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Introduction |
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Site and Setting |
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Early Excavations |
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New Discoveries |
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Research Goals |
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Acknowledgments |
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Research Goals |
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Settlement Chronology and Context Although a basic settlement chronology was established by the early German excavators, a much more refined stratigraphic sequence is needed to determine the phases of occupation at the site and to isolate the architecture and the artifactual assemblages associated with each phase. After three years of excavation, the Neubauer Expedition has explored only the final phase of the Iron Age occupation in the seventh century b.c. In future seasons, the step-trench in Area 3 on the southern slope of the royal citadel will be enlarged and deepened to obtain a complete sequence from the Early Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age, when the site was largely abandoned (i.e., from ca. 2500 to 600 b.c.). Another step-trench will be opened on the summit of the upper mound, in Area 2, where there is an occupational sequence that extends as late as the early Hellenistic period (until ca. 300 b.c.).
Enough material has been collected to show that the pottery of the site, although broadly similar to the pottery of other sites in the wider region, is highly local in character, with many idiosyncrasies and very few imported wares. This is in keeping with Zincirli’s relatively isolated geographical position in a narrow valley hemmed in by mountain ranges. The total quantity of pottery and the range of forms are actually quite limited, at least in the latest Iron Age phase, suggesting that vessels of metal, wood, and stone may have played a larger-than-normal role at this site. Radiocarbon samples are being taken from every phase in order to establish an absolute chronology for the architectural phases and the local ceramic sequence. Occasional imported wares also provide a means to link the local sequence to ceramic sequences elsewhere.
This aspect of the research, although fundamentally descriptive, is essential for understanding the site within its wider context, as well as for making temporal correlations from one excavation area to another within the site. Not only will it provide an essential framework for future archaeologists who excavate in the same valley, but it will be essential for the regional survey project of the Neubauer Expedition (a related project that is planned for future seasons), in order to date the periods of occupation of the approximately 100 settlement sites in the vicinity. The Zincirli ceramic sequence will be used to understand the settlement history of the region, comparing the Zincirli material with surface artifacts collected from surveyed sites identified on the ground and via satellite imagery. A chronologically refined settlement history will be of great value for understanding the economic and political functioning of the kingdom of Sam’al in the Iron Age, and also of earlier polities in the region, by indicating how many and what kind of settlements existed in a given period. With a sufficiently precise chronology, the wider settlement history and the architectural changes at Zincirli itself can be related to broader political and cultural changes of the Bronze and Iron Ages, such as the imperial conquests and population migrations documented in ancient texts.
Population and Cultural Influences Zincirli is located in a border region between the ancient Anatolian and Syrian cultural zones. Bounded on the north and west by the towering Taurus and Amanus mountain ranges, it is the most northwesterly region of habitation of Semitic-language speakers, and in many periods it had cultural ties with Syrian population centers to the south and east. But within the royal dynasty of Iron Age Sam’al (900–700 b.c.) were kings who bore non-Semitic Luwian (Indo-European) names, reflecting the powerful political and cultural influence of Luwian-speakers of Anatolian extraction who had migrated southward into the region centuries earlier from across the Taurus Mountains. They did so under the aegis of the Hittite Empire, which was based far to the north in central Anatolia and had conquered the region south of the Taurus Mountains in the fourteenth century b.c.
After the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 b.c., various “Neo-Hittite” rump kingdoms emerged that were ruled by Luwian-speaking elites. In particular, Carchemish on the Euphrates River, 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of Zincirli, which was formerly the seat of the Hittite viceroy (and prince of the imperial dynasty) who ruled Syria on behalf of the Hittite king, became in the early Iron Age (ca. 1200 to 900 b.c.) the capital of a powerful local kingdom with a Luwian-speaking dynasty. The presence of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions at various sites in the Zincirli region suggests that it was initially part of the Luwian-dominated Carchemish kingdom, or at least was controlled by a local Luwian-speaking elite, until a Semitic-speaking “Aramean” dynasty took over in (probably) the late tenth century and chose the old Bronze Age mound of Zincirli—at that time largely abandoned—as the capital of their kingdom.
The newly expanded and fortified city was called Y’DY (possibly its Luwian name, pronounced “Yādiye”) and was also referred to interchangeably by the Semitic name ŚM’L (“Sam’al,” meaning “north”)—unless one of these two names denoted the city proper while the other denoted the kingdom of which it was the capital. In any case, the new Semitic-speaking rulers promptly adopted Neo-Hittite iconography and decorative styles similar to those of Luwian-ruled Carchemish, as shown by the basalt orthostat reliefs lining the newly built gates of their city, indicating the continuing prestige of that cultural tradition, which was widely imitated even by non-Luwian elites. The “tree of life” orthostat discovered by the Neubauer Expedition in 2008 is very similar in style to orthostats found at Carchemish that were similarly placed outside a major gate and displayed a procession of soldiers and royal officials.
Further complicating the ethnolinguistic situation, it is worth noting that the place-name “Sam’al” for Zincirli appears already a thousand years earlier, in an Old Assyrian text from the Middle Bronze Age, which indicates that there was a Semitic-speaking population in the area long before the Hittite Empire and subsequent Luwian domination, and that the old Semitic name was never forgotten. This is confirmed by the strongly “Amorite” character of the artifacts and architecture found at the Middle Bronze Age royal capital excavated at the site of Tilmen Höyük, located just 8 kilometers (5 miles) south of Zincirli (see Marchetti 2006). The rulers of Tilmen had close cultural and political links to regions to the south in inland Syria, which was dominated at that time by the Yamhad Empire based in Aleppo (Halab). Moreover, similar Middle Bronze Age material has been found at Zincirli itself, which was apparently a fortified town in the Amorite kingdom ruled from Tilmen. And, furthermore, the place-name “Sam’al” (written ś-m-i-r-w) appears also in the Late Bronze Age, in an Egyptian list of North Syrian toponyms carved on the wall of the temple of Amun at Karnak to celebrate the exploits of the pharaoh Thutmose III, who campaigned repeatedly in the region, conquering the Orontes River and its tributaries and marching as far as the Euphrates in his eighth campaign around 1450 b.c. (see Astour 1963, p. 233).
For the Bronze Age Amorites of Syria, Zincirli was the “north” (ŚM’L), just as much as it was for the Iron Age Arameans who supposedly invaded in the tenth century b.c. In fact, the only reason to think that the Iron Age rulers of Sam’al were invading Arameans, as opposed to long-indigenous Semitic-speakers who had been resident there for a millennium or more, is the linguistic classification of the “Sam’alian” dialect (attested in local Iron Age inscriptions) as a branch of Aramaic. But there is some question as to whether Sam’alian is actually Aramaic (see Huehnergard 1995). It does not possess a number of morphological innovations shared by other Aramaic dialects, so it could instead be an otherwise unattested branch of Northwest Semitic that was spoken in the Zincirli region since the Amorite period. In that case, Gabbār, the founder of the Iron Age kingdom of Sam’al, may well have been not a roving Aramean warlord but a local resident of Amorite heritage who threw off the Luwian yoke and restored his Semitic-speaking compatriots to a position of power. There is certainly no archaeological hallmark of the Arameans as an invasive ethnic group that can be pointed to at Zincirli.
If this be confirmed by further research at Zincirli, it would change the historical picture considerably, because the kingdom of Sam’al—which, it should be noted, was not directly accessible from the Aramean power centers in Upper Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and Habur Rivers, being tucked away to the west of the Luwian kingdom of Carchemish and north of the Luwian kingdom of Patin (originally “Palastin”; see Harrison 2009)—would thus never have been Aramean or part of the “Aramean expansion zone.” To the extent that it was ever Aramaized (as indicated by the use of official Aramaic in King Barrākib’s final inscription), this would have occurred much later, in the latter part of the eighth century, under the aegis of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and its Aramaic-speaking administrators who hailed from Upper Mesopotamia.
At the very least, we can say that over the course of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age there was some form of coexistence and mutual cultural adaptation of people of diverse ethnic origins. Luwian elites were politically dominant for generations under the Hittite imperial regime and thereafter (ca. 1300–900 b.c.), until Semitic-speaking rulers rose to power and massively fortified the site of Zincirli (ca. 900–700 b.c.). The Luwians came from Anatolia to rule an indigenous West Semitic population, just as Semitic-speakers later ruled the Luwian population. Scholars have long suspected that the rivalry between these two groups is reflected in the enigmatic reference to the downtrodden muškabīm (lit. “those who lie down”) and a presumably better-off group called ba‘rīrīm in the Phoenician inscription of King Kulamuwa of Sam’al (ca. 830 b.c.), who claims to have aided the muškabīm (down-at-heel Luwians?) and to have fostered mutual respect between the two groups. Moreover, despite a long period of coexistence and perhaps even intermarriage, as has been suggested to explain the intermingling of Semitic and Luwian names within the Sam’alian royal dynasty (e.g., Kulamuwa himself, whose father Hayyā had a Semitic name but whose own name is Luwian—perhaps he was the son of a queen who belonged to an old Luwian noble family), the original ethnic identities were not forgotten and could surface in various forms, a phenomenon that is widely attested in other historical periods, including the modern Middle East.
A striking example of this is the recently discovered Kuttamuwa Stele, on which was carved a 13-line alphabetic inscription in a local West Semitic dialect. It belonged to Kuttamuwa, servant of Panamuwa, a Sam’alian official with a Luwian name in the service of a Sam’alian king with a Luwian name, whose predecessor and successor both had Semitic names (assuming it is King Panamuwa II, son of Barṣur and father of Barrākib). Kuttamuwa’s inscription refers to both Semitic and Luwian gods (including the goddess Kubaba, known in classical times as Cybele), and he was apparently not buried in a communal tomb to which the offerings were brought, according to the traditional West Semitic custom, but was most likely cremated, a practice attested in culturally similar cities of the period such as Carchemish on the Euphrates, Hamath on the Orontes, and Guzāna (Tell Halaf) in Upper Mesopotamia.
Cremation was an Indo-European practice generally regarded as abhorrent in the Semitic world (for example, in ancient Israel and its neighbors). In both his name and his mortuary customs, if not his language, Kuttamuwa had plainly not forgotten his ancestral traditions, even though he lived two hundred years after the Luwians had lost control of the region. It seems that Luwian names and Luwian gods were still favored by some in Sam’al, even at this late date, along with distinctive Anatolian mortuary practices. Perhaps these names and practices were adopted even by people of non-Anatolian extraction for political or social reasons, just as people today will adopt foreign names and identities to enhance their social standing. Or, we must reckon with the ongoing vitality of Luwian cultural traditions in the midst of an equally vital and dynamic Semitic-speaking cultural milieu.
The archaeological question is whether these enduring social identities held by intermingled ethnic groups, and the cultural influences exerted by these groups on one another, can be detected in their material remains. The Neubauer Expedition is approaching this question through the careful analysis of spatial and temporal patterns of architecture, artistic styles and iconography, cuisine (detected via pottery and botanical and faunal remains), mortuary customs, and other social practices revealed by extensive exposures of the residential lower town. The goal is not to identify specific households or individuals in reductive terms as permanent members of this or that monolithic, crudely reified “ethnic group,” but to study processes of group identity-formation and identity-maintenance from the point of view of the nonverbal social practices and habits that in every society accomplish the socialization of individuals into communities.
Socioeconomic Organization The Iron Age population and ethnic interactions at Zincirli can be studied on a scale and at a level of detail that is unusual in Near Eastern archaeology because of the large quantity of Iron Age urban architecture that is readily accessible just under the modern surface. A modern village has grown up over the western part of the citadel mound and lower town, but at least 20 hectares (50 acres) are available for excavation and for geophysical remote sensing. A geomagnetic survey conducted in 2007 produced a remarkably vivid picture of the buried streets and wall foundations of the city. A complementary ground-penetrating radar survey was done in 2008 in the northern part of the lower town. (The magnetic gradiometer detects the iron-rich basalt used ubiquitously in wall foundations at Zincirli, while the radar is especially good at detecting compacted floor and street surfaces that are distinguished by their differential densities.)
Using the geophysical map as a guide, excavation of the northern lower town commenced in the summer of 2008 with an initial exposure of 650 square meters in two different areas (Areas 5 and 6). In most places in the lower town there are one to two meters of accumulated debris representing two or three architectural phases (remants of mudbrick structures on stone foundations). A given area can be excavated down to virgin soil in one or two field seasons, depending on the complexity of the stratigraphy. Over the coming years, the Neubauer Expedition intends to excavate thousands of square meters in various parts of the lower town, providing a sample of architecture and artifacts large enough to permit meaningful conclusions about the social and economic organization of the city.
There are very few Iron Age sites in the Mediterranean region (and, indeed, in the entire Middle East) at which large-scale exposures of residential urban districts have been achieved. The Zincirli excavations, profiting from easy access to well-preserved Iron Age strata of both the Assyrian and pre-Assyrian periods, will provide a large quantity of new evidence concerning the organization and use of urban space. This evidence will allow us to answer questions about population density, subsistence practices and food storage, craft production and economic specialization, livestock stabling, household size and composition, and neighborhood relations (as shown by multi-house architectural arrangements in relation to shared courtyard spaces and other shared facilities). At Zincirli, geophysical surveying methods have been shown to produce an unusually clear picture of buried structures in the lower town, at least for the latest architectural phases representing the last century of habitation in the lower town. This subsurface survey data augments the data obtained from excavated areas, which in turn can be used to interpret more accurately the geophysical maps of unexcavated areas.
A key question has to do with the existence (or not) of kin-based or quasi-kin modes of social organization. In other words, were there “urban clans” or patron-client household groupings governed by politically powerful patriarchs, forming economically autonomous and mainly agrarian subcommunities within the larger city, on the model of traditional Islamic cities or medieval Mediterranean cities in Italy and elsewhere? In contrast to this model of urban farming clans (i.e., intermarrying groups of agrarian extended-family households) that had moved from their rural villages to land allotments within the city walls but had retained their traditional mode of life and their kin-based social organization, was there instead a more bureaucratic mode of truly “urban” organization, with economically specialized urban households interacting and competing as individual units and integrated by means of some form of market economy or by a top-down command economy characterized by extensive royal military and labor requirements and the large-scale distribution of royal rations? A careful study, not just of individual houses, but of groups of neighboring houses, can provide an answer to this question.
Zincirli also provides the opportunity to examine changes in socioeconomic organization over time. The lower town was in existence for about three centuries and witnessed three political stages, from independence under the rule of a local king, to vassal status within the Assyrian empire, to the removal of the local political elite and direct rule as an Assyrian province with an Assyrian governor (and possibly also some measure of deportation and population replacement, although this is not textually documented for Sam’al, as it is for other kingdoms). Did these major political shifts, from independence to provincialization, leave a visible mark on ordinary urban districts, reflecting the reorganization of urban elites and economic production in line with the demands (or incentives) created by the empire? Was there an upsurge in interregional trade as a result of the pax Assyriaca, causing a restructuring of the Sam’alian economy with ripple effects at the household level? Or was daily life and the use of space in the lower town largely unaffected, even though the royal citadel (and the members of the royal court) undoubtedly experienced drastic changes?
The site of Zincirli therefore provides an ideal laboratory for investigating all of these issues: for examining ethnicity in an urban population of diverse origins affected by and adapting to cross-cutting cultural influences; for examining the material correlates of identity-forming and identity-maintaining social practices; and for examining Iron Age urban subsistence and household and neighborhood organization, both before and during incorporation into the vast Assyrian Empire. Large-scale horizontal exposures of coherent architectural phases, which can be accomplished very cost-effectively at Zincirli and can be augmented by unusually precise geophysical mapping of buried architecture, will provide valuable new data to address these questions.
[Last revised on May 10, 2009.] |
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The Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli
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The Neubauer Expedition’s 2008 excavations in Areas 5 and 6, in particular, have demonstrated that the site of Zincirli is unusually well suited to achieving large horizontal exposures of well-preserved urban architecture in an Iron Age lower town. This is important, because a quantitative increase in the scale of excavation will produce a qualitative leap in our understanding of urban life and culture in this formative period of Mediterranean history. The urban social fabric and economic organization cannot be understood from a limited sample of individual houses but requires careful study of clusters of adjoining houses spanning thousands of square meters. Indeed, it is necessary to study entire neighborhoods—large blocks of houses (insulae) bounded by streets and open spaces—in different parts of the city, because these urban neighborhoods were coherent architectural and social units whose inhabitants interacted and cooperated in ways that actually constituted Iron Age “urbanism.” In order to grasp the economic and social structures through which the city functioned and cohered for hundreds of years as a populous and thriving community, the Neubauer Expedition is examining not just individual houses on a local scale of analysis—their size, layout, production and storage facilities, activity areas, and related faunal, botanical, and artifactual remains—but also interlocking groups of houses and their shared facilities, their overall architectural arrangement, and their degree of isolation from other house clusters. By this means, the social and economic relationships among households, and not just within them, can be understood in light of historical and anthropological analogies in more recent Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies. More specifically, the Neubauer Expedition is focusing on the following research questions: (1) settlement chronology and context; (2) population composition and cultural influences; and (3) the socioeconomic organization of the Iron Age lower town. An important element in this research is the extensive geophysical survey the expedition is conducting in and around the site, using a variety of scientific techniques to reveal architectural remains buried under the modern surface, as well as ancient landscape features such as roads and canals.
A detailed geomagnetic survey map created by Jason Herrmann, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arkansas, under the direction of Dr. Jesse Casana, from data collected by a magnetic gradiometer that measures differences in magnetism between the area above the surface and features below the surface. This geomagnetic map is superimposed on a high-resolution Digital Globe “Quickbird” satellite image, on which is also superimposed Robert Koldewey’s 1894 plan of the Iron Age city walls and royal citadel. At Zincirli, the basalt foundation stones of buildings in the Iron Age lower town, which are rich in iron and therefore have a strong magnetic signature, are readily detectible in contrast to the surrounding soil. Although the northwestern quadrant of the 40-hectare (100-acre) site is covered by a modern village and so cannot be surveyed, a large sample of the urban architecture (ca. 20 hectares = 50 acres) has been explored by this method. Other subsurface geophysical surveying methods used by the Neubauer Expedition include ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity. |
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Jason Herrmann of the University of Arkansas performing the geomagnetic survey in the lower town of Zincirli, north of the citadel mound (above) and using ground-penetrating radar in Area 5 (below). |
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Geomagnetic map of the north lower town of Sam’al. The red lines indicate the 2008 excavation trenches in Area 5 and Area 6 (totaling 600 sq. m.). The foundations of the outer city walls are visible at the top right—the large and deeply laid stones of the outermost wall of the double-walled fortification have a particularly strong magnetic signature. Detailed analysis of all aspects of residential architecture in extensive areas of the lower town—of the activities and modes of organization both within individual domestic complexes and across larger neighborhoods—will produce a qualitative leap in our understanding of Iron Age urbanism. |
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The step-trench in Area 3 on the southern slope of the citadel mound will be enlarged and deepened in order to reconstruct the complete settlement history and chronology of the site. |
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A close-up of the step-trench in Area 3 shows a two-thousand-year sequence from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age. |
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Satellite image (facing south) of Zincirli’s location in the border region between Anatolia and Syria. North Syria is visible in the distance, in close contact with ancient Sam’al via the valleys of the Orontes River and its tributaries. The white line connects the site of Zincirli with the similar archaeological site of Tell Ta‘yinat on the lower Orontes, 100 kilometers (60 miles) to the south. The Mediterranean Sea is visible in the southwest (top right), on the far side of the Amanus range. Zincirli is located near a major pass across the mountains, through which its inhabitants maintained contact with people from Cilicia and Anatolia. |
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Plan of Carchemish on the Euphrates, the political and cultural center of Luwian “Neo-Hittite” society in Iron Age Syria. The site was excavated before the First World War by a British team that included T. E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia.” |
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Carved stone orthostats from Carchemish on display in the Ankara Archaeological Museum. The Zincirli orthostats are similar to those from Carchemish—especially the newly discovered “tree of life” orthostat unearthed in 2008. |
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University of Chicago Ph.D. students Virginia Rimmer and Benjamin Thomas examine Kuttamuwa’s mortuary stele in Area 5, shortly after its discovery. No human bones were found in the area, reflecting “Syro-Hittite” Iron Age mortuary practices. The stone stele itself was the locus of food offerings for the deceased, whose “soul” (NBŠ) was thought to inhabit the stele. |
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“Syro-Hittite” sites in North Syria where pictorial mortuary monuments like the Kuttamuwa stele have been found in Iron Age contexts. It is at such sites that Luwian-speakers bearing Anatolian cultural traditions (e.g., the practice of cremation) intermingled with bearers of the indigenous West Semitic culture in the period after the fall of the Hittite Empire. |
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Expedition staff members Leann Pace, Christoph Bachhuber, and Başak Boz investigating a Bronze Age rock-cut tomb near Zincirli in 2007, soon after its discovery by local villagers. This multi-chambered underground tomb contains the bones of dozens of different individuals—presumably members of the same kin group who were buried there over a long period of time. It was dug into a chalky limestone slope 800 meters west of Zincirli and served as a burial place for the settlement at least a thousand years before the Iron Age walls were constructed. Multiple burials in rock-cut extramural tombs are reminiscent of traditional West Semitic burial practices. This tomb and others like it will be examined further in future excavation seasons. |
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Sources |
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Contact: |
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Dr. David Schloen Associate Professor University of Chicago 1155 East 58th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 |
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Stone-sculpted head of a female sphinx—with human head, a lion’s body, and an eagle’s wings—from one of the pair of double-sphinx column-bases found in a porticoed “hilani” palace at Zincirli, now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum |