Archaeology in north-eastern Syria was once a poor relation to the great sites that lie to the south and over the Iraqi border. Southern Mesopotamia is long established as the area that shows the urban roots of advanced civilisation. Ur may or may not be Abraham’s birthplace but by the 3rd millennium bc it was certainly the centre of a sophisticated court society. Nineveh, lying adjacent to modern Mosul, rivals — and may surpass — Ur in antiquity and was an Assyrian centre by the end of the 2nd millennium bc.
Widespread looting and military action now make archaeological investigation next to impossible at such centres. But digging has continued over the border with Syria, and recent finds at the site of Tell Brak are producing new answers to the questions of where and when our kind of civilisation began.
It has long been known that the Akkadian king Naram-Sin had a palace here in the late 23rd century bc. Tell Brak lies in a fertile basin, and its logistics meant that the town commanded the routes that led to and from the Jazirah desert. Max Mallowan’s team in the 1930s uncovered the site’s significance as it evolved in the centuries immediately before Naram-Sin’s reign. Archaeologists returned in force 30 years ago, and the work recently done by the Cambridge team led by Augusta McMahon push the settlement’s date of origin back to the late 5th millennium bc. Localised production of ceramics and objects made of obsidian glass — probably imported from Anatolia — show that Tell Brak was an international commercial centre even at this astonishingly early period.
But it is the seals stamped on the drinking cups that catch the historian’s eye as they emerge from the earth, because they delineate a lion caught in a net — a symbol of royalty wherever it is found in the ancient Middle East.
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