Dr John MacGinnis 'Excavating a provincial capital of the Assyrian Empire: The Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Project'

Transcription

1 Dr John MacGinnis 'Excavating a provincial capital of the Assyrian Empire: The Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Project' Interview by Tom Russell How did you know the site was Assyrian? We knew from texts that the Assyrians got as far as Diyarbakir, and that there were three fortified sites to the east: Sinabu, Tidu, and Tušhan. But before the excavations there hadn t really been archaeological investigation into the Assyrian presence on the Upper Tigris. Surveys and field walking began in 1997 and that turned up Assyrian ceramics and half a dozen hands of Ištar. There was a long debate about whether Kurkh or Ziyaret Tepe was Tušhan, but after Simo [Parpola] s publication of the archives, it seems certain it s Ziyaret Tepe. You date the Neo-Assyrian presence at Ziyaret Tepe between 882 and 611 BC. How can you be so precise? We know they came in 882 because Ashurnasirpal tells us he campaigned in the north, refounded the city of Tušhan, and resettled the Assyrians who had been there from the time of Shalmaneser presumably Shalmaneser I. 611 is pretty certain too. It comes from the archives. For the most part, they re typical Neo-Assyrian administrative texts, discussing textiles, grain, lists of people, and so on, but the dating really stands out. It seems to be BC. That s significant because Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, fell in 612. The archive spans that period and nothing like that has been found before. We don t know the precise dating of the last Assyrian texts. There are eponyms, called limmus, for each year, and we only know their sequence up to 648 BC. After that no list has been found, although we can work out certain sequences. One of the limmus at Ziyaret Tepe, Aššur-šarrani, is otherwise unattested. Simo thinks he must be 611, which we wouldn t find anywhere else. He s probably right. Some of the texts point to being written right at the end of the empire, most of all this wonderful letter written by Mannu-ki-Libbali, a senior official at Tušhan. It s a reply to a request for a unit of chariots, but he says it s impossible to do that and that everyone has left. He complains about having to stay behind, Surely death will come of it, I am done.

2 He also says who everyone is in some detail, which gives us a nice list of exactly who you did need for an Assyrian chariot unit: smiths, carpenters, leatherworkers, bow and arrow makers, toolmakers, Assyrian and Aramaean scribes, and so on. Do we know any more about the different phases of occupation? At Operation Q, we dug a gate in its entirety. It had four phases of architecture, which was one of the reasons for digging it. We found something similar with the storage building at Operation G, so four phases may cover the whole site. The surveys at Q showed an area of high resistivity in the middle of the gate, which was likely to be the road. We dug there, and found four phases which match the gate exactly. Curiously, in the third road, there were no potsherds but there were dozens and dozens of hands of Ishtar, either the whole thing or the stem. I m absolutely certain they were sought out and buried. They must have had some special status or function, but none of them were inscribed. What about the gate itself? The gate itself had two gate chambers, one on either side of the road, where the soldiers lived on duty and perhaps where they lived full stop. We found knucklebones in the gate chamber, presumably for games, and six graves. There were three on each side, mainly from the third phase. It was normal to bury the dead in their housing unit, which suggests that for those six soldiers the gate chamber was the closest thing they had to a house. Where have you dug in particular? I have been responsible for the lower town overall. Some years I have been fully committed directing other site supervisors but this year I was able to personally supervise my own area, Operation W. We found black and white mosaic pavements there in 2001, our second year of digging. The mud brick in the lower town is very difficult to dig you have to examine it over different days and at different times of day so it was very reassuring to come straight down on a characteristically Neo-Assyrian pavement. This one had been dug up in part and replaced with a much rougher line of stones. At first, I thought they were graves. I didn t really want to dig them, but Dirk [Wicke] had such amazing results on the high mound that we decided we d better excavate at least one.

3 It wasn t a grave. We found stones, 30 or 40 centimeters of clay, and then another pavement, which must have been an earlier phase of the building that was levelled or rebuilt. The stones could be repairs, but it s unlikely because they definitely could do better repairs than that. The pavement at Operation G/R originally had smaller pebbles and was quite ornate, but that was gradually being replaced with large squares of plain black and white, although the process was never finished. The only theory I can think of is this. We have evidence for an earlier phase of the building and there seem to have been four phases in total. Possibly there were graves cut into the floor in an earlier phase, and these stones were put into the floor to mark where the graves had been so cult could continue. What did you find in the 2013 digging season? The find I m happiest with is an early Neo-Assyrian tablet. It s a list of 25 textiles, which we found in a pit that cuts the palace. I think it s reasonable to say it s evidence for textile production, and it might tie in with the list of women. One of the things they may have been doing is weaving textiles. Dirk did a sounding of the palace a couple of years ago and found Middle Assyrian occupation. He wanted to expand that area. He came down on a Middle Assyrian courtyard paved with stones, rather than bricks. It was really finely made. We also found a duck weight about the size of a real duck weighing one Assyrian talent (30kg). It would have been the heaviest in a series of weights, used for weighing bitumen, metals, and textiles. It was the only one we found, which is one piece of evidence that the Assyrians had time to take possessions with them when they left, but chose to leave the heaviest things behind. On the unusual side, we found a tool made of a lion bone and a grave with two cylinder seals inside. We ve found a few seals and sealings over the years, almost all of them in context. There s a common motif of archers shooting equids, but we ve also got a clay bulla with the sibitti [the Pleiades], and one sealing with fragments of cuneiform writing. Most people will have heard of Ziyaret Tepe because of the list of women whose names are from an unknown language. What s the latest thinking on the list and the language? Our guess, which no one has challenged yet, is that they were deportees from the Zagros Mountains. If that s right, they d be the first generation the children of deportees tend to have Assyrian or Aramaic names.

4 Work in Western Iran might tell us more, but I also plan to see what names appear in the royal inscriptions and letters that discuss expeditions in the Zagros, and check if any of those correspond to what we found at Ziyaret Tepe. As for the tablet itself, we found a fragment in 2008, but we had to wait till 2009 for the rest. It wasn t meant to be a digging season, but Dirk got a special dispensation. He came right down on the tablet. I was in Cambridge when I got the call saying, We ve got a tablet! I went out straightaway. I didn t even ask what size it was. It was lying on the floor of the middle phase of the palace, which burned down in the 8 th century. We don t know quite what happened, but the Assyrians may have lost control of Tušhan at that point. I d guess the palace was burned deliberately. The tablet must have been lying on the floor of the throne room when it happened. The obverse was exposed to the fire, which baked the surface. You can read pretty much everything there, although the reverse is quite worn. One fragment is missing, though. It must have been scraped by one of the medieval pits, or perhaps nibbled by a rodent. We sifted everything looking for it, but it just wasn t there. The cremation burials are among the more unusual finds from Ziyaret Tepe. How did you come across them? There was a baked brick pavement sticking out of the mound, which is something you often get with major Mesopotamian sites. It marks the presence of monumental architecture. This one had a band of red, which means the bricks were made out of natural clay, which is stronger and has higher status. It was very difficult to excavate. The building had been razed to the ground or even lower and lots was lost to erosion. We found there had been pits dug in. A lot of them were medieval rubbish pits, but some weren t medieval or Hellenistic but actually Assyrian. Inside, we found fragments of bone, smashed up pottery, hundreds of fragments of ivory, lots of metalwork some of it melted into drops and stone bowls. The bones were really tiny fragments. Without a physical anthropologist, it wasn t clear whether they were animal or human. It took us a while to realise it, but they turned out to be the cremation burials. You dig down, lay the body in there with the grave goods, and burn everything. It s not an Assyrian practice. What is Assyrian, though not exclusively, is that it was within the palace or home. I think we re looking at something Assyrian with a foreign element. It s a perfect almost too perfect example of religious syncretism.

5 Dirk joined us at that point to look at the ivory. While excavating the graves, he expanded westward into the mound and came across the throne room. He also elucidated the plan of the palace, including two courtyards, a block for the reception rooms, retiring rooms, and bathrooms. You have an article coming out in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal about the tokens you found at Ziyaret Tepe. What can you tell us about them? The tokens are actually one of our great finds it just took us a long time to realise that! We found hundreds of them in the western building at Operation G/R. We d already found a few at the palace and Operation K, but when you find just a few, there s always an argument about whether they re gaming pieces. When you find hundreds, particularly in an administrative building, they must be tokens. At the time we were preoccupied with the archives. It was only later that we realised how important it is to have tokens in use in a Neo- Assyrian building. When we looked into it further, we found out there was no other evidence for tokens in Neo-Assyrian administration or rather, no published evidence. There s actually quite a lot out there. The University of Chicago found about 1200 at Tell Tayinat in Turkey, when they excavated it in the 1920s and 1930s. They re not published, but they are being worked on now and apparently they re on display in the Oriental Museum in Chicago. There are also tokens from Tell Sheikh Hamad, something like 300 of them. From Aššur there are even tokens in jars or associated with jars. One of the jars has an etching on the outside that s like the "oxhide" token. Tokens obviously have a much older history in accounting, so we assume they were used for sheep or agricultural produce. But we don t know yet exactly how they were used, if it was for temporary calculations or storing long term information on flocks. In some respects, tokens are actually superior to writing. Illiterate people can use them to assess flocks of sheep and they re better for calculations. If, for instance, you had a sheep department with a bag for each flock, you might have a written tag with the name of each shepherd, but if you wanted to move two rams and a ewe from one flock to another, that s easier with tokens than tablets.

6 What do you think explains the lack of inscriptions from Ziyaret Tepe? Yes, there are no steles or sculptures or winged bulls, which is a bit of a shame. Whether they re still buried, or were robbed in antiquity or later, we don t know. They were a standard component of Assyrian provincial capitals, so they must have been there. The site s littered with baked brick fragments for courtyards, kitchens, bathrooms, any surface that was exposed to water in high-status buildings. We ve all turned over every single baked brick we came across, but none of them are inscribed. That s certainly not accidental. When we thought we were the only site with tokens, we assumed it was because literacy hadn t permeated to the frontiers, but that no longer seems to be the answer. I d guess it s what happens when you get further away from the Assyrian heartland. The governors didn t have the authority to inscribe bricks in their own name and they hadn t been ordered to do it in the king s name. There must also be some foundation deposits somewhere. Dirk thought he d found them when he was digging the palace. He came across a mud brick wall with a single baked brick in it. He was sure this was the top of the foundation box. We all got up early one morning to watch him excavate it. But there was nothing there. We ve talked about the palace and some of the larger buildings, but one of your aims was to find some low status housing. How did you get on with that? Yes, it s not as easy as you might think. On the high mound there are elite buildings such as the palace, but there are also elite buildings in the low city. It s probably the wrong model and the city wasn t actually composed of high status and low status areas. We did find what might be some low status housing at Operation K, which we originally dug to ground truth whether there was a city wall. There s a three meter gap between the housing and the wall there. Kemalettin [Köroğlu] thinks they re barracks, which would be sensible near the wall, but we need more library work to assess that. There was probably an empty zone the whole way round and the wall itself is curved, which is unusual. Both of those features may be to let horses and riders get round quickly. So where would the lower classes have lived? Partly in the elite residences as servants, but in the period of high peace the majority would have lived in the countryside. Throughout the Assyrian empire, once a province is peaceful, you get a burgeoning of

7 small sites one or two hectares which are essentially farms. That s where deportees were placed and produced the agricultural base of the province. From Tušhan, they may have floated grain downriver to the Assyrian heartland. What happened to Ziyaret Tepe after Assyrian power collapsed? The site was abandoned apart from a few squatters. It s likely the palace was deliberately razed, because it s preserved above ground level in very few places. That may partly explain the lack of steles and sculptures. There was certainly some Later Roman and medieval habitation. Digs at Operations U, T, and J turned up roof tiles, jars, glass, and iron nails from the Late Roman period. At Operation T we found four coins, too. From memory they were late 3 rd to early 6 th century AD. It s tough using coins for dating, but that bracket seems plausible. When can we expect the final reports? 2014 should be the end of the project. We finish with a study season, then the final reports. There ll be at least six volumes, including two on the palace, one on the palace itself and one on the cremation burials. There ll be volumes on the perimeter archaeology and the complex at Operation G/R as well. We re also compiling a list of publications at the moment. There ve been 60 to 80 of those already, counting preliminary reports, specialist reports, and articles for the general public. Is there a chance for further digging, and what do you think you d do if you did go back? We d probably focus on the palace. We deliberately didn t do that, we worked on it as one component of a very varied strategy. Maybe we d do more resistivity in the lower town, too. The high mound won t be flooded and the lower town may not be so badly affected as we first thought, so whether or not it s a pipe dream, who knows? It s been a very successful project and the team works very well together. Quite a few of us would like to go back.