Radner, Karen and Squitieri, Andrea (eds.)
Exploring AssurVol. 1. Gladbeck: PeWe-Verlag.
This first volume of the new series “Exploring Assur” presents the
results of the fieldwork conducted at Assur, modern Qal’at Sherqat, in
2023, with a focus on the New Town in the south of the settlement, and
contains contributions by Silvia Amicone, Katleen Deckers, Jörg
Fassbinder, Holger Gzella, Sandra Hahn, Jean-Jacques Herr, F. Janoscha
Kreppner, İnci Nurgül Özdoğru, Karen Radner, Jana Richter, Jens Rohde,
Lena Ruider, Claudia Sarkady, Michaela Schauer, Annette Paetz gen.
Schieck, Andrea Squitieri, Andreas Stele, and Marco Wolf.
At Assur, the team is based in the excavation house first used by Walter
Andrae from 1903-1914, and as this building is a protected monument
within the UNESCO World Heritage site of Assur, a chapter is dedicated
to its history. The early years come to life through the letters of
Andrae and many photographs that he and his staff took of the building,
reproduced courtesy of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin.
The fieldwork undertaken in 2023 included a program of magnetometer and
electrical resistivity tomography prospecting and sediment coring in the
New Town of Assur, whose results are presented together with a study of
soil and sediment magnetism based on coring samples. The magnetogram of
the New Town substantially deepens our knowledge of the settlement’s
organisation in the first centuries AD when the city was part of the
Parthian world. The excavations conducted in the southern part of the
New Town, directly adjoining an area excavated by the Iraqi State Board
of Antiquities and Heritage in 2002, brought to light a sizeable chamber
tomb of 46 m2 from that period, with over a dozen skeletons.
Moreover, the excavations yielded highly welcome new evidence for the
Hellenistic occupation of Assur, namely Building A and two burials
(Graves 3 and 4). The dead were placed underneath clay sarcophagi of an
ovoid-elliptical shape. One bears an incised alphabetic inscription
dated to the month Ab in the year 153 of the Seleucid era, that is
July/August 158 BC. Brief as the text is, it provides precious insights
into writing and dating practices at Assur after the end of local
cuneiform writing and before the rise of the Eastern Mesopotamian
scribal tradition that would eventually spread to Hatra and other areas.
This burial also contained calcinated textile fragments of at least six
different types of cloth.
New data for the Assyrian occupation of Assur originates from some
small-scale work undertaken on the edge of the Iraqi trench of 2002,
from the partially excavated Building B and from Grave 5, which
contained typical 7th century BC items including a bronze fibula and a
glazed miniature vessel. A deep sounding dug down from this burial to
the virgin soil yielded pottery types that are well known from sites in
the Assyrian heartland and the Syrian Jazirah in the 13th century BC,
including fragments of carinated bowls and beakers with elongated bodies
and nipple bases, as well as a piece of charcoal with a radiocarbon
dating range of 1506-1440 calBC (95.4% probability). This date
corresponds well with the oldest mention of the construction of the wall
and the gates of the New Town in the inscriptions of Puzur-Aššur III,
whose reign is conventionally dated to 1521-1498 BC. In total, the 2023
excavations produced 17 radiocarbon dating ranges, derived from the
analysis of charcoal, seeds and human teeth; these are the very first
14C dates available from Assur.
Another first for Assur is the palaeobotanical analysis of 133 charred
wood fragments and 8,655 carbonised plant remains, which provides an
entirely new dataset for reconstruction of the ancient environment.
Chapters on the pottery, with first steps towards a fabric
classification for Assur by means of portable X-ray fluorescence and
petrographic analyses, the small finds and the epigraphic finds
(cuneiform and alphabetic) round off the volume.
URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-115818-7 ISBN: 978-3-935012-66-9 Place of Publication: Gladbeck Language: English Item ID: 115818 Date Deposited: 26. Apr 2024 06:46 Last Modified: 30. Apr 2024 09:16 DFG: Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – RA 1138/3-1
