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