Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan
The Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan ( Arabic تل حجيرة الغزلان Tall Hudschairat al-Ghuzlan , DMG Tall Ḥuǧairat al-Ġuzlān , about 'place of the gazelles') in Wadi Araba is an excavation mound in southern Jordan near Aqaba . In the Chalcolithic period (from the 4th millennium BC) copper was processed there from the Timna ore deposit 30 kilometers away. By today's standards, the village was an industrial city from the Copper Age .
location
Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan is located a good five kilometers from the Red Sea in the alluvial fan of Wadi al-Yitim, which leads from the Jordanian mountains to the west down to the Arava plain . The north-western outskirts of Aqaba has already expanded to the site. In the course of the development of the building areas, the project to explore the tell became necessary and possible.
research
The ASEYM project (Archaeological Survey and Excavation in the Yitim and Magass Area) began in nearby Tall al-Magass and has been continued as a joint project between the Archaeological Faculty of the University of Jordan and the German Archaeological Institute since 1998 . The Department of Antiquities of Jordan (DoA) and the Archaeological Museum in Aqaba, where some of the finds are also on display, are also participating in the project.
In the vicinity of the Tell, there are water management systems such as dams and canals that were created to protect against flash floods during the winter rains or to irrigate fields. In order to clarify their function and the water supply of the tell, Matthias Grottker from the Lübeck University of Applied Sciences carried out a two-year project.
By means of dating via the optically stimulated luminescence of the rock surfaces of the water management systems, which takes place within the ASEYM project at the luminescence laboratory of the Geographical Institute of Heidelberg University , the exact chronological classification is also clarified.
The work on Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan was supported by the German Research Foundation from 2002 to 2011 . As part of the survey, in addition to the two tells, numerous sites from different epochs were documented.
Excavation results
The excavation on Tell revealed a small building structure with many rooms. Walls stood up to 4 meters high, with remains of false ceilings visible in places. The remains of wooden ceiling beams, some of which have over 400 annual rings, form a valuable basis for building a dendrochronology of the southern Levant . A fortification of the place with several wall shells was proven in the west, south and east.
Khalil and Schmidt interpret several shaft-like small rooms as grain silos . Each could hold about five cubic feet of grain. With an airtight seal, the little oxygen in such a filled silo is used up very quickly by microbial processes. This means that there are no longer any living opportunities for pests to eat and the grain can be stored for a long time without loss. The annual requirement for several hundred people could thus be saved in the settlement.
In the west of the tell, graphic decorations were found on plastered walls that were pressed into the soft clay with fingertips. The figures represent stylized people and animals, mostly ibexes . Numerous horns of ibexes, goats and gazelles were also found in the filling material of the rooms, the meaning of which is apparently not limited to the property of "hunting trophies".
Outstanding among the finds were several complete and many broken molds on which copper remains could be detected. Also hoards of copper objects and large amounts of slag prove the industrial processing of copper and copper ore . Two types of shapes stand out: oval ones with a recessed bottom, which resulted in curved bars, and flat, rectangular ones measuring around 8 × 11 centimeters. Both forms produced bars of approximately 800 grams of copper.
It is possible that copper from Timna or Feinan was cast into ingots in Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan for export. In any case, bars that match the shapes found were found in Lower Egypt. In contrast, Egypt, which was poor in natural resources, traded luxury items, as the fragment of a stone vase in Hujayrat shows.
In the early Bronze Age , around 3000 BC The production and the settlement were probably given up after an earthquake.
Water management systems
Water reservoirs or cisterns are not detectable in the vicinity of the tell. Many dams and gullies can be seen in the area, which were used to channel water. Since several traces of sintering were found on the dams, it can be assumed that calcareous groundwater flowed through them. The Lübeck University of Applied Sciences carried out geoelectrical investigations and discovered aquifers that run under the Wadi al-Yitim and that emerged as springs nearby during the settlement of the tell or that could be reached via wells near the surface. The pouring of water was sufficient to supply the population with drinking water and to irrigate fields. The water is thought to have been lifted through shafts and flowed between the dams onto the fields that were on several terraces south of the tell.
exhibition
In the Archaeological Museum of Aqaba , a space dedicated to the excavations and finds from Tall al-Hujayrat Ghuzlan. In addition to simple ceramics, there is also carefully crafted jewelry such as bracelets and pearls made from sea snails and bones or ostrich egg shells. Crucibles and casting molds for the manufacture of ingots, as well as copper ore and lumps of cinder are evidence of copper extraction and processing. A replica shows a section of a figuratively decorated clay wall with ibexes.
Web links
literature
- Lutfi Khalil, Klaus Schmidt (eds.), Prehistoric Aqaba I. (Orient-Archäologie; Vol. 23) Rhaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-89646-653-2
- Dieter Vieweger : Archeology of the Biblical World . Gütersloh 2012, ISBN 9783579081311 , pp. 274–275
- Matthias Grottker: Water management systems at Tell Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan, Aqaba, Jordan . In: ImpulsE 9, Issue 1 (2004) pp. 50–55.
- Benjamin Heemeier, Matthias Grottker: Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan - water resource of a prehistoric settlement. In: ImpulsE 11, Issue 1 (2006) pp. 20–26.
- Lutfi Khalil, Klaus Schmidt: Excavations at the 4th millennium site of Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan / Aqaba - New Results 2004. In: Occident & Orient, Volume 9, No. 1 & 2, Amman 2004, pp. 12-14 online
- Florian Klimscha, Ulrike Siegel, Ricardo Eichmann, Klaus Schmidt: In the realm of the ibex . In: forschung - The magazine of the German Research Foundation 1/2011, pp. 4–9 online
- Florian Klimscha, Ulrike Siegel, Benjamin Heemeier: The water management system of Tall Hujayrāt al-Ghuzlān, Jordan . In: Florian Klimscha, Ricardo Eichmann, Christof Schuler, Henning Fahlbusch (eds.): Water management innovations in an archaeological context . Rahden / Westf. 2012, ISBN 978-3-86757-385-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ ASEYM project
- ^ Completed projects: 2005 - 2007: Water management of the prehistoric settlement Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan
- ^ Geographical Institute of the University of Heidelberg , accessed on September 20, 2012.
- ↑ German Research Foundation
- ↑ Dirk Hecht, Rock Art in the Aqaba Area. In: Orient-Archäologie Volume 23 (2009), 113-126
- ↑ online ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 482 kB) University of Erlangen-Nürnberg , Verbundforschung 2008–2009, p. 190
- ↑ Lutfi Khalil, Klaus Schmidt: Excavations at the 4th millennium site of Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan / Aqaba - New Results 2004. In: Occident & Orient, Volume 9, No. 1 & 2, Amman 2004, pp. 12-14
- ^ Dieter Vieweger: Archeology of the Biblical World . Gütersloh 2012, p. 275
- ↑ Matthias Grottker: Water management systems at Tell al-Hujayrat Ghuzlan, Aqaba, Jordan . In: ImpulsE 9, Issue 1 (2004) pp. 50–55
Coordinates: 29 ° 33 '58.7 " N , 35 ° 2' 2.8" E