of desecrating an ancient holy site, they left the stones intact. Exposed for a century or so until it was swallowed again by debris, the temple may have been an early Near Eastern tourist attraction. And if archaeologists, preservationists, and Syrian government officials have their way, the site will soon offer visitors the rare opportunity to tread the floor of a 5,000-year-old place of worship.

At work since 1996, the team is just now wrapping up excavations and preparing the site for the construction of a museum supported by the World Monuments Fund and the Agha Khan Trust. But the ambitious project actually originated as an offhand joke. While Kohlmeyer was laboring on a gritty salvage dig at a remote Bronze Age site along the Euphrates River, a Syrian official suggested that he find a more civilized spot to excavate—like the Aleppo citadel. Securing permission from Syria’s bureaucracy to dig in the middle of one of the country’s most important national monuments—in what many believe is the world’s oldest continually inhabited city—was so improbable as to be funny. “It is as if the Chinese wanted to excavate the Tower of London,” says Kohlmeyer, who sports a trim mustache and brown hair down to his shoulders. But he took the suggestion seriously and, miraculously, got the permit. Kohlmeyer’s sensitivity to later Muslim-era sites may have helped. (His wife Julia Gonnella is an archaeologist who specializes in the Islamic period, and is now responsible for analyzing artifacts from the upper levels of the citadel.) “My friend was astonished to learn that his joke became a reality,” says Kohlmeyer.

He already had reason to believe that the temple of the storm god lay under the later Byzantine and Islamic layers. After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had long controlled the region, the French occupied Syria under a secret agreement with the British. They made the citadel their key base in Aleppo, and in the 1920s a French scholar noticed a slab with a Hittitestyle relief that had been reused in a medieval structure. French archaeologists dug into a nearby storage building, which had filled with trash and rubble over many centuries. Ducking through a narrow passage in a wall on the left side of the temple, just where the line of friezes at the rear of the temple begins, Kohlmeyer takes me into the cellar of the storage building. The French had cleared this space, reaching the temple pavement. But they abandoned their work just shy of the first carved slab, leaving behind a trowel and an empty bottle of champagne gleefully excavated by Kohlmeyer’s team. “A half-meter more, and all of these would have been in the Louvre,” he says, gesturing at the row of jaunty figures. By the second season, in 1997, Kohlmeyer had found the first relief, and to his delight was sure he had located a remarkably intact temple that would give him a unique glimpse into the religious architecture, beliefs, and practices of the ancient Near East over a vast span of time. Since then, he and his team have expanded the dig. Most of what is visible today dates to the period around 900 b.c., when small neo-Hittite kingdoms that arose after the collapse of the Hittite empire dotted the region. But the temple has more ancient antecedents as well as astonishing continuity. Kohlmeyer has been able to trace the complicated story of building, destruction, and renovations at the site over two millennia, offering an intimate picture of the great and sometimes subtle changes wrought over time by the storm god’s devotees.

Aleppo’s ancient origins still lie hidden under the citadel and surrounding city. But as early as 2400 b.c., the rulers of the prosperous city of Ebla made a 35-mile pilgrimage here to what likely was a modest place of worship where sacrifices were offered to Adda. “The storm god was the archetypal deity in Syria and Anatolia,” says Billie Jean Collins, an expert in the ancient Near East at Atlanta’s Emory University. Mesopotamians and Egyptians depended primarily on irrigated fields, but those living to the north and west counted on rainfall to sustain their crops. That made the storm god the preeminent deity. The Hebrew god Yawheh was originally considered a storm god, she adds. Whatever his name, this masculine deity was typically depicted carrying a weapon, or a thunderbolt, as a symbol of his power.

Tablets from Ebla describe the rulers’ contributions to renovating Adda’s temple, which was built on the bedrock of the natural hill. In one corner of the covered area, Kohlmeyer points to rough stones covered with plaster—today all that can be seen of the structure patronized by Ebla’s royal family. A curious deposit of small and finely worked bronze ceremonial spearheads—similar to those found by the late-19th-century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann at Troy—were the only artifacts Kohlmeyer recovered from the early temple. By 1800 b.c., Aleppo had become the center of the short-lived Yamhad Empire, which was populated largely by Amorites, a Semitic people first mentioned by Mesopotamian scribes in the mid-third millennium b.c. as nomads from the west. Cuneiform texts from Mari, a city far to the southeast on the Euphrates, describe the giant seated figure of the storm god—by then known as Addu—in the place of honor within the sanctuary, with a smaller sun god on his knee. The layout of this renovated temple was the same as the original, offering a suitably impressive home to the esteemed god.

Lebanese cedar spanned the roof of the central hall, which measured about 90 feet by 55 feet. The temple was at least 15 feet high, and the northern wall was 33 feet thick. That thickness, combined with evidence of a wooden staircase, hint at a multi-floored building that may have risen to an even more significant height, says Kohlmeyer. This structure, he adds, may have been similar to a small number of tower temples built in the region during the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1570 b.c.). Fire eventually destroyed the building, but patrons again came to its rescue and at least partially restored the temple. The basic shape—nearly square with a northern altar opposite the main entrance to the south— remained unchanged. It, too, may have looked like a tower from a distance.

By the 14th century b.c., the Hittites were expanding from Anatolia into what is now northern Syria and exerting a strong influence over the region. Reconstructing the temple yet again, the new architects seem to have reoriented the building along Hittite lines. That meant shifting the central altar to the eastern wall so that it was not visible from the main entrance. In the new design, worshipers entered the temple and then turned right to see the storm god, now called Teshup. The central hall also was narrowed—either to accommodate that change or because Lebanese cedar was too expensive or not available. The old central altar was covered, and some of the plain stone slabs lining the walls were replaced with figures carved in a vibrant Hittite style.

An array of fantastical gods—and even carvings that imitate windows and shutters typical of a Hittite place of worship—decorated the temple in this era. Some of the new panels show bull-men with tails, similar to depictions found near the Hittite capital of Hattusa in north-central Turkey. But, with their curly hair, they bear a striking resemblance to an ivory plaque found in Megiddo far to the south in modern-day Israel—a hint of the extent of the cultural and political connections during this period. And the new masters of Aleppo added the magnificent basalt lion and sphinx in front of the temple doors. Similar statues guard the entrances to Hittite temples and city gates far to the north. Those two figures are imposing, but the strange and delightful carving of a fish-man that sits nearby steals the show. Just over six feet tall, he holds a pinecone and bucket—symbols of purification that are found in reliefs that decorate later Assyrian palaces. His feet poke out from his scaled tail. The subject and quality of this frieze hints at an artist familiar with the latest Mesopotamian styles, so different from the smaller and more cartoonish Hittite approach to wall decoration.

With its revamped floor plan, substantial statues, and array of styles, the new structure was the product of a cosmopolitan period, when the old northern Syrian traditions absorbed Anatolian and Mesopotamian influences. But by the 11th century b.c., the Hittites were history. And, yet again, the temple at Aleppo reflects the ever-changing Middle East. The Hittite temple was destroyed and a new sanctuary arose in its place. The central altar was restored to the position it had in the original plan and a king’s image placed next to that of the storm god. Adjacent to the ruler’s image is an inscription that gives important insight into an era largely shrouded in mystery.

When the long-powerful Hittite Empire crumbled around 1190 b.c., after a series of civil wars, a complicated tapestry of peoples and languages emerged in the region. But it is hard to discern what took place in this transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Trade collapsed, major cities were abandoned, and small villages predominated. The Near East appears to have suffered through a dark age from the collapse of the Hittite Empire until 1000 b.c. “It is dark because we have so few inscriptions,” says London University’s David Hawkins, one of the few specialists fluent in Luwian, a language related to Hittite and used in southern Anatolia and northern Syria during this period.

Scholars long blamed invasions by the so-called “Sea Peoples” mentioned in Egyptian chronicles for the disruption and chaos across the Near East. But archaeological evidence for such an invasion is scanty. Hawkins suspected that a contraction of trade set off migrations of peoples in the Mediterranean basin that didn’t necessarily devastate the region or its ancient traditions. He has already traced a link between the names of old Hittite kings and those of the lords of Iron Age towns in the area, including the ruler of Carchemish, an important site that straddles the border between Turkey and Syria. The so-called dark age, it appears, may not have been so dark after all, and could have been a time of continuity rather than widespread disruption.

Eager to find inscriptions, Hawkins visited Aleppo in 2003, but returned to Britain disappointed. Ten days later, Kohlmeyer uncovered the king’s inscription. “I called Hawkins, and he arrived the day after,” Kohlmeyer recalls. Incised in Luwian hieroglyphics, the text is a set of cult instructions focused on the storm god and mentioning the king’s name. The discovery confirmed that this was indeed the storm god’s sanctuary. But what caught Hawkins’s eye was the mention of Taita, ruler of a people called the Patasatini. He contends that the proper translation is Palestin. That would make the king of the Philistines responsible for restoring the storm god’s temple to its former glory.

The Philistines (whose name survived as a geographical term describing “Palestine”) are probably the Peleset, one of the Sea Peoples who invaded Egypt in 1180 b.c. They made pottery similar to that produced by Mycenaeans and other peoples in the Aegean Sea, and settled the eastern Mediterranean coast from Gaza to Turkey. The new inscription complements two found decades ago near the major Syrian city of Hama, south of Aleppo, which reference both Taita and his queen. The king, Hawkins says, likely ruled over a substantial part of Syria.

Kohlmeyer also found a fragment of an inscription on a lion statue that mentions Carchemish and Egyptian horses, hinting that this ruler was more than simply a local leader. “This brings Aleppo into the international sphere,” says Hawkins. “And there seems to be continuity after the fall of the Hittites.” Archaeologists have found ceramics in northern Syria that appear to have been influenced by styles popular along the Mediterranean coast in this period. But Kohlmeyer, aware of the find’s political implications in a country with 400,000 Palestinian refugees, downplays the inscription’s significance. “I worry that this could become a pilgrimage site for Palestinians,” he says.

There was one last temple restoration around 900 b.c. by an unknown patron. This time, slabs portraying demons, monsters, and gods were added. A warrior-goddess, perhaps Ishtar, is dressed like a man. Eerie half-scorpion, half-human creatures stride by. And, in a long relief, the storm god himself, clean shaven, wearing a conical cap with horns, and clad in a kilt with a dagger, carries a pointed club as he mounts an old-fashioned Hittite chariot drawn by a bull. Protective winged figures—perhaps resembling the cherubim that decorated Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, which was built at this time—flank the altar. Depictions of winged creatures at Solomon’s temple may have been decorated in gold, and though no gold has been found at Aleppo, these reliefs could have once been sheathed in it.

An international array of styles is apparent on the final reliefs, and the artists may have spoken a polyglot of Luwian, Phoenician, and Aramaic as they chiseled away. Some of their innovations turn up later in the palaces of the great Assyrian rulers. “We still think of Mesopotamia as the center of civilization,” says Kohlmeyer. “That is wrong—influence went in both directions. These sculptures show that what originated in northern Syria eventually appears in Assyria.”

But before a new temple floor could be laid, a disastrous fire struck. Some of the reliefs were still unfinished, and remains of posts hint at scaffolding that was in place in the final days. There would be no reconstruction. In Hellenistic times, probably around 300 b.c., the Hittite altar was uncovered but not touched. Standing by the east wall, Kohlmeyer points out the ancient trench dug by the Greeks, which the modern team re-excavated. A people who believed in the storm god named Zeus—who like his Eastern cousin was chief of the pantheon and often depicted wielding a weapon— may have respected the site as sacred. There was a political angle to that consideration as well, says Collins, since showing respect for local gods was a smart way for newcomers to negotiate a peaceful coexistence with the locals. Over time, however, the trench was filled in and the friezes were forgotten. “This is one of the few places in Syria you can see such clear stratigraphy,” says Kohlmeyer, pointing up at the innumerable layers that begin with the time of Alexander the Great and stack up until the final days of the Ottoman Empire.

There is still more to discover. Kohlmeyer guides me to a deep trench behind the old central altar. A couple of local workers remove the plywood and sandbags that cover the 16-foot-deep excavations. Below are blank stone slabs— perhaps part of a corridor running around the temple. “This may have been part of the outer facade in the early second millennium b.c.,” he says, as I back away from the crumbling edge of the hole. The trench offers tantalizing hints at what remains to be found. Kohlmeyer is hopeful that once he clears the edges of the site, further clues to the temple’s outer precincts will emerge. Officials in Damascus, however, want work completed so that a museum can be built. Construction is slated to begin next year. A steel roof will protect the fragile temple remains, and the number of visitors will be strictly controlled.

As we climb out of the temple area and make our way through the gate to a stone-paved lane, we’re immersed in a sea of Syrian children in blue-andwhite uniforms. “I like working out in the open air in the countryside,” he says wistfully. An archaeologist digging in the center of a city whose citizens firmly believe is the oldest continuously inhabited one, he’s a prize guest at dinner parties, and the necessary socializing distracts him from his work. But there are advantages. He and his wife and daughter live in small century-old house on the citadel, far above the noise and dust of town. And late at night, when the tourists are gone and the citadel’s gates are locked up, silence descends. Then it is just Kohlmeyer, his family, and the storm god.

The post Temple of the Storm God appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The post Uncovering Sidon’s Long Life appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The palace of Darius and the large audience hall in the royal city of Persepolis (above). Tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments (right) from Persepolis are written in cuneiform to express Elamite, an ancient language of western Iran.

Tensions between iran and the United States have rarely run higher, with both governments sparring over alleged terror plots, disputing the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, and vying to influence the uprisings across the Arab world. But in Chicago and Boston courtrooms, the two countries have found rare common ground—neither wants ancient tablets from the royal palace of Persepolis in Iran to end up on the auction block. To the relief of scholars, two recent court rulings may give them their joint wish, preserving open access to what is the most significant source of information on the ancient Persian Empire uncovered to date.

In the early 1930s, during excavations of Persepolis, University of Chicago archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld unearthed tens of thousands of fragments of fragile clay tablets dating from about 500 b.c. The fragments were packed into 2,353 cardboard boxes and shipped to the university’s Oriental Institute. The Iranian government of the day allowed the export, with the understanding that the tablets would be translated and then returned. But the task of piecing together and understanding the vast number of fragments has been under way for more than seven decades and the majority of the collection remains in Chicago. Now, fearing loss of the archive, the university has moved into high gear to create thousands of digital images of the tablets, which record the day-to-day accounts of the empire during the reign of Darius the Great (521–486 b.c.) and include records of those traveling on behalf of the king, lists of workers’ rations, and careful notation of offerings made to deities.

Researchers hope to have most of this intensive effort completed within the next two years. To get the job done, the institute has assembled what Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, calls a “dream team” of textual scholars, archaeologists, and technical experts in digital cataloguing to take images of the tablets and make them available for public use. Translations are also being done, though it will take much longer to complete that daunting task. “Whether they are seized for sale or the government of Iran demands them back, the tablets will be out of the building soon. We all understand how important and urgent this is,” says Stein.

The front of this tablet (top) is inscribed in Elamite, while the back (left) has an impression that identifies the seal’s original owner as “Cyrus, son of Teipses, an Azanite.” Some scholars believe he was the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, who ruled the Persian Empire before Darius.

The sudden rush stems from a long-running legal battle involving not just the University of Chicago, but also Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston. The trouble began in2004, when Stein returned 300 translated tablets to Tehran in an effort to build trust with Iranian museum officials and scholars. Media reports of that visit caught the atten-tion of David Strachman, a lawyer for a group of Americans suing the Iranian government. They sought damages from a 1997 bombing in Jerusalem that killed five U.S. tourists and wounded dozens more. The Palestinian orga-nization Hamas, which has ties to Iran, had claimed responsibility, so the plaintiffs filed suit against Iran. In 2003, a U.S. federal court awarded them $423.5 million in damages, including $300 million in punitive damages. When the defendant, the Islamic Republic of Iran, ignored the ruling, the lawyers sought out Iranian assets on U.S. soil. Strachman set his sights on other tablets from Persepolis and on Iranian artifacts at Harvard and the MFA that could be worth millions of dollars if sold on the antiquities market.

Two bitter, expensive, and complicated legal battles ensued, pitting the plaintiffs against Chicago, and against Harvard and the MFA, and forcing the reluctant Iranian and U.S. governments to become involved. In March 2011, a U.S. court of appeals in Chicago rejected the plaintiffs’ request to seize and sell the Chicago tablets, noting that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 protects foreign assets, except those used for commercial purposes. Strachman argued that the tablets were commercial property, but the court disagreed. It also said that the university could ask for immunity on Iran’s behalf. A lower court had sided with the plaintiffs, and Iran had hired a lawyer to argue for protection. When former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami met with the Oriental Institute’s Stein in 2006 to discuss the situation, Khatami argued that the tablets “do not belong to governments but to the Iranian nation and the world.” The U.S. Department of Justice sided with the Iranians, and the Department of State twice filed briefs backing the position of Chicago and the Iranian government.

Patty Gerstenblith, a legal expert at DePaul University, predicts that Strachman’s clients may ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case. In an email, Strachman said that he preferred to decline comment on the litigation. A 2002 U.S. law that punishes terrorists might yet give the suit new life, adds Gerstenblith. For now, Stein says he’s relieved that the long and arduous discovery phase, when the plaintiffs requested reams of documents from Chicago, is over. “We went to hell and back trying to find all the stuff,” he recalls.

Some tablets were written in different scripts to express languages other than Elamite, including the Semitic language Aramaic (right) and Greek (below).

Meanwhile, in September 2011, in a separate case in Boston, a federal judge blocked the same plaintiffs from claiming the two other collections of tablets and artifacts. Harvard and the MFA had argued that they own the objects, not Iran, while the plaintiffs had argued they were taken illegally out of the country and therefore are still the property of the Iranian government. The court ruled that the collections belong to the institutions, not to Iran.

Though the immediate threat of seizure has passed, Stein worries that the conclusion of the suit in favor of the Oriental Institute could prompt Iran to demand the tablets be returned before another legal challenge surfaces. The threat of losing them, either through sale or return to Iran, has galvanized outside groups—among them, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Parsa Foundation—to contribute $3 million to the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project (PFAP), named for the rooms of the city’s fortification wall where the tablets were found. Although broken into thousands of fragments, the tablets may have survived thanks to the collapse of the building that housed them, likely whenAlexander the Great burned the royal compound in 330 b.c.

The Elamite text of this tablet (above) records an order from a high-level official named Farnaka, who was in charge of the central administration.

For scholars of the ancient Near East, Chicago’s PFAP is providing new insights into the vast empire that ruled the area from Egypt to India in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., but that has mainly been known through ancient Greek sources and a few more recent archaeological digs. The archive contains an impressive record of the Persian Empire’s daily dealings with its subjects during a period of about 15 years beginning in the late sixth century b.c. The texts pose a challenge to the handful of scholars capable of making sense of the records contained in the tablets. In this period, the Semitic tongue Aramaic was the lingua franca across the Middle East, but a host of other tongues and scripts were also used. Most of the tablets use a dialect of Elamite, the ancient language of western Iran, which was inscribed in the Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Others are written in Aramaic, and a small number are in Greek, Phrygian, and Old Persian. The latter find has been particularly surprising. Scholars long believed that Old Persian was only used for monumental purposes, not for practical accounting. This find may indicate that this script was more versatile than once believed. But Matthew Stolper, an Oriental Institute scholar who has led the Chicago “dream team” since they began work in 2002, cautions that other examples are required to make a case for Old Persian as a widespread writing system.

Many of the tablets were shipped to Persepolis from regional centers where they were carefully transcribed, sorted, and stored. This is exploding an old myth—held by both ancient Babylonians and modern scholars—that the Persian rulers were barbarians civilized by their subjects. Instead, there was a homegrown and capable bureaucracy. Another mistaken belief the tablets expose is that, following a decree of Cyrus the Great, slavery was not permitted in the empire. A text written in Persepolis mentions a slave sale.

A relief from the main stairway of the Council Hall depicts armed Persian guards (right). Between 5,000 and 6,000 of the tablets lack text, but include seal impressions on the clay (above).

Because most of the accounts record the distribution of grain, flour, sheep, goats, wine, and beer, the kind of day-to-day accounting that reveals the empire’s internal workings, the tablets provide a look at a cross section of ancient Persian society, from the royal family to workers. are no big narratives here. This is the view from the lunchbox,” says Stolper. The tablets also give insights into religious practices of the day. Scholars still are unclear what role religion played in the early empire of the sixth century b.c.  The Persepolis tablets indicate that the court distributed food and wine to priests of the ancient Iranian deity Ahura Mazda, a god who later became the focus of a Persian state religion. But they surprised researchers by showing that offerings were issued to Elamite and Babylonian gods as well. With respect to food distribution, the tablets say that some female workers received larger rations than men of comparable status, although it is not clear why. On the other hand, women with male children received more food than those with girls. There are also innumerable notations of travelers’ expenses paid for by the royal court. “People were moving from Bactria [in today’s Afghanistan] to Sardis [in today’s Turkey],” says Stolper. “This was a polyglot and multiethnic society.”

In their seemingly humdrum details, the Persepolis tablets are both adding new information to our understanding of the Persian Empire and revising long-held notions about the kind of society in which the Persians lived. According to Stolper, “The Persepolis archive has fundamentally changed every aspect of the study of Achaemenid Iranian languages, art, institutions, and history.” Even if the tablets go to auction, he hopes to convince any future owners—or Iranian officials—to wait until the information from each fragment is completely digitized before claiming the artifacts. This will ensure that the archive is available for the future, no matter what course the legal case takes.

The post The Truth Behind the Tablets appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Even local archaeologists with the benefit of air conditioned cars and paved roads think twice about crossing eastern Iran’s rugged terrain. “It’s a tough place,” says Mehdi Mortazavi from the University of Sistan Baluchistan in the far eastern end of Iran, near the Afghan border. At the center of this region is the Dasht e Lut, Persian for the “Empty Desert.” This treacher ous landscape, 300 miles long and 200 miles wide, is covered with sinkholes, steep ravines, and sand dunes, some topping 1,000 feet. It also has the hottest average surface temperature of any place on Earth. The forbidding territory in and around this desert seems like the last place to seek clues to the emergence of the first cities and states 5,000 years ago.

Yet archaeologists are finding an impressive array of ancient settle ments on the edges of the Dasht e Lut dating back to the period when urban civilization was emerging in Egypt, Iraq, and the Indus River Valley in Pakistan and India. In the 1960s and 1970s, they found the great centers of Shahr i Sokhta and Shahdad on the desert’s fringes and another,Tepe Yahya, far to the south. More recent surveys, excavations, and remote sensing work reveal that all of eastern Iran, from near the Persian Gulf in the south to the northern edge of the Iranian plateau, was peppered with hundreds and possibly thousands of small to large settlements. Detailed laboratory analyses of artifacts and human remains from these sites are providing an intimate look at the lives of an enterprising people who helped create the world’s first global trade network.

Far from living in a cultural backwater, eastern Iranians from this period built large cities with palaces, used one of the first writing sys tems, and created sophisticated metal, pottery, and textile industries. They also appear to have shared both administrative and religious ideas as they did business with distant lands. “They connected the great corridors between Mesopotamia and the east,” says Maurizio Tosi, a University of Bologna archaeologist who did pioneering work at Shahr i Sokhta.“They were the world in between.”

Work continues at Shahr-i-Sokhta, while the standing walls uncovered during earlier campaigns have been preserved. The site was composed of many large structures, including palaces, several large villas, and more modest homes.

By 2000 b.c. these settlements were abandoned. The reasons for this remain unclear and are the source of much scholarly controversy, but urban life didn’t return to eastern Iran for more than 1,500 years. The very existence of this civilization was long forgotten. Recovering its past has not been easy. Parts of the area are close to the Afghan border, long rife with armed smugglers. Revolution and politics have frequently interrupted excavations. And the immensity of the region and its harsh climate make it one of the most challenging places in the world to conduct archaeology.

The peripatetic English explorer Sir Aurel Stein, famous for his archaeological work surveying large swaths of Central Asia and the Middle East, slipped into Persia at the end of 1915 and found the first hints of eastern Iran’s lost cities. Stein traversed what he described as “a big stretch of gravel and sandy desert” and encountered “the usual…robber bands from across the Afghan border, without any excit•ing incident.” What did excite Stein was the discovery of what he called “the most surprising prehistoric site” on the eastern edge of the Dasht-e Lut. Locals called it Shahr-i-Sokhta (“Burnt City”) because of signs of ancient destruction.

It wasn’t until a half-century later that Tosi and his team hacked their way through the thick salt crust and discovered a metropolis rivaling those of the first great urban centers in Mesopotamia and the Indus. Radiocarbon data showed that the site was founded around 3200 b.c., just as the first substantial cities in Mesopotamia were being built, and flourished for more than a thousand years. During its heyday in the middle of the third millennium b.c., the city covered more than 150 hectares and may have been home to more than 20,000 people, perhaps as populous as the large cities of Umma in Mesopotamia and Mohenjo-Daro on the Indus River. A vast shallow lake and wells likely provided the nec•essary water, allowing for cultivated fields and grazing for animals.

Built of mudbrick, the city boasted a large palace, separate neighborhoods for pottery-making, metalworking, and other industrial activities, and distinct areas for the production of local goods. Most residents lived in modest one-room houses, though some were larger compounds with six to eight rooms. Bags of goods and storerooms were often “locked” with stamp seals, a procedure common in Mesopotamia in the era.

Shahr-i-Sokhta boomed as the demand for precious goods among elites in the region and elsewhere grew. Though situated in inhospitable terrain, the city was close to tin, copper, and turquoise mines, and lay on the route bringing lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to the west. Craftsmen worked shells from the Persian Gulf, carnelian from India, and local metals such as tin and copper. Some they made into finished products, and others were exported in unfinished form. Lapis blocks brought from the Hindu Kush mountains, for example, were cut into smaller chunks and sent on to Mesopotamia and as far west as Syria. Unworked blocks of lapis weighing more than 100 pounds in total were unearthed in the ruined palace of Ebla, close to the Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologist Massimo Vidale of the University of Padua says that the elites in eastern Iranian cities like Shahr-i-Sokhta were not simply slaves to Mesopotamian markets. They apparently kept the best-quality lapis for themselves, and sent west what they did not want. Lapis beads found in the royal tombs of Ur, for example, are intricately carved, but of generally low-quality stone compared to those of Shahr-i-Sokhta.

Pottery was produced on a massive scale. Nearly 100 kilns were clustered in one part of town and the craftspeople also had a thriving textile industry. Hundreds of wooden spindle whorls and combs were uncovered, as were well-preserved textile fragments made of goat hair and wool that show a wide variation in their weave. According to Irene Good, a specialist in ancient textiles at Oxford University, this group of textile fragments constitutes one of the most important in the world, given their great antiquity and the insight they provide into an early stage of the evolution of wool production. Textiles were big business in the third millennium b.c., according to Mesopotamian texts, but actual textiles from this era had never before been found.

Situated at the end of a small delta on a dry plain, Shahdad was excavated by an Iranian team in the 1970s (below). An Iranian-Italian team (bottom), including archaeologist Massimo Vidale (right), surveyed the site in 2009.

The artifacts also show the breadth of Shahr-i-Sokhta’s connections. Some excavated red-and-black ceramics share traits with those found in the hills and steppes of distant Turkmenistan to the north, while others are similar to pots made in Pakistan to the east, then home to the Indus civilization. Tosi’s team found a clay tablet written in a script called Proto-Elamite, which emerged at the end of the fourth millennium b.c., just after the advent of the first known writing system, cuneiform, which evolved in Mesopotamia. Other such tablets and sealings with Proto-Elamite signs have also been found in eastern Iran, such as at Tepe Yahya. This script was used for only a few centuries starting around 3200 b.c. and may have emerged in Susa, just east of Mesopotamia. By the middle of the third millennium b.c., however, it was no longer in use. Most of the eastern Iranian tablets record simple transactions involving sheep, goats, and grain and could have been used to keep track of goods in large households.

Burial Goods If there were any doubts that eastern Iran was a sophisticated and populous region in the third millennium b.c., the vast cemetery at Shahr-i-Sokhta has put them to rest. Over the past two decades, a team led by Iranian archaeologist Mansour Sajjadi has been working in a 100-acre area that includes an estimated 40,000 graves—and possibly as many as 200,000—dug over a period of many centuries, only 100 of which have thus far been exca-vated.According to archaeologist Kirsi Lorentz at the University of Newcastle, who is working on the finds from the site, the cemetery offers “a unique record with which to study the development of urban civilization in the third millennium b.c.” One of the most intriguing finds is the well-preserved remains of a woman in her late 20s who died between 2900 and 2800 b.c. She was buried with an ornate bronze mirror and what Sajjadi and Ital-ian excavators believe is an artificial eyeball made of bitumen paste and gold that was once held in place with fine thread. Microscopic examination showed that the artificial eyeball left an imprint in her eye socket, a sign that it was there for a long period of time before her death. Other archaeologists insist that the object is more likely an eyepatch held in place by string threaded through holes on each side. Another important find was an intricate rectangular wooden board with 60 small, round pieces made from wood inlaid with bone and limestone, likely an early form of backgammon. Similar sets have been found in the Indus far to the east, as well as in the tomb of Queen Puabi in the Royal Graves of Ur. The board in Shahr-i-Sokhta is approximately the same date as the Indus and Mesopotamian artifacts, and suggests that the people of eastern Iran traded not only goods, but ideas for entertainment as well. Lorentz says that the cemetery’s large numbers will allow for statistical analysis of health, diet, and mobility among the ancient residents. And though the bones are often in poor condition, she adds that there is “exceptional preservation” of human hair, nails, and skin. Grooves found in the teeth of many individuals may be a sign that weavers used their teeth as third hands. Short hair found on the skulls may show that crew cuts were the fashion—at least in death if not in life. —A.L.

While Tosi’s team was digging at Shahr-i-Sokhta, Iranian archaeologist Ali Hakemi was working at another site, Shahdad, on the western side of the Dasht-e Lut. This settlement emerged as early as the fifth millennium b.c. on a delta at the edge of the desert. By the early third millennium b.c., Shahdad began to grow quickly as international trade with Meso•potamia expanded. Tomb excavations revealed spectacular artifacts amid stone blocks once painted in vibrant colors. These include several extraordinary, nearly life-size clay statues placed with the dead. The city’s artisans worked lapis lazuli, silver, lead, turquoise, and other materials imported from as far away as eastern Afghanistan, as well as shells from the distant Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

Evidence shows that ancient Shahdad had a large metalworking industry by this time. During a recent survey, a new generation of archaeologists found a vast hill—nearly 300 feet by 300 feet— covered with slag from smelting copper. Vidale says that analysis of the copper ore suggests that the smiths were savvy enough to add a small amount of arsenic in the later stages of the process to strengthen the final product. Shahdad’s metalworkers also created such remarkable artifacts as a metal flag dating to about 2400 b.c. Mounted on a copper pole topped with a bird, perhaps an eagle, the squared flag depicts two figures facing one another on a rich background of animals, plants, and goddesses. The flag has no parallels and its use is unknown.

Vidale has also found evidence of a sweet-smelling nature. During a spring 2009 visit to Shahdad, he discovered a small stone container lying on the ground. The vessel, which appears to date to the late fourth millennium b.c., was made of chlorite, a dark soft stone favored by ancient artisans in southeast Iran. Using X-ray diffraction at an Iranian lab, he discovered lead carbonate—used as a white cosmetic—sealed in the bottom of the jar. He identified fatty material that likely was added as a binder, as well as traces of coumarin, a fragrant chemical compound found in plants and used in some perfumes. Further analysis showed small traces of copper, possibly the result of a user dipping a small metal applicator into the container.

A metal flag found at Shahdad, one of eastern Iran’s early urban sites, dates to around 2400 b.c. The flag depicts a man and woman facing each other, one of the recurrent themes in the region’s art at this time.

Other sites in eastern Iran are only now being investigated. For the past two years, Iranian archae•ologists Hassan Fazeli Nashli and Hassain Ali Kavosh from the University of Tehran have been digging in a small settlement a few miles east of Shahdad called Tepe Graziani, named for the Italian archaeologist who first surveyed the site. They are trying to understand the role of the city’s outer settlements by examining this ancient mound, which is 30 feet high, 525 feet wide, and 720 feet long. Excavators have uncovered a wealth of artifacts including a variety of small sculptures depicting crude human figures, humped bulls, and a Bactrian camel dating to approximately 2900 b.c. A bronze mirror, fishhooks, daggers, and pins are among the metal finds. There are also wooden combs that survived in the arid climate. “The site is small but very rich,” says Fazeli, adding that it may have been a prosperous suburban production center for Shahdad.

Sites such as Shahdad and Shahr-i-Sokhta and their suburbs were not simply islands of settlements in what otherwise was empty desert. Fazeli adds that some 900 Bronze Age sites have been found on the Sistan plain, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mortazavi, meanwhile, has been examining the area around the Bampur Valley, in Iran’s extreme southeast. This area was a corridor between the Iranian plateau and the Indus Valley, as well as between Shahr-i-Sokhta to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south. A 2006 survey along the Damin River identified 19 Bronze Age sites in an area of less than 20 square miles. That river periodically vanishes, and farmers depend on underground
channels called qanats to transport water.

Despite the lack of large rivers, ancient eastern Iranians were very savvy in marshaling their few water resources. Using satellite remote sensing data, Vidale has found remains of what might be ancient canals or qanats around Shahdad, but more work is necessary to understand how inhabitants supported themselves in this harsh climate 5,000 years ago, as they still do today.

Meanwhile, archaeologists also hope to soon continue work that began a decade ago at Konar Sandal, 55 miles north of Yahya near the modern city of Jiroft in southeastern Iran. France-based archaeologist Yusef Madjizadeh has spent six seasons working at the site, which revealed a large city centered on a high citadel with massive walls beside the Halil River. That city and neighboring settlements like Yahya produced artfully carved dark stone vessels that have been found in Mesopotamian temples. Vidale notes that Indus weights, seals, and etched carnelian beads found at Konar Sandal demonstrate connections with that civilization as well.

Many of these settlements were abandoned in the latter half of the third millennium b.c., and, by 2000 b.c., the vibrant urban life of eastern Iran was history. Barbara Helwig of Berlin’s German Archaeological Institute suspects a radical shift in trade patterns precipitated the decline. Instead of moving in caravans across the deserts and plateau of Iran, Indus traders began sailing directly to Arabia and then on to Mesopotamia, while to the north, the growing power of the Oxus civilization in today’s

The large eastern Iranian settlement of Tepe Yahya produced clear evidence for the manufacture of a type of black stone jar for export that has been found as far away as Mesopotamia

Turkmenistan may have further weakened the role of cities such as Shahdad. Others blame climate change. The lagoons, marshes, and streams may have dried up, since even small shifts in rainfall can have a dramatic effect on water sources in the area. Here, there is no Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, or Indus to provide agricultural bounty through a drought, and even the most sophisticated water systems may have failed during a prolonged dry spell.

Unbaked clay figurines like this one, dated to 2400–2000 b.c., were found in several graves at Shahdad.

It is also possible that an international economic downturn played a role. The destruction of the Mesopotamian city of Ur around 2000 b.c. and the later decline of Indus metropolises such as Mohenjo-Daro might have spelled doom for a trading people. The market for precious goods such as lapis collapsed. There is no clear evidence of widespread warfare, though Shahr-i-Sokhta appears to have been destroyed by fire several times. But a combination of drought, changes in trade routes, and economic trouble might have led people to abandon their cities to return to a simpler existence of herding and small-scale farming. Not until the Persian Empire rose 1,500 years later did people again live in any large numbers in eastern Iran, and not until modern times did cities again emerge. This also means that countless ancient sites are still awaiting exploration on the plains, in the deserts, and among the rocky valleys of the region.

Andrew Lawler is a contributing editor at Archaeology. For our 1975 coverage of the excavations at Shahr-i-Sokhta, see www.archaeology.org/iran

Lasting Impression The impression of a cylinder seal on an unbaked clay jar sealing from Konar Sandal They are tiny and often faded and fragmented. But one abundant source of evidence for both international trade and the role of women in eastern Iran during the third millennium b.c. are the tiny images found on seals and seal-ings throughout this area. The small impressions were designed to mark ownership and control of goods, from bags of barley to a storeroom filled with oil jugs. Holly Pittman, an art historian at the University of Pennsylva-nia who has worked throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, is examining the fragile impressions. She is attempting to build a clearer picture of the lives of ancient inhabitants in large centers such as Shahr-i-Sokhta, Shahdad, and Konar Sandal, near today’s modern city of Jiroft. Pittman now believes these people of eastern Iran shared common ideas and beliefs while also participating in the first age of long-distance exchange. Female deities with vegetation growing out of their bodies are one common element on the seals found in eastern Iran and, as on the Shahdad flag, figures confronting one another also appear frequently. A distinctive type of white stone seals that have been found in Central Asia and the Indus appear to have been made in a similar style by eastern Iranians. “There are relationships between sites, and certainly this part of eastern Iran is participat-ing in a global network,” she says. “This is a world of merchants and traders.” Pittman believes that by early in the third millennium b.c., the network linking Mesopotamia and southeastern Iran resulted in a mixing of cultures across this enormous area. Seals that were used to close storage rooms in Konar Sandal, for example, are of a specific Mesopotamian type common in the major Iraqi port of Ur. That hints strongly at the presence of Mesopotamian inhabit-ants in Konar Sandal who had almost certainly come from Ur. She also suggests that Mesopotamian artifacts absorbed style elements from southeastern Iran. Another example is the famous inlaid lyre found at Ur, which has the face of a bearded bull typical of eastern Iran. Other seals found in ruins such as Konar Sandal are Proto- Elamite in style, showing strong connections with western and central Iran, where the Proto-Elamite writing system is believed to have originated at the same time that Mesopotamian urban life began to flourish in the late fourth millennium b.c. Seals were powerful markers of economic, political, and social clout. At some eastern Iranian sites such as Shahr-i-Sokhta, they appear to have been largely in the hands of women. Marta Ameri, an archaeologist at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, notes that two-thirds of the seals found in Shahr-i-Sokhta’s graves are found in female burials. While the grander bronze seals are uncovered mostly in male tombs, the more common bone seals are more often associated with women. Based on remains of seal-ings made to doors, vases, bags, and other objects, the bone seals were in more frequent use than the bronze. This suggests, Ameri says, that women were in control of food storage and possibly trade goods as well. Until more intact graves are found at other sites such as Shahdad,“we at least have a tantalizing look at the roles women may have played,” says Ameri. —A.L.

The post The World in Between appeared first on Andrew Lawler.