Excavation 2000

Preliminary Report on the Excavation in Assur
Spring 2000

In Spring 2000 a new German excavation took place at Assur. It was a continuation of the project started 1989-90 by Prof. Dr. Barthel Hrouda (University of Munich) which had to be stopped because of the war. The present excavation was a joint project of the Institute for Oriental Archaeology and Art at the University of Halle, the Bavarian Academy of Science and the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft on the one hand and the Department of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq on the other hand. It was supported by the foundation Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The German Archaeological Institute kindly made its house in Baghdad available for the expedition.

The excavation team comprised: Peter A. Miglus (University of Halle) as a director, Jürgen Bär (University of Heidelberg), Arnuf Hausleiter (Free University of Berlin) and Franciszek M. Stepniowski (University of Warsaw). The epigraphist was Stefan M. Maul (University of Heidelberg). In Iraq the expedition was joined by Zuhair Rajab Abdallah (University of Baghdad), Hussein Ali Hanze (Iraqi Department of Antiquities) und Hekmet Bashir Aswad (Museum at Mosul) who was the representative of the Department of Antiquities and Heritage. Four Sherqatis supervised about forty workers at the site.

The expedition departed on the 25^th of March from Berlin to Amman and continued on the next day to Baghdad. It stayed in Baghdad for four days and reached Assur on the 31^st of March. The digging went until the 5^th of Mai. On 9 Mai we came back to Germany via Jordan.

The long-term planning of Prof. Hrouda for the former excavation consisted of making a sounding in the oldest levels of the site as well as investigating the changes of the urban structure in different periods of occupation. We pursued this strategy and resumed the excavation in the trenches started 1990, i. e. Field 1 (‘Ostabschnitt’) and Field 2 (‘Westabschnitt’) in the western area of Assur. We found both trenches badly damaged with many traces of illicit digging.

It was very difficult to connect our operations with the new grid system which had been laid out in 1989. Most of the fixed grid points and bench marks had been removed.

After cleaning the disturbed remains and controlling measurements of the better preserved walls and pavements exposed in prior excavation we continued to dig deeper and extended the trenches for a better understanding of the already excavated building structures.

The mud-bricks walls in Field 1 were removed with the exception of their stone socles. New plans and photographs of the building structures were made. Afterwards older floors and installations were exposed. In a small extension in the northern part of the trench there appeared first a deposit of rubble covering Parthian graves, and below, it the Late Assyrian building level with the entrances of two private houses. Our investigations in Field 1 exposed remains of five or six buildings. All but one were partially excavated. The fully excavated medium-sized private house in the centre of the trench consisted of six rooms. It is a typical Late Assyrian structure with a fore-courtyard, a big reception room, and the inner courtyard with a small living unit.

The trench was extended 5 m to the south where Andrae’s trial soundings in the former grid squares eA-B9I are located. Our work concentrated here at first on a Parthian grave structure whose stone foundation was entirely exposed adjacent to the grave remains excavated ten years ago. The tomb stood on mud-brick collapse and rubble. This deposit partially sealed two big rooms in the Late Assyrian destruction level. Debris with conflagration remains in these rooms indicate the disaster of the year 614 B. C. when the city was captured and at least partly destroyed by the Medes.

Fifteen clay tablets and fragments of the tablets found in the trench were secondarily burnt by the fire (S. M. Maul has prepared the preliminary publication for MDOG 132, 2000). They turned up in the rubble between the Parthian grave chamber and the Late Assyrian buildings. The tablets belonged to one of the archives found by B. Hrouda during the former excavation (preliminary report by K. Hecker, MDOG 123, 1991; now being prepared for publication by K. Radner).

In the grave foundation as well as in the deposit below it, there were many pieces of inscribed and stamped bricks, most of them from the quay wall of Adad-nirari I. (1307–1275). The former expedition had found some of these bricks re-used also in the walls of the Assyrian rooms. There were many fragments of Assyrian clay hands (‘Handkonsolen’) in the entire eastern part of Field 1. Also a large number of loomweights made of unbaked clay were found on the floor in the south-western building. Some well preserved jars, cups and bowls also belonged to the inventory of these rooms. A burnt piece of an engraved tridacna-shell is presumed to belong to the same shell fragments which came from this trench ten years ago.

In Field 2 we cleared Middle Assyrian walls exposed during the season 1990. This area was extended to the north and to the south and the whole trench is now 40 m long. In the south extension where a new 10 x 10 m square was opened, the upper levels were added to the older horizon resulting in the continuous sequence of nine building levels: – one parthian level – three Late Assyrian levels – a level from the turn of the 2^nd to 1^st millennium B.C. – four Middle Assyrian building levels. We have not reached the Old Assyrian deposits yet, but from the surface of the street on the north side came painted sherds of the ‘old Habur ware’.

In the upper Late Assyrian level in the south extension there is a street of 2.6 m width running in a SW–NO direction which was also cut by Andrae in the trial trench ‘cD9I’. The mud brick walls of the houses on both sides of this street were built on stone foundations. Between the stones and the brick superstructure was a thin layer of sherds and brick pieces, which served to make the foundation level. Their floors were of mud or of stones and pebbles, in the doorways were thresholds of limestone. The structure in the fifth level exposed in the north extension had extended pavements of backed bricks. In the fill of the Assyrian destruction level were some burials of the post-Assyrian period.

In the central part of the trench stood a Middle Assyrian house with a brick tomb which had already been excavated in 1990. The baked bricks of the pavement were signed with finger marks and with private stamps of a person named ^mU&ur-Enlil. In the destroyed vault we now found bricks with a second Name: ^mAdad-etir (after S. M. Maul).

Field 3 was opened between Fields 1 and 2 at a distance of 25 m to the south of Andrae’s trial trench 8I. It consists of two 10 m squares which are situated close to the eastern end of the old small sounding dC8II. Similar to the upper level in the another trenches, there were deposits of at least two parthian levels – a piece of a street surface and few walls – which covered well-preserved Late Assyrian building remains. In the rooms in the north square A, partially paved with baked bricks, installations such as a drain, stone pivots at the doors and a stone threshold in one door opening were found. The rooms were filled with mud brick debris and two of them contained a great deal of pottery. Various jars and another ceramic forms came also from the rooms in southern square A whose walls were more destroyed.

This trench should be extended in the next season to the north where we expect to connect with the old trial sounding ‘8I’. In the future we also expect to reach the area of the temple of Ištar.

A team of Iraqi archaeologists directed by Hafidt al-Hayani has been digging in Assur for the last two years. Their investigations are conducted under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities and Heritage. This work concentrates on the modern cemetery (so called ‘Gräberhügel’) on the hill opposite the ziqqurrat and the temple of Ashur, i. e. on the northern and eastern slope of it. Parthian and Late Assyrian structures has been excavated there. The Iraqi expedition has also opened some trenches in the central and western part of the site. In Assur West in the vicinity of our investigation area the Iraqi expedition dug on three places. In the biggest trench located northeast of Field 1 remains of three Late Assyrian houses were exposed (the publication by H. al-Hayani is forthcoming in MDOG 132). In one of them a clay tablet archive containing some 226 tablets was found.

We would like to thank Dr Rabi‘a al-Qaisi, the Director General of the Department of Antiquities and Heritage and D. Hana’ ‘Abd al-Haliq, the Director of the Iraq Museum for their kind support of our excavation. Best thanks are due to the former director of the antiquity administration Dr Muayyad S. Damerji who helped to restart this project. We are grateful to Hafidh H. al-Hayani and his staff for the successful collaboration and to all our colleagues who facilitated our work.