Archæological Discoveries in Northern Syria

Abstract

SIR LEONARD WOOLLEY'S first report on the current season's work of the British Museum's Archaeological Expedition to Northern Syria records important discoveries, which throw fresh light on the Hittite occupation of that area and would seem to confirm references in the Biblical narrative to the relations of the Hittite people and the inhabitants of Palestine in the patriarchal age, which hitherto have been regarded as anachronisms. The expedition, Sir Leonard reports (The Times, June 12), has com pleted its first season's work in the Amk plain, inland from Antioch. The time available was brief, as excavations begun last year at Mina had to be com pleted; but an isolated area about twenty yards square in what was believed to be the aristocratic quarter of the city, opened up to a depth of 13 ft., has revealed a magnificent building, one of the finest as yet found in northern Syria. This structure is Hittite. It was built of basalt, mud-brick and timber. The approach was from a tile-paved area by way of a flight of basalt steps between platform buttresses, and led through a colonnade into a wide entrance court. The building had been destroyed by a fire; but the chambers adjoining the court were rich in finds of pottery, local and imported, including Cypriote pottery of the Bronze age. An important find consisted of portions of two literary texts, which, as the oldest cuneiform documents as yet found in northern Syria, may be expected to yield results of considerable historical interest. The date of the building can be fixed with tolerable accuracy, as information from the main excavation of the year, which was on a much larger scale, indicates con secutive periods ranging from the twelfth back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century B.C. Here, below cremation graves, was found a house, which on the evidence of Mycenaean pottery belongs to the thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C. Inscribed tablets afford evidence of the existence of a royal library. In the fourth level, dated at the sixteenth century B.C., was found a house which in its details corresponds to the larger building previously de scribed, and being characteristically Hittite, serves also to place the Hittite occupation of northern Syria at a much earlier date than hitherto accepted.