On Some Recent Finds from Tepe Gawra

Abstract

Among the discoveries made by Mr. Bache and his party during the campaign of 1935/36 (see above, pp. 6 ff.) at least two deserve special mention; viz., the Cult (Fig. 1) and the Round House (frontispiece and p. 11). Both serve to broaden our knowledge of Chalcolithic civilizations in Mesopotamia. The curiously shaped objects to which the term Cult Symbols has been applied form a group of specimens that have been coming up recently in several sites of Mesopotamia and Persia.1 They are made either of stone or of terracotta, and they show invariably the same characteristic doubleloop top. The stone specimens are generally solid and often carefully polished, while the clay pieces may be hollow inside, thus suggesting a bell in appearance. The first one to be attracted by these novel antiquities was the distinguished German excavator, Dr. Walter Andrae. In his stimulating monograph on the Ionian column 2 Andrae has suggested that these objects, among which an early find from Gawra was the most significant single specimen at the time of his writing,3 represented symbols of divine huts, the reed huts of Sumerian mythological texts. The base, he thought, signified the sanctuary, while the volutes represented the door-posts of reed-bundles which framed the main entrance. The date of this highly conventionalized symbol Andrae placed in the Early Dynastic period, about 3000 B. C.