Preliminary Report on the Excavations at Tell Rifa'at

Abstract

Tell Rifa‘at, in the ‘Azaz Casa, is situated in the midst of the village of the same name, thirty-five kilometres to the north of Aleppo in the Syrian Region of the United Arab Republic.The modern village, with a population of 5–6,000, is the seat of a Mudir Nahir; it lies five kilometres east of the Aleppo-‘Azaz road, close to the Turkish border, and is on the railway line from Aleppo to Istanbul. Trial excavations were made on this site by the Czech philologist Hrozny in 1924, but after three months’ work he abandoned his investigations; no detailed report on this work has so far been published, and apart from a few fragments in the Aleppo Museum no material from the excavation appears to be extant.My attention was drawn to Tell Rifa‘at in 1953 in the course of a survey of sites on either side of the Syro-Turkish frontier; but it was not until 1956 that under the auspices of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London and with the assistance of a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and from the Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne, a preliminary investigation of the site was undertaken. A further season had been planned for 1957, but owing to the political situation it was not possible to resume work until the summer of 1960, when a two-month season was carried out with the support of funds from the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the C. H. W. Johns Memorial Fund of Cambridge University, the Ashmolean Museum, the Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne, the Russell Trust, and the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham.