Tell Sabi Abyad

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Coordinates: 36 ° 30 ′ 13 ″  N , 39 ° 5 ′ 34.5 ″  E

Relief Map: Syria
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Tell Sabi Abyad​
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Syria

The Tell Sabi Abyad ( Arabic تل صبي أبيض; "White Boy's Hill") is a historic settlement in the Belich Valley in northern Syria near the modern village of Hammam et Turkman, around 30 km from the border with Turkey. The medium-sized tell housed during the late Neolithic , around from the late 8th to the early 6th millennium BC. And the Halaf period a rich village. In the late Bronze Age there was a fortified country estate on the Tell of the Central Assyrian administrative center.

description

Tell Sabi Abyad is a group of four hills (I - IV) lying close together, which stand on an approximately north-south running line. The main hill (I) rises five to ten meters above the wide plain of the fertile Belich valley and covers four to five hectares. Of the three smaller hills, whose settlement around 6800 BC Was abandoned, one is covered with a modern cemetery and can therefore not be archaeologically explored. Hills I to III have been explored since 1986 under the direction of Peter Akkermans, Leiden University .

Stratigraphy Tell Sabi Abyad I

In the excavation campaigns from 1986 to 1992, eleven building and settlement layers could be distinguished on the southeastern part of Sabi Abyad I. Layers 11 to 7 were only reached in part of the area, underneath that was the natural soil at a height of four meters below the current fields around the Tell. Sediments that were deposited over the millennia by the entry of wind or flooding of the Belich have changed the landscape and possibly buried other parts of the settlement.

In the lowest settlement layer (11) pottery was found with simple openings without a neck ("hole mouth"), as they were known from the nearby settlements Tell Assouad and Tell Damishliyya, both around 5800/5700 BC. Were abandoned. It is possible that Sabi Abyad was also uninhabited around this time for 200 to 300 years, because the layer 10 above showed completely different ceramics.

According to the division for the Belich region, settlement phase 11 is part of the 'Balikh IIA' (around 5700 BC), phases 10 to 7 belong to the 'Balikh IIC' (around 5500–5200 BC), the Layers 6 to 4 are part of 'Balikh IIIA' (Transitional Period, 5200-5100 BC) and the youngest layers 3 to 1 represent 'Balikh IIIB' (Early Halaf Period, 5100-5000 BC). A largely continuous settlement in the 6th millennium BC was thus possible on Tell Sabi Abyad I. Be proven. This makes it an important research center for the transition period from the ceramic Neolithic to the Halaf period .

After 5000 BC Tell was uninhabited for a long time. Only in the Late Bronze Age did the top of the hill have a fortress with a Central Assyrian administrative center.

The burned village

In settlement layer 6, a village was exposed that was destroyed by a violent fire around 5200 BC. Was destroyed and in which thousands of small finds could be recovered. The eight large buildings each contained numerous rectangular rooms. There were also four larger round structures and several ovens in and between the houses. The walls, well preserved by the fire, were sometimes up to 1.40 meters high. On the exposed area of ​​around 800 square meters, it was found that the burned village was laid out on two terraces. The houses on the slope were about two meters lower than the buildings higher up on the hill. As a result, the floors of the upper houses were roughly level with the roofs of the lower ones. Many finds suggest that numerous activities took place on the rooftops.

The area of ​​the houses built close together varies between 90 and 120 square meters. Some have 15 or more rooms, all very small with areas of three to five square meters. The mostly 40 cm wide walls were simply founded on the ground, made of rammed earth and usually plastered with clay. The rooms were partially connected by doorways. Often these were missing, however, so that access had to be via the roof. In each room there was a thick layer of ash, orange-brown crumbly clay, lumps of wall and charred scraps of wood. The frequent occurrence of charred beams and hard-burned clay fragments with impressions of reed stalks and round wooden poles indicates the construction of the roofs: wooden poles were placed from one wall crown to the other at certain intervals, over which were reed mats , which were sealed with a thick layer of clay .

The very small rooms were mostly storage rooms or grain silos. One room was knee-high filled with charred grains. In others one found storage jars, remains of baskets and many seal impressions that had served as closures.

In the case of numerous rooms, conclusions could be drawn about their use based on the inventory. Rubbing stones and ceramics, for example, indicated the preparation of food. On the other hand, a room designated as an archive because of the finds contained hundreds of small objects such as ceramics, stone bowls and axes, bone tools and male and female clay figurines. Particularly astonishing were the more than 150 clay seals with stamps and the small counting stones (tokens), which indicated a very early, well-developed registration and administration system.

Ceramic with bitumen decor

In the "burned village", abundant pottery was found, which was decorated with strange black lines. This decoration consisted of bitumen , which was applied to the ceramic immediately after firing. Chemical-analytical investigations and comparisons with bitumen from the closest deposits showed that this raw material came from Zakho or Kirkuk in what is now Iraq . The Neolithic inhabitants of Tell Sabi Abyad maintained trade relations over at least 500 kilometers to the east.

Early Halaf period

The first settlement of the early Halaf period (Balikh IIIB) is known as Layer 3 on Tell Sabi Abyad. Its construction was preceded by a leveling of the higher terrace so that it follows layer 6 of the burned village in large areas, as the architecture of settlement phases 4 and 5 has not been preserved in these places. The settlement is dated to 5100-5050 BC. Dated and divided into three construction phases. First an impressive stone wall was built. This was later incorporated into a large multi-room building. In the third construction phase, another building was erected further south. The largely well-preserved settlement layer 3 with walls of up to 1.5 meters in height was exposed over an area of ​​around 875 square meters.

Burned down storage building

Older settlement phases than in the south-east were reached in the excavation area on the north-east side of the main hill. A burned-down storehouse was excavated there in 2003/04, which, based on radiocarbon samples, dates back to around 6100 BC. Is dated. It is T-shaped in plan with three adjacent rooms that run perpendicular to a long room. The rammed earth walls are more than a meter high and have no passages or doors. Access to the rooms must therefore be via the roof or openings in the higher part of the walls. The wall thickness suggests a second floor. The fact that many artifacts were found in the rooms not at floor level but higher up between the remains of collapsed walls and charred beams suggests a second floor or at least an open attic that is occupied.

In one room, on the floor level, lay the skeleton of a young woman as a side stool burial. The only addition she had was half a club head under one hand. The club head as a status symbol and the location not below, but on the floor, give rise to ascribing a special meaning to women in their social environment. The rooms of the house contained a lot of small finds. Noteworthy is the large number of mortars and pestles made from basalt and other types of rock that are not locally found. The next basalt deposit is about 100 kilometers away in what is now eastern Turkey. So it was valuable equipment that was lost in such large numbers with the house. In addition to the missing outer doors, an enormous amount of seal impressions in clay, which marked the goods, and counting stones , which were important for accounting, speak for the interpretation as a storehouse .

Bronze Age fortress

After a long pause in settlement, buildings were rebuilt in the Late Bronze Age . A Central Assyrian fortress (Dunnu) has been excavated on the highest part of Sabi Abyad I. It measures 60 by 60 meters and was surrounded by a square ditch about 80 meters on a side. A large tower is one of the oldest parts, which is dated to the Mittani period (approx. 1300–1230 BC). The Assyrians fortified the place between 1230 and 1197 BC. And dug the trench. The next higher layer, which dates back to 1196–1183 BC. BC, showed a gradual backfilling of the trench with municipal waste and renovations in the buildings. At the end of this phase, the Dunnu appears to have been abandoned and partially destroyed. Thousands of artifacts were left in situ - ceramics, rubstones, seals and seal impressions, over 400 cuneiform tablets and installations such as ovens and silos.

The cuneiform tablets provide information on the administration and trade of the Assyrian fortress in official and private letters. They refer to a number of high-ranking Assyrians who lived and worked in Sabi Abyad. It shows the different aspects of the fortress: a military outpost, an administrative center and a base on the trade route from Karkemish to Assur . For most of his life the fortress was in the hands of Ili-pada , Grand Vizier of Assyria, Viceroy of Hanilgabat and a member of a prominent family related to the royal house. The fortress was Ilī-pad's country seat, from which he managed a large farm. There were also texts referring to his father Aššur-iddin , which suggests that the fortified country estate was a family property that provided the financial basis for a court in the capital.

Sabi Abyad II and III

The smaller hill Sabi Abyad II was during the Pre-Ceramic Neolithic from about 7550 to 6850 BC. Settled. The hill measures approx. 123 × 76 meters at the base and rises 4.5 meters above the surroundings. Eight layers of settlement were differentiated from the surface to the natural soil, of which the youngest, uppermost, extends into the Ceramic Neolithic. Layers 2–8 have different architecture with walls made of rammed earth. In addition to numerous flint artefacts from mainly local raw material, an even higher number of obsidian objects were found, the raw material of which could come from the volcanic region around Bingöl west of Lake Van . It is unclear whether the already finished blades were imported.

In 2010 excavations were carried out on the third hill, Sabi Abyad III.

In 2014, the excavation team, led by Peter Akkermans, discovered that the excavation site and its depots had been looted during the Syrian civil war .

Scanning for Syria Project (2017-2018)

The museum in ar-Raqqa had a large number of clay tablets with cuneiform writing , which archaeologists from the University of Leiden unearthed at the fort and made silicone molds from them. The molds were to be used to create casts for later and more detailed research in the Netherlands. As a result of the looting of the museum, the casting molds became the only text witnesses from the 12th century. Since the molds have a lifespan of no more than thirty years, the Scanning for Syria (SfS) project was created to digitize them . at the University of Leiden and the TU Delft initiated as part of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Global Heritage and Development . Financing could be obtained through the NWO –KIEM Creatieve Industry Program. In further cooperation with the KU Leuven and the University of Heidelberg , various methods for 3D measurement of the fragile and detailed casting molds were tested. Ultimately, the choice was made for a micro-CT scanner from the TU Delft from the Geoscience and Engineering department , which offers a good compromise between efficiency and precision and the associated possibility of text reconstruction. The texts were extracted using the Heidelberg Forensic Computational Geometry Laboratory and the GigaMesh software framework . From this, 3D models and high-resolution images in publication quality that correspond to the manual redrawings could be created with minimal expenditure of time. Additional 3D prints are used in teaching Assyriology . Other 3D replicas convey the ingenuity of cuneiform script to visitors to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden . In May 2020, the project won the European Heritage Award of the Europa Nostra research in the field. The award was dedicated to Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, who passed away at an early age.

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Today's area around Tell Sabi Abyad has been controlled by the Kurdish People's Defense Units YPG since July 2015 . According to the Tell Sabi Abyad project, the site was looted and shows severe damage on satellite images.

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter MMG Akkermans (ed.): Tell Sabi Abyad, The Late Neolithic Settlement. P. 26.
  2. ↑ Peter MMG Akkermans (ed.): Tell Sabi Abyad, The Late Neolithic Settlement. Pp. 38-63.
  3. ^ Sabi Abyad Project Site
  4. ↑ Peter MMG Akkermans (ed.): Tell Sabi Abyad, The Late Neolithic Settlement. Pp. 84-105.
  5. ^ Sabi Abyad Project Site
  6. ↑ The Dunnu ( Memento of the original from August 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / dunnu.nl
  7. ^ Peter MMG Akkermans: The Fortress of Ili-pada. Middle Assyrian Architecture at Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria. P. 1.
  8. ↑ Marc Verhoeven, Peter MMG Akkermans (ed.): Tell Sabi Abyad II - The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Settlement. Report on the Excavations of the National Museum of Antiquities Leiden in the Balikh Valley, Syria.
  9. ^ Sabi Abyad Project Site
  10. ↑ Depots of Leiden archaeologists in Syria plundered (archeology.wiki). Retrieved May 15, 2020 .
  11. ^ Website of the research project Scanning for Syria at the University of Leiden. Retrieved May 15, 2020 .
  12. ↑ a b Website of the Scanning for Syria project at the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Global Heritage and Development . Retrieved May 15, 2020 .
  13. ^ NWO website to promote Scanning for Syria. Reconstruction and enhanced reality of Assyrian clay tablets (1200 BC) recently stolen from Raqqa Museum, Syria. Project. Retrieved May 15, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Khaled Hiatlih, Ayham al-Fakhri, Rasha Haqi, Dominique Ngan-Tillard, Hubert Mara, Katrina Burch Joosten: Focus Raqqa: Protection for the archaeological heritage of the museum of ar-Raqqa . In: Ancient World . wbg Philipp von Zabern , 2019, p. 76–83 ( wbg-wissenverbindet.de [accessed on May 15, 2020]).
  15. ↑ Dominique Ngan-Tillard: Scanning for Syria - digital book of cuneiform tablet T98-34 . June 5, 2018, doi : 10.4121 / uuid: 0bd4470b-a055-4ebd-b419-a900d3163c8a (English, 4tu.nl [PDF; 48.6 MB ]).
  16. ↑ Scanning for Syria as winner of the Europa Nostra Prize. Retrieved May 15, 2020 .