James Osborne | The Syro-Anatolian City States: A Neglected Iron Age Culture

hi good evening Thank You Gayle for an extremely generous introduction and thank you all for being here I really cannot believe how many people are here you didn't you know there's a game right I mean I'm only here because I have to be but it's alright I also need to apologize for not being Anthony Sedona who was scheduled to give tonight's lecture on the battlefield archaeology that he's doing at Gallipoli you know a critical moment in Australian and Turkish military history and hopefully he has a chance to come back and give a lecture in this lecture series that I think that will be fantastic but for tonight right as a professor Stein indicated basically my goal tonight is simply to communicate that the Syrian Italian city-states that I have the pleasure of working on and studying are worthy of more scholarly and popular respect than they're typically given in comparison with their contemporary neighbors in the Iron Age of the Near East and I'm going to show that through two primary means first of all through their regional influence and inter-regional interaction with their neighbors and secondly through this sort of sort of developed sense of monumentality that they had especially in light of urban planning I think is really unique and maybe more developed or more sophisticated than has been appreciated so far let's see here so just to start off with the sort of nuts and bolts issues the who what when where and so on in the late bronze age or the roughly 1500 to 1200 BC or so most of Turkey was occupied by the Hittite Empire and I'm not going to talk about them tonight other than to say I'm going to press on this computer instead which I'm used to other than to say that around 1200 the Empire collapses under circumstances that are still debated and still quite mysterious and for the next 200 years or so at the beginning of the Iron Age roughly 1200 to 1000 the ancient Near East is what under what's conventionally known as a dark age and which is to say that there's not a lot of historical options meaning we don't know a lot of the political genealogies at the time and we don't have a clear sense of the sort of geopolitics of the region which is why I'm not really able to show you any kingdoms on this particular map but after the dust is settled by about a thousand BCE or so that the iron age - period begins and this is really when complex society is rejuvenated across the region so first of all in central Anatolia we see the Phrygian kingdom occupying most of what had been the hittite a core region to the west of course the Greek city-states this is the time that they begin and start their process of turning into the the floor wit of classical civilization to the east we had the neo-assyrian empire which presumably you're all at least partially familiar with from our collections and then sort of the sandwich in the middle of these are the she wrote Anatolian city-states now I'm willing to bet that for the non specialists in the audience you've all know a little bit about the Greek city-states you've all heard at least about King Midas and his golden touch at his relationship with Greek mythology from Phrygia you all know a little bit about the neo-assyrian empire at least know that it existed and know that when you enter this building when you look left you see a gigantic Niwas hearings statue but it's quite possible that you've never heard of the sphere of an Italian city-states at all and that's sort of the impression that I want to correct tonight and of course if this map were larger I could include to the south the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah which are also coming into play at this time period also very much part of the Near East at the time so right tonight I just want to say that this juror Anatolian city-states are important - and they also need to be considered just as much as these other kingdoms that we already know about now at the same time of course you have to be careful of what my PhD adviser called the unfollow s-- policy envelopes being greek for naval which is that an archaeologist is very easy if you work at a time and at a particular site for long enough to sort of start assuming that it was the centre of the world right and I don't want to say that I mean in this culture influence Greek mythology as much as the Phrygians maybe not were they as powerful as in the Assyrian Empire definitely not have they influenced modern culture the way that the writers of the biblical text did no but then they still are significant and they still deserve their place at the Iron Age table so to speak so in case you prefer time lines in a linear fashion I include this slide what I'm going to be talking about today then is not the Late Bronze Age but a little bit of this Iron Age one period of the sort of complicated inchoate confusing era and then this Iron Age two period which is really the height of the Syrian Italian city-states and the Assyrians will also come up tangentially at several points so why are they neglected in the first place well I think there's several reasons for that actually not least of which is the fact that there's a modern geopolitical border that cuts right across the middle of this culture right which is the border obviously between Syria and Turkey now if you work in Turkey or if you work in Syria just naturally you're going to gravitate towards the the you know the archaeological research that's being conducted in that country especially if you are a Turkish or a Syrian researcher right and once you get embedded in one of these cultures countries as a foreigner it's not exactly easy to cross the border so this tends to bifurcate scholarship a lot which leads to a lack of understanding that in fact the city-states that exist on both sides of this border are very much part of the same culture system so that's one reason maybe even more significant is the nature of our sources which are themselves highly complicated so in the first place there are multiple languages and multiple scripts that are in use at this time but the first language that I'll talk about very briefly is Lu bian I think in a spring professor our hitch height linguistics professor dr. peggy de buri gave a lecture on hieroglyphic Looby and so I won't reiterate that too much tonight other than to say that it's a sister language of Hittite or basically related to Hittite and therefore indo-european right it's related to English and a lot of the words are cognate with English words and it's written in this really wacky hieroglyphic script which one reads not left to right or right to left but left to right and then right to left which I gather is called boustrophedon or as the Ox plows dr. good-good ever I already sees correcting me so she can do so later but that's one group of languages and scripts so the second is altogether radically different and this is the Aramaic and Phoenician language inscriptions that are written with the alphabet so this is a totally different writing system but also a totally different language family it's not an inner European language these are West Semitic languages right cognate with Hebrew and here and Arabic so this also influences how we appreciate the culture because scholars will often only specialize in one or one or the other of these two language groups and as a result even terminology becomes difficult so usually scholars who study the lugan inscriptions and the city-state's that have produced more of those language inscriptions call these city-states neo-hittite city-states because the language is related to Hittite where as scholars who study city-states that have produced more Aramaic Phoenician language inscriptions will tend to refer to them as aramean city-states so we don't even have like a good word to call this group that everyone can agree on and so I just figure let's get rid of the ethnic terms altogether I'll just say well some of them are in Syria some other minute are in Anatolia I'll call them the zero Anatolian city-states which is totally neutral and no one can get mad at another major source for our understanding of this time period is of course the inscriptions given to us by the neo-assyrian empire it's fine don't worry about it take your time right so the Assyrian Empire is continually expanding continually interacting with the Syrian Italian city-states and are obsessively recording the information that they gather on the course of those campaign that's where we get a lot of our geopolitical information city names ruler names dynasties that kind of thing and people will often note that the Assyrians were not themselves ethnographers right that they are writing with a very obvious ideological slant nevertheless there's still a great amount of information file that we glean from these so why about let's say 950 1000 950 900 BCE or so this is sort of the geopolitical picture of what the Near East looks ok so on the left there on the western half of this map are about a dozen city-states that I've been calling stir o Anatolian now looking at this map one would think okay well this this particular culture is extremely powerful right because they're they cover a lot of ground certainly a lot more than the core of the neo-assyrian empire which you see there on the east but in fact the opposite is true because it's such a fragmented political landscape they're never able to unify as a single political entity and are therefore never able to defend themselves against the very unified and very aggressive new assyrian empire so that's maybe a third reason why they haven't been given their due or why they don't get enough credit this sort of politically fragmented landscape politically if not culturally and indeed oh I boxed this particular city-state p'tina with its capital at Tel time at or ancient Honolua because that's the site I'll be talking about later in the lecture so that you know where this is indeed when they're conquered by the new assyrian empire the empire engages in a policy of deportation and forced migration upwards of at least 1 million people according to the texts are moved around when they're conquered and possibly as many as 4 million depending on how you statistically extrapolate from the texts that provide figures that's a huge huge undertaking right at a massive demographic shift at the time even if the numbers are exaggerated which obviously they are so this is yet another reason why the culture ends up falling by the wayside right because they only got to exist for a couple of hundred years before they were completely disbanded and effectively wiped off the map so that by about 700 BC these colors are a little washed out unfortunately but I think you can make out the Assyrian Empire's extent there right and there by about 700 BC the entirety of this year and Italian city state system has been conquered and incorporated into the Empire I really never to be seen again Aramaic continues to be spoken and B becomes a lingua franca Louvre e'en effectively ceases to exist okay and just to give you again a sense of context for the site that I'll be talking about for the majority of the lecture tell ty annette is located there another major source of information for us are the reliefs the engraved reliefs that lined a lot of the surra Anatolian public buildings their palaces their temples and their public 8 ways and this gives us a lot of information about you know what daily life activities looked like so here for example you can see a piecing scene a mortuary feasting seems most likely but unlike the newest hearing reliefs like the ones that we have on display here there's no historical narratives given in these series of images so in one sense they're they're a little bit limited in the information they're able to give us so instead the third final source end after the iconography and the historical inscriptions is obviously archeology and that's well talked about mostly tonight so let's begin then with intra-regional interaction and some of the ways that at the stereo volume city-states have been under appreciated and I'll show some of the reasons you know why that is the case starting on the Iron Age one period I'll just be very briefly about this sort of the Dark Age period that I referred to earlier so right in the 1930s tell Tina was excavated by this university and by this institute the Oriental Institute and you'll see some of photographs of what that exhibition looked like in 2004 after 70 years of neglect really tell Tina excavations resumed as dr. Stein mentioned in the direction by Tim Harrison of the University of Toronto now the early excavations had mostly concentrated on early first millennium levels so when the University of Toronto resumed excavation they went below these that time period into the second plenum and into this Iron Age one horizon that the 1930 team would really not touched and what they found or what we found I can say to our surprise was pottery that looked like this and this is significant because this is a foreign style of ceramics this is not the local style of ceramics that would have been produced in southeastern Turkey during the 12th or 11th century BC on the contrary this stuff looks very aging it looks like the pottery that was made increase in surrounding areas it's not in fact from there this is locally produced versions of that ceramics but what it suggests is that some of the people at least who were living at tal tonight at this time had relations or themselves came from this Aegean context now that's significant because if you know you're Iron Age one history from the Near East you know that the social group that is often the most cited in this context is a group called the sea peoples who are supposed to have migrated from the Aegean world to the ancient Near East at precise of this time period and who are famously known to have settled in Israel on the coast of Israel as the Philistines right and that material culture looked at very very similar to this now we have what seems to be evidence for a Sea Peoples group settling elsewhere in the Near East in the northern LaVon on the northeast corner of the Mediterranean and that's very very exciting it's like a new cultural group related to the biblical Philistines and it's not just ceramic evidence by the way these very unassuming lumps of clay are loom weights that were used with the loom to produce textiles and you know these aren't objects that one would trade they're literally just unbaked pieces of clay you would only use this if they were actually the artifacts that you wanted to use on your loom and that's a pit being excavated that has a cache of these loom weights we call them spool wings because they resemble spools of thread so really there's a whole material culture assemblage that looks like it's this sort of Mycenaean Aegean Sea Peoples category material culture and that's been very very exciting for the Near Eastern community here there's also now evidence in the inscriptions at the same time as our renewed excavations were uncovering this Greek looking material culture philologist were going back to inscriptions that had been excavated in the 1930s and realizing that things were not quite as they thought so this is an inscription that was x-rated in the 1930s from the site it's on display and thus you're an Italian Gallery here if you want to go have a look at it after the lecture maybe another day I tend to use the line drawing instead because it's more clear and you can really appreciate the wackiness of the script which is fun and what this inscription contains although it's very fragmentary you can't really make sense of it there's just not enough preserved but it does contain two telling pieces of information one is that isolated fragment on the right provides the name of the King Albert II has presumably the same guy as Calhoun de name given to us in the neo-assyrian inscriptions it also gives us the name of the place the name of the kingdom and that top line which says or was thought to have said whatis a teeny in fact the part I've shaded yellow I'm told I'm not alluvion a figure for myself by any stretch of imagination but I'm told that the sort of two mountain peaks are in ethnic markers at what is actually there is the water set in Ian right but this was the state of affairs at the time we started our digging and abruptly around the same time as I said that we were excavating this aegean material culture falala gist said well maybe that D should be read as an L and you know when you have the saw solo followed by a P consonant we should probably be collapsing those things so that instead of Assad you should just be reading right so that all of a sudden changes it hawala Steen now it's not inconceivable already that this is very interesting right because the wah buh-bah and sounds are all known to sort of clustered together which is why people who are learning English will often say River instead of River what have you and sure enough another text excavated right around the same time from the city of Aleppo from the same time period naming this kingdom did not say Wallace Dean rather said Palace steam so now we have evidence that the name of this kingdom alternated between Wollaston or Palestine which is to see you etymologically so that thinking goes as Philistines in the south right so now it really does seem like we have linguistic evidence and archaeological evidence placing at least some group of sea peoples like the Philistines in the North in this year Anatolian world which is really really exciting I wanna stop there I don't want to get too carried away this is a as archaeological thinking goes this is you know new dynamic exciting stuff and it's still very much being thought about and argued about and there's definitely not a consensus on how we present you know that Sea Peoples contingent was at our site or whether it's appropriate to call them Philistines maybe not certainly it's not the entirety of the material cultural assemblage but at least it's part of it and that is significant in you know does this here when Italian city-states credit so let's move forward in time a little bit to the Iron Age - period and talk about their inter regional connections at this time so this is I'm just going to change my page here this is showing you the annals of one of the newest here in King's action also called the second on one of his campaigns he encounters the kingdom of patina the king of patina capitulates obviously in in the process of capitulation has to surrender a gigantic amount of duty to the Assyrians and they lived among other things 20 talents of silver a talent by the ways is I correct me if I'm wrong as specialists but I think about 30 kilograms so this is a huge amount of metals and the forms of silver a talent of gold tin iron and this is what interests me decorated caches of boxwood with trimming beds decorated heads with trimming dishes of ivory and boxwood ornaments from the palace well what exactly are all of these objects that he's talking about why is he talking about decorated couches and decorated beds it seems peculiar and it's interesting to know what they're actually talking about well by decorated furniture they mean furniture that is inlaid with ivory pieces like this one it really exquisite handiwork and it's one of the steerer Anatolian world's main contributions to the artistic legacy of the ancient Near East actually but of course because they were conquered by the Assyrians and then taken away from Syria Anatolian sites as booty most of these objects are found not within the zero Anatolian cultural sphere itself but they're found excavated from the Assyrian capital cities so how do we even know they're from this your Anatolian world if that's not where they're found and the answer to that is by art historical comparison with non-portable objects and I'll give you example of how this works methodologically so on the left and is a drawing of a bunch of ivories that were excavated from NIMH brude one of the neo-assyrian capital cities Georgina Harman meticulously went through all of the ivories the many many hundreds of ivories that were excavated from NIMH Road and grouped them into schools which she called schools based on their stylistic attributes so here for example you can see that all the animal figures in this drawing have a line going along the spine sort of lines indicating the ribs which are often boxed in Tufts along the stomach region and especially a flame like musculature on the animals hindquarters and she called this the flame and frond school frond being a plant that also shows up in this particular school the flame and France will named after the flames here right now it turns out if you look at the reliefs that I showed you earlier as lining the public buildings of Syria Anatolian cities you can see a lot of interesting parallels so for example here's a relief from Tel Halep one of these two Anatolian capital cities this is now on display in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore if any of you have been there and here you can see the line going across the spine the line for the ribs the tufted stomach and again the flame-like musculature indicated on the hind leg so she possibly did probably the artists who made the flame in fron school ivories came from this particular city-state and were likely inhabitants of tell Halle for some sort of nearby site so that's how we understand these ivories is coming from this part of the world so these are the things that the Assyrians are obsessed with they're always referring to them in their inscriptions and they're obsessed with their furniture being decorated in this stuff and it comes from all over the eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern world not just the Assyrian cities a similar logic applies by the way to the metal objects that passion I shall refer to in that inscription why was he so obsessed with metal objects metal furnishings for the palace well these are also distributed widely so for example these are horse trappings so the top two objects are called a frontlet and that's the object that goes down the forehead of a horse the one on the bottom you'll probably recognize now it's a horse blinker all of these are going to be ceremonial right they're too nice to actually be used in regular everyday horse activity but the one on the top left was excavated at tel time and it shows a master of animals motif as well as nude women holding their chests while standing on a lion head motif visible here and also here and in case it was in doubt whether or not these two objects which are found in Greek cities and Greek sanctuaries in Samos and Eretria right UB is an island in just off the coast of Greece very far away from tying that in case it's in doubt that these in fact were made in the Sorrento naeun's sphere they happen to have helpfully an Aramaic inscription on them which actually you can make a running along the length of it right down there that even names the kingdom patina of which tell Tyonek was the capital city so the same sort of logic but you can date these then you can attribute the Jew graphical source of these objects even though they're found far and wide by virtue of parallels with Shara Anatolian remains and then these bowls also have a very similar logic these are items made in the Syrian Italian world now found in a new moon in the Assyrian Empire way to the east as well as Olympia in Greece way to the West and unfortunately you can't tell in this image very well but this sort of star pattern that you can just barely make out in the middle of this bowl is the same as the star pattern on this bulb obviously made in the same place so how do they get distributed to these regions far and wide well one obvious mechanism is Overland trade right we already know that the Assyrian Empire located around here was conquering our Siro Anatolian sphere over here and bringing them back with them to their capitals that's Nimrod right there Lord Ian capital of the Phrygian Kingdom also has a number of metals and ivory from this year Anatolian city-states that would have gotten there by sure Anatolia by overland presumably trade in this case and not conquest but there's also a lot of this stuff found on Cyprus and found on the islands of the Aegean there's a the island of euboea by the way that I just mentioned where some of this stuff is found and that stuff could only really have gotten there by some kind of maritime trade and this brings me to one bugbear of mine which is how the shear Anatolian city-states interactions with an influence on the Greek and AG and cultural world has sort of been overshadowed by classical scholars who would like to attribute all of the cultural developments of that region to their own energies and agency and I'll show you why in just a second it really all comes down to how one interprets one very small site called El Mina which is located as you can see in that inset there right at the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea now al Mina is so important because it's right on the coast okay so it has access up the Arantes River Valley system into the heart of the Sur Anatolian and Near Eastern worlds also has access obviously to the Mediterranean world I see right to Cyprus and the Aegean this is what the Iran case Delta looks like now and this mountain by the way is the modern java Accra but in classical times it was known as Mount Casius in biblical times it was known as all cellphones was the residence of Google Riddick but all the storm god cellphone and earlier than that subpoena and we'll see why that's significant in just a minute so Amina is not an impressive archaeological site to visit it's about like a meter high it's under a hectare in size it's not exactly imposing but it's had a disproportionate effect on how we understand Greek near and near Eastern or east/west interaction during the Iron Age it was excavated in the 1930s by Sir Leonard Woolley who's painlessly excavated karkemish and excavated Brewer in southern Mesopotamia and it was first settled in the late 9th or early 8th century BCE basically during the height of the Iron Age - period right the height of this year Anatolian city-states now I visited this site last summer in fact our two summers ago now and it's covered just covered in Greek pottery late Greek pottery like Hellenistic pottery 5th century 4th century 3rd century BCE so if we're pretty clearly occupied at that time as a Greek colony in the Middle East which is which is interesting now was it occupied as a Greek colony in the late ninth and eighth centuries that excavators of the site certainly thought so and that's sort of how it entered the literature that even from the very founding of the site it would had always been a Greek colony and was responsible for east-west interaction like those bronze pieces I just showed you but new evidence is starting to change our understanding of that for one thing and a serial gist has identified what he thinks is an inscription that names the site as octa and we think that octo refers Almina because it's named right after Mount sapone at that giant mountain I just showed you not only that it's referred to as a royal storehouse that is part and parcel of the political economy of the region it's founded so in other words a zero Anatolian site so that's interesting archaeologically the ceramics from the site so Leonard was hoping leonard woolley was always hoping to find greeks there in the very first publications that he that he wrote he only published the Greek pottery this is a famous cup called those pendant semi circle skip oh so skip oasiz the Greek for cup you can see the pendant semi circles there this was all anyone knew from El Nino so sure everyone thought ok yes it was a Greek colony then slightly later someone else returned to the powder and said hang on it's like a lot of it looks Cypriot that's kind of funny ok and then even later just 10 years or so ago and the eastern archaeologists looked at it and said hang on a sec a lot of this pottery is in fact perfectly in line with the standard everyday pottery that existed in the Near East at this time and they just didn't collect it and they didn't publish it that's not what they were interested in right they were interested in the Greek connections but in fact if you compare al Mina's ceramic assemblage with that have tell tying that that they're more or less identical so here are the Greek pen and semi circle skip boy that we have imported to till tonight here's our Cypriot bull assemblage and here's our local pottery exactly Marian mirroring what was found at all Nina in other words al Mina is not a Greek sight looking east it's a near eastern sight looking West and once you have that realization then all of a sudden you realize that this your Anatolian city-states are largely responsible for that east-west interaction that was taking place now if you look at the ceramics that that are being imported to the Near East they're all sort of drinking vessels so probably their part and parcel of a elite feasting repertoire and maybe elite dining practices was the engine that was sort of driving that interaction in the first place and that is perhaps supported by this feeling that probably longtime fan to the Oriental Institute will have seen many times by now this is the Adam Lewis Ely excavated by our own professor David Sloan from Zinn Charlie which is another Cirro Anatolian City State Capitol and it shows a feasting scene similar to the relief I showed at the beginning of the lecture and what you see in Kedah movies right hand but one of those balls basically identical to the balls and at least in terms of its shape that I showed you earlier this is a ceramic imitation of the bronze vessels that we have excavated at ina as well as other local vessels like that platter for example so another methodological indication for example of how to geographically source items like this found in Crete for this your Anatolian world well because our non portable artifacts are showing you illustrate of the same thing so then in the Greek world this interaction would eventually get manifested in what they call the orientalizing period of the late 8th and 7th centuries BC and here are Greek pots that have very obvious relations iconographically with the Near Eastern no yet I mean if you look at this bore I guess it is you can see the rib lines line going down the spine and even some flame like lines on that back conch it really does look very near restring ok so this here an Italian city-states are not exclusively responsible for Greece's orientalizing period the Phoenicians had a lot to do it there's there's all sorts of interaction taking place but I just want to emphasize that the ceramic line city-states were at least partially responsible for this taking place and were part and parcel of the interaction that was going on at the time the same logic applies to the to the east right to the neo-assyrian empire so this is one of the most famous scenes in ever illustrated in the neo-assyrian palace reliefs this is the King Ashurbanipal mid 7th century BCE and his wife Ashur sharap you presumably most of you already know this but those who aren't familiar with the Near East I always show this slide to intro students to say just when you think things look one way actually they sometimes look another way because although this looks like a very bucolic happy scene of the king and queen dining and peace in their garden there of course dining in the presence of the severed head of King Tommen whom they had just defeated in battle so it's also got this sort of grim militaristic valence to it which is always good to show people but for my purposes right now if you just zoom in a little bit and you look at the objects that are being displayed you can see that the same seer Anatolian objects are on display here so for example Asha Shara holds in her right hand one of these bronze bowls just like we've seen on the kata MOA steely and as we've seen excavated from Crete and found in Olympia and so on probably I sure bono Paul himself had one as well and his little bit has been chipped off when the city of Nineveh was conquered I didn't talk about all these objects this is a tripod bowl that could be ceramic could be ground stone more likely ground stone also a classic store Anatolian object as is this Pyxis which is a strict allure box we have treated a Pyxis just like this at all time at for example and then finally here are our decorated beds or our decorated couches right these are the ivory-inlaid that I was talking about being illustrated in these reliefs showing you a very common motif called a woman in the window that kind of straight from this sphere so right this you're an Italian city-states were heavily involved with the cultural development of their neighbors like the Assyrians like the Greek city-states that would eventually become Hellenistic civilization I'm going to change gears now to the second aspect of why I think this your Anatolian city-states need to be taken a bit more seriously which is their sense of artistic monumentality but also monumentality at the level of City Planning this map is showing you basically sorry this illustration is showing you maps of several capital cities from this year Anatolian world basically the ones that have furnished most of our evidence for monumental arts and monumental city planning and one thing that I find interesting by the way is how they very often have the same sort of spatial signature by which I mean a three tiered hierarchy a lower town and Acropolis and a palace compound inside of it right Lowertown here Acropolis their palace compound there and we'll see the same happening at tell Diana it also shows you incidentally the power of satellite imagery which is really revolutionized me some archaeology tell Ripa OTT we had no idea until recently was a hundred and twenty Hector's in size that's a gigantic city even larger than carnage so for example that scale is 400 meters and that one is 200 meters this site is only about 35 maybe 40 hectares or so anyway that's a sidebar these are colossal statues that have been found across this your Anatolian world here's a is karkemish that's tell hala there is Zinj early there's Malatya and it's silhouette for scale first of all I mean I never want to make blanket claims right that these are the largest dad she's ever found in the new reeds so as soon as I say that someone's gonna prove me wrong but they're gonna be right up there at the very least right these are unusually huge by any Near Eastern standard this statue for example would not be out of place in terms of scale beside our mimasu statue in the Mesopotamian gallery most of the time they're found in the city gates of the seer Anatolian cities now inscriptions tell us that these city gates are symbolically associated directly with a king of the city and with the city itself so that if someone conquered if someone was able to militaristically conquer the gate they've defeated the king right off the bat and the Cronk of the city whole scaled simply by doing that furthermore these statues are usually found actually buried underground which is really really interesting and in tune like not just destroyed although that sometimes happened but actually actively buried just like you might an actual person which might suggest that they were actually thought of in that way so the idea is that you know one when a pedestrian enters the city through the gate you're entering a building that we know from texts symbolized royal powers symbolize the city while passing a statue of the king that may have been actually considered to be an animate being right the actual king himself not simply a representation visually of that king so let's look at some of those principles of urban monumentality in in one single case okay so here's the aerial photograph of tell Diana we've already seen the Iron Age one Mycenaean style pottery from the site this is what it looks like today and this is a 20 hectare mound but I think this photograph was taken a couple of years ago what's really interesting is when you zoom out a lot and look at this site from space you realize that it's not 20 hectares in size at all but in fact surrounding the north and eastern edges of the city is an additional 16 hectares of Lowertown that you can't see on the ground which is because the Arantes River which is right here floods the plain and deposits about a millimeter of sediment across the plain every year now that doesn't sound like a lot right it's just a millimeter but if you do the math that becomes a meter every year every millennium and if you add up the millennium it's like three meters of alluvium since the Iron Age so it's actually quite significant and that's why you can't see this there now if you look closely you can even see from space the city wall right there right which is really really neat note by the way this is a modern cotton factory this is the scar from the excavations that took place in the 1930 so this photograph was taken from space in 1970 I think December 12 1970 and that's the result of the 1930s excavations that have taken place 35 to 40 years ago and this is what that excavation looked like so this is the Oriental Institute's Syrian expedition to tell Tina in the 1930s why Syrian Hittite expedition well because they were looking for neo Hittites in what was then Syria as Gil mentioned at the intro of this lecture it's now Turkey right but at the time it was Syria this is a massive horizontal exposure the kind of excavation you would never see in your east today obviously what that means is that we've sacrificed some level of control we don't have a clear strategy a quick understanding of a lot of the objects that they found or how the buildings relate to one another in a perfect way on the other hand we have a very good sense of the urban planning of the city this is the kind of thing you could do in the 1930s that you can't excavate today right you can't just excavate a city and decide what the city plan is anymore like you could back then and is basically the plan of the city that we know of now okay the Lower City with the gate the Acropolis with another gate Palace compound with yet another gate so at each tier of this facial hierarchy accessibility is restricted one thing I also like about this images it shows you even with that crazy enormous excavation that I just showed you in that last slide there's still so much left to be done I mean it really is remarkable how much archaeology this remains at all sites really so it did ty not participate in this sort of coordinated citywide strategy of monumentality well it was harder to tell before but now thanks to the new excavations you have a clearer sense of how urban monumentality operated here first of all in this gateway was excavated at least huge portions of a monumental royal statue this is also on display in this your Anatolian gallery right you can go see that after the lecture this is absolutely gigantic and we know it's a ruler and not a divine figure by the way because it doesn't have horns which in the ancient Near East were a common visual signal of divinity this is the close-up of the palace compound note that the temple is outside of the palace which is interesting you would have gone along the exterior of the building past this sort of sacred area entered the gate and then you had to do a 180-degree turn before you were able to enter the palace I always like to tell this story so in the 1930s 1939 happened the civil the world war ii was just starting to break out and the excavators decide okay maybe it's time for us to pack up shop I think we found all the monumental architecture to be found here at the site anyway it's not bad timing let's get out of here but before we go let's just make sure we found it all okay it's just so that we can leave knowing that there's no more monumental buildings left so they sent out this one meter wide probe east of the temple didn't really find anything other than this sort of mysterious stone installation that they thought was maybe a well or something like that and they more or less shrugged their shoulders and said yeah it looks like we found well all right we can take off and I did and they didn't come back so when the renewed excavations began in the mid-2000s like 2004 I think was the first season of excavation and I was supervising the the area of excavation that was taking place right over here and I suggested to the director why don't we just put in a trench over here I mean this part we know they never touched let's just see what's there at least we'll know it'll be new information and what we ended up finding was a perfectly preserved temple that had been destroyed in ancient times which is a good thing by preserved for the archeologists built by the ter Anatolians reused by the Assyrians destroyed around 650 BCE lying immediately underneath the surface of the site this is a beautiful beautiful archaeological context and that little that 1 metre wide trench came across right there so they missed it by about a metre and just to give you an example of how spectacular the finds are in this inner sanctum room on the podium there of the inner room was a cache of katie-ann tablets including this guy a succession treaty between Easter hot and the neo-assyrian King and the local governor of Ty Annette promising that when Easter hadn't died his son Ashurbanipal would be recognized by the local governor as a legitimate heir to Easter Hayden's rulership this is a gigantic tablet I mean this has really been transformative for neo-assyrian theory illogical Studies and I'm very thankful that it was excavated by us and not by the 1930s team although you know I had an exploit he's not on the professor here as well so I this plan again just shows you how close this was right there's that stone installation feature the trench line is right there along there probably about a meter in 15 centimeters or so further north and they would have cleared this entire building more pertinent for tonight's lecture in terms of urban monumentality what was located on this side of that 1 metre wide trench well that is where we found our team found a monumental life-size basalt lion statue maybe about a meter on the other side of this probe that they had sent up right so they really thread the needle between these two spectacular monumental contexts I had argued elsewhere that Lion the symbolism was highly close highly related to royal symbolism and so I was really hoping that on the underside of this line would be an inscription naming a king and associate in the King with this line and I was disappointed when that didn't end up being the case but nevertheless it's still a glorious piece of art maybe and I mean in my opinion one of the most beautiful pieces of monumental art to come out of this your Anatolian city-state sphere so obviously the next summer we expanded that excavation trench there's our lion there right so here's our meter wide probe our temple here's our lion and when we expanded that pro that initial probe which is that black outline there to our regular 10 by 10 meter square it appeared that this line was found in association with agate right now I've already told you that gates were strongly associated with the royal figure and with the city at large and what did we find in the passageway of this supposed gate building nothing other than another one of these monumental royal statues this time with an inscription in the back naming him as shoe peel early homo a famous long-standing famous hittite royal name all these photographs I should say we're taking by Jennifer Jackson who's in the audience tonight that's why they look so fantastic so hey just but think about what this means for a second if you are living in the Lower City like with the rest of the hoi polloi and you want to move into the palace compound you go for a walk one day first you walk through this gate that is associated already with royalty where you come across a royal statue that may have been actually considered to be the king himself right that's already significant then you continue on your walk to another gateway we know now that was loaded with its own monumental symbolism of akut above the king and his royal power vide the line another royal statue you then continued on pass another gate symbolically associated with royalty and then you did your 180-degree turn to face the entrance to the palace now what did that palace look like I thought that would be a whole other lecture but I think I'll just illustrate it very briefly through tell holla instead of telling that because the the palace particle of how is better preserved and had the same exact principle you come from a lower City way out here through this gateway into the palace compound you turn 180 degrees and you're facing the porticoed entrance to the palace which looked like this now this was excavated by the Germans long before World War two who then took the statuary back to Berlin it was then destroyed in the fire bottom of Berlin during World War two painstakingly reassembled in the past ten years actually do miraculous effect although it still doesn't look quite as good as it did originally these are reconstructions that now or at least that until recently formed the entrance to the Museum of Archaeology in Aleppo so the last time I saw a photograph of these they're all they were boarded up with sandbags right in part of the Syrian civil war that's ongoing right now and I don't know that their current state hopefully they're okay this is a photograph by the way of our own dr. Emily hammer director of the Center for ancient Middle Eastern landscapes here at the Oriental Institute and I will admit she's not my largest friend and colleague that I have which gives you a bit of a disproportionate sense of the monumentality of these objects but nevertheless I think you do appreciate that this is an absolutely gigantic structure right so after all of that walking through the gates associated with royalty and the statues and the Lions then you turn around and you face the particle entrance of this building which would have been absolutely spectacular so in other words the entire city really was coordinated into this sort of tightly packed nexus of symbols all of which were extolling the power of the king and that's a that's sort of an urban package of monumentality that I haven't recognized elsewhere in these other sort of Phrygian or even new experiance cities even though though they may have had larger palaces and more elaborate leagues finally then this is my closing point for the evening there was also a really beautiful sense of monumentality in their sacred architecture so this is one of the most famous temples that from this your Anatolian world from a site called ein Dhara it's about 50 kilometers northeast of Tel tiny net this is the temple that was excavated there very elaborate reliefs it was used for several centuries from the iron age one period down at least for about 700 or so and this is what that building looks like in plan by the way for those of you interested in biblical archaeology and biblical studies this temple is probably the best example we have of what the Temple of Solomon may have looked like we don't have the Temple of Solomon archaeologically preserved right it was a destroyed and beat it's romancer under the Dome of the rock in Jerusalem but if we could according to the text this is what we how we reconstruct it and the plan is very similar to the contemporaneous roughly contemporaneous structure from mined era and I'll tie it up by the way our temple is also used as a parallel so for example you see the two pillars at the beginning those are described at the biblical text you see this ambulatory or corridor going around the secret building just as described in the biblical text anyway that's a sidebar the relations between Assyria Anatolia and the biblical world are all other lecture as well but what I want to show you right now are these footprints right here which are actually there in this in the lintel stones or threshold stones of this antechamber between the particle and the antechamber here and they look like that they're about a meter in length and as you can see in that last slide the divine figure which is presumably what the architect was trying to illustrate stands at the entrance that the particle entrance into the temple where he or she lived right temples in the ancient world were considered the abode of the God took one step with his or her left foot right there the right foot there is actually striding into the building and I just think that's spectacular that's a really evocative way of using negative space to evoke them the monumentality of the divine right and I have also haven't seen this sort of creative use of negative monumentality to evoke grandeur anywhere else at this time so anyway I'll just conclude then by saying right I just hope I made the case that far from being an afterthought in our approach to the Iron Age civilizations of the ancient Near East the Syrian Italian city-states were a major in critical under the new Reese at the time playing a huge role in the development of their neighbors like Reese like the neo-assyrian empire and that they had this sort of sense of urban monumentality that rivaled and in some ways even surpassed that of their neighbors so they definitely deserve a greater amount of popularity and respect that so far they've been denied wait thank you very much you

Channel: The Oriental Institute

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Length: 51min 37sec (3097 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016