The relevance of this article to alcohol history will be apparent
in the final two paragraphs.
*******************************************
Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938
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Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 11:12:06 -0700
From: "Martha J. Bianco, List Editor" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The First Metropolis?
Posted by Michael Gregory <[log in to unmask]>
Cross-posted from H-Nexa
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/05/28/stifgnwfc02001.html
The Times
May 28 2000
Archeologists working in an arid corner of Syria have unearthed a vast
array of artifacts that could push back the dawn of civilisation,
writes Matthew Campbell.
The first metropolis?
A workman was digging on a dusty Syrian plain last autumn when a
bright green object in the dirt on his shovel caught the eye of Rachel
Franke, one of a team of American archeologists sifting the desert for
clues about the origins of civilisation. Her heart froze.
It was a piece of copper. Closer inspection of the dirt revealed tiny
beads made of shell and bone. Then a larger object came tumbling
loose.
"I had never seen anything like it," said Franke. The sculpted animal
figure she held up in the morning light had been buried for nearly
6,000 years.
She began sieving the dirt with a colander and, by the end of that
day, dozens more artifacts, including ornaments with bulging eyes and
a model of an animal that has yet to be identified, had been found.
"Seeing it was pretty incredible," said Clemens Reichel, another of
the archeologists. "It blew us away."
The archeologists' excitement grew in the following days. Having dug
down past villages and towns that disappeared thousands of years ago,
the team had few expectations of finding anything older underneath.
But besides the animal figures and beads, Franke and her colleagues
soon unearthed large quantities of pottery. "It was far more than any
normal family would need - a giant trash heap of urns, plates, cups
and bowls," she said.
The joint American-Syrian team that is excavating a huge mound at Tell
Hamoukar, in an arid corner of Syria not far from the Iraqi border,
believes it has stumbled on what could be the world's oldest city. If
it is correct, it has found evidence that civilisation dawned earlier
than had previously been believed.
Although older settlements than Tell Hamoukar have been found, notably
Jericho, none shows enough sophistication to qualify as a city. Tell
Hamoukar is a site of about 500 acres. By contrast, says Reichel,
"Jericho is just three houses and a tower".
Even clearer evidence of a large-scale ancient community has emerged
in another part of the Tell Hamoukar site, where McGuire Gibson, the
expedition leader, has found a section of a giant city wall and huge,
igloo-shaped ovens unlike any previously seen. Here, too, the
archeologists found wells, pottery fragments and tiny balls of clay
loaded with stones for firing from slingshots.
"The quantity of material we were getting was just extraordinary,"
said Gibson, a professor at the University of Chicago's oriental
institute. The implications were breathtaking to Gibson and the other
experts to whom he presented his preliminary findings at an archeology
conference in Copenhagen last week.
Until now the only cities archeologists had found dating back to
4000 BC were Sumerian ones in southern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. It had been believed that
urban dwelling and civilisation spread north from there into Syria.
Yet if cities were springing up in the north at the same time,
archeologists will have to consider that a culture predating the
Sumerians may have sown the seeds of civilisation in both places.
Gibson's team will return later this year in the hope of strengthening
that hypothesis. "We've only just scratched the surface," says
Reichel.
Yet already the rarefied world of Middle Eastern archeology is abuzz
with talk of temples and royal palaces buried beneath the sands of
Tell Hamoukar. The first artefacts from the site are yielding some
clues - and tantalising mysteries - about the culture that produced
them.
Just as modern telescopes are giving astrologers a glimpse of the
origins of the universe, archeologists are delving further than ever
into the so-called "cradle of civilisation" in the Middle East. But
since the Gulf war in 1991, Saddam Hussein's Iraq has been virtually
sealed off to the foreign archeologists, for whom southern Mesopotamia
was always an irresistible magnet. Instead they are descending on the
bone-dry Syrian desert in droves.
Although Franke had extensive experience in Iraq, she had never been
to Syria before. "It's like rolling a dice," she says of the process
of deciding where to dig in a country whose landscape is littered with
the remains of bygone eras.
The first figures showed up on the ninth day of the dig. They were at
a layer of the pit coinciding with the chalcolithic period from 4000BC
to 3400 BC, long before the construction of the Egyptian pyramids or
Stonehenge.
The Syrian digger handed Franke "a very dirty, strange little item".
She passed it to Gibson, who was working nearby. His eyes lit up. As
he scraped off bits of earth, the finely crafted shape of a reclining
lion was revealed. It looked, thought Gibson, like one of the figures
found in tombs of the Scythian period.
The Scythians, however, had roamed the distant Siberian steppes at a
far later period in the first millennium BC. "The musculature of the
animal was done very expertly," says Gibson.
Soon the team had accumulated so many of the figures that they had
little time for anything other than cleaning them off, and even the
cook was drafted in to help.
Careful dusting revealed a spotted leopard, ducks, bears, rabbits,
fish, birds and dogs. An animal with a long fluffy tail and rabbit
ears has defied explanation. "The locals call it a rat," says Franke.
"But rats do not have fluffy tails."
A German team excavating a nearby site dropped in on the Americans -
archeologists tend to keep in touch with one another while digging in
the same country. So did some members of a European Union-sponsored
dig in the vicinity. Franke showed them the animal figures. "They were
flabbergasted," she says.
The significance of the figures lay not in their decorative value.
They were the earliest of bureaucratic tools, seals used for stamping
a mark on possessions. "Seals are prime evidence of some kind of
system of accounting or responsibility," said Gibson. "The accounting
system is tied to an administrative system."
The variety of seals found at Tell Hamoukar - besides the decorative
animal pieces, there are more banal clay chunks carrying a basic
pattern of lines - also indicated a hierarchy of authority, said
Gibson. "There were two or three levels of people in which somebody
with authority is there to check on the work of subordinates," he
said.
A glimpse of a rigid class hierarchy also appeared to be offered in
the jumble of pottery styles. The sheer quantity of it that Franke
pulled from one rectangular pit suggested cooking on an institutional
level. With the crude cooking bowls and urns, however, were elegant,
finely crafted pieces of crockery, some of it no thicker than the
shell of an ostrich egg.
"It's like Upstairs, Downstairs," says Franke. "I figured I'm in a
place where there are people cooking food for people, who were eating
it off very fine vessels."
One thing baffled her about the pottery, however. There were also
delicate versions of the cooking pots too small and brittle for use in
a kitchen. At first she thought they might be decorations or
playthings. But their prevalence on the site ruled this out.
"The small, delicate things mirror exactly the shape of the larger
things," says Franke. "It doesn't make sense. To me this is the
biggest mystery. It is almost as if the potters were turning out these
miniature versions for the challenge."
Just as intriguing were a series of "eye idols" - simple figures with
bulging eyes made from bone and similar to a group discovered in the
1930s in Iraq at a site where Sir Max Mallowan, the archeologist
husband of Agatha Christie, once spent time on a dig. Archeologists
believe the figures have a religious significance. One was found lying
in a grave.
More tantalising still for Gibson, however, was a portion of wall 10ft
high and 13ft wide. It had apparently been constructed for defence and
it suggested, he said, a high degree of central control, planning and
administration. Gibson hopes to find more of the wall later this year.
"It would suggest earlier growth of complexity of social organisations
in this part of the world than we previously thought," he says.
This would cast doubt on the widely held belief that the trend of
urban living spread north from ancient Mesopotamian cities such as Ur
and Uruk. This, in turn, raises the possibility that the ideas behind
Tell Hamoukar's constructions sprang from an even earlier influence,
perhaps the little-known culture in the Tigris and Euphrates region,
whose artefacts dating back to about 4500 BC have been labelled "Ubaid
period" and are scattered throughout the Middle East.
On the old trade route between Nineveh and Aleppo, the inhabitants of
Tell Hamoukar are believed to have traded pottery, textiles and
precious stones. Yet the trade routes also carried ideas from one
tribal area to another, which archeologists believe first created
civilisation.
Gil Stein, a prominent American archeologist, says future Tell
Hamoukar excavations promise rich rewards. "Monumental structures in
southern Mesopotamia took decades to excavate because they were buried
so deep," he said.
In Tell Hamoukar, however, artefacts are being found much closer to
the surface amid expectations that temples and other large structures
may soon be uncovered. "It's very exciting," he said. "Watch this
space."
Whatever the case, the modern world has one tradition, at least, for
which to thank these earliest of urban dwellers. The American
archeologists believe they have discovered what could be the world's
oldest brewery at Tell Hamoukar.
An analysis of the contents of immense vats discovered at the site
show the remains of barley. "They were," declares Gibson, "almost
certainly beer drinkers."
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