Eye temple

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Two Syrian eye idols of the kind found in Tell Brak (exact location unknown); Ebnöther collection in the Museum zu Allerheiligen , Schaffhausen
Aerial photo of Tell Brak, 2015. Below, center left, the location of the eye temple

The Eye Temple is a historic building in Tell Brak , settlement mound and archaeological site in Mesopotamia and one of the oldest known urban settlements. Tell Brak is located on the territory of today's Middle East state Syria . The eye temple is attributed to the Uruk period , a Neolithic high culture in the Middle East . It received its current name after the large numbers of ophthalmic idols found there during archaeological excavations , a form of small sculpture that is widespread not only in Mesopotamia and often has a cultic purpose.

Research Findings

The building on the southern edge of Tell Brak was discovered in the 1930s by the British researcher Max Mallowan ( Near East archaeologist , 1904–1978) and interpreted as a temple. Architecturally, the building is a central hall house , the walls of which were decorated with pillar-niche decorations and pen mosaics , similar to the temples in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk . A large side wing of the house with room chains was used to store valuable objects, possibly votive offerings.

Further excavations revealed that the temple had at least three previous buildings, which lasted well into the 4th millennium BC. BC . Mallowan named the youngest of these buildings because of the characteristic color of the building material Red Eye Temple (German: " Red Eye Temple ") and dated it to the late Uruk period, when he found the bell pots associated with the Uruk expansion on site . Below the foundations of the red building was the older Gray Eye Temple . In addition to various objects of art, seals and pearls, numerous eye idols and spectacle idols were found, which gave the entire building its name. The stratigraphically oldest building layer of the eye temple is the White Eye Temple, which has so far been virtually unexplored.

literature

  • Max EL Mallowan: Excavations at Brak and Chagar Bazar. In: Iraq 8 (1947), pp. 1–259.
  • Joan Oates, Augusta McMahon, Philip Karsgaard, Salam Al Quntar, Jason Ur: Early Mesopotamian Urbanism: A New View from the North. In: Antiquity 81 (2007), pp. 585-600. ( Full text (PDF; 1.9 MB) as digitized version)

Coordinates: 36 ° 39 ′ 56.7 ″  N , 41 ° 3 ′ 28.3 ″  E