New Publication: Exploring Assur - Volume 2

Karen Radner — Andrea Squitieri (eds.)

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This second volume of the series “Exploring Assur” presents the results achieved at Assur, modern Qal’at Sherqat, chiefly in its New Town, through fieldwork and analyses undertaken in 2024 by the Assur Excavation Project. Edited by Karen Radner and Andrea Squitieri, the book contains contributions by Mustafa Ahmad, Mark Altaweel, Silvia Amicone, Alessandra Cellerino, Katleen Deckers, Eileen Eckmeier, Kay Ehling, Jörg Fassbinder, Rafał A. Fetner, Enrico Foietta, Eduardo Garzanti, Helen Gries, Veronica Hinterhuber, Doğa Karakaya, F. Janoscha Kreppner, Marta Lorenzon, John MacGinnis, Alessio Palmisano, Jana Richter, Jens Rohde, Claudia Sarkady, Michaela Schauer, Poppy Tushingham, Melis Uzdurum and Marco Wolf.

New information, including a further 15 radiocarbon dates, is presented for the Parthian-period cemetery, the Hellenistic Building A, and the Neo-Assyrian Building B unearthed in the trench NT1. The new trench NT2 brought to light a newly discovered drainage shaft for the entire New Town’s wastewater, which was built during its original construction in the mid-second millennium BC, punching through the bedrock. This shaft was used and maintained until the end of the Assyrian occupation of the city. A charcoal sample radiocarbon-dated to 770-541 calBC was identified as oak (quercus), which must have been imported to Assur. A pottery sherd bears a fragmentary Neo-Assyrian cuneiform inscription running in three lines from the vessel’s rim to its bottom; the text is neither a straightforward dedication nor statement of ownership although it mentions an individual and a group of associated persons. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire, the shaft gradually filled up until the end of Assur’s Parthian-period occupation, especially with workshop waste from metal and ceramic production. We were therefore able to retrieve a well stratified pottery sequence for the two millennia long occupation period of the New Town.

In trench NT1, some of the newly excavated burials from the Parthian-period cemetery contain unglazed clay bathtub sarcophagi of a type already well known from the Neo-Assyrian period. Some of them show clear signs of repair, and this may indicate that antique sarcophagi were reused in the Parthian period, as already Walter Andrae had suggested. The cemetery was looted in antiquity, and two large water jars were likely left behind by the looters in the Early Islamic period, as the vessels’ characteristic honeycomb decoration allows their dating to the 8th century AD.

Important finds from the sizable Building A below that cemetery include a coin of either Antiochus VIII. (125–96 BC) or his son Antiochus XII. (87–83/82 BC), in any case a late Seleucid piece, and the fragment of an imported Attic echinus bowl, one of the most popular forms of the Hellenistic vessel typology, whose non-local origin was also confirmed by the chemical and petrographic ceramic analysis; both finds further secure the Hellenistic dating of Building A. “Room 5” of the previous Iraqi excavations of 2002 could be shown to be Building A’s deep grain silo. The flotation samples yielded further material for the ongoing plant identification, including the newly identified wild plant astragalus sp. (milkvetch).

Also in trench NT1, a new room of the enormous Neo-Assyrian Building B was excavated that can be identified as a reception room. It provided a good amount of flotation material that provided more radicarbon datings and deepened our knowledge of the domesticated and wild plants in use at Assur during the late Neo-Assyrian period.

Furthermore, in the temple district of Assur, we took corings from the holy-of-holies of the sanctuaries of the gods Ishtar and Ashur to shed light on their construction history. While inconclusive for the Ashur temple, drilling in the cella of the Ishtar temple exposed a 1 m thick layer of non-local sand that had been deposited directly beneath the first sanctuary of the Early Dynastic Period. The use of imported sand likely served the ritual purification of the site.

In addition to the detailed presentation of the new excavation results, the book contains chapters on the ongoing erosion damage to the archaeological site, on the coring and geophysical prospecting programmes (in 2024 with a focus on earth resistivity tomography), on the typological, chemical and petrographical analyses of the pottery, on the small finds and the cuneiform texts (largely bricks from the surface), on the brick recipes from different periods based on their geochemical analysis, on the human remains, and on the ancient plant life and use (based on the analysis of charcoals, flotation light fractions and phytholiths).