Zincirli Overview

Marina Pucci

The analysis of the pottery and the publication of an exhaustive small finds catalogue of the materials from the German excavations at Zincirli are the main aim of the project presented here.

The site of Zincirli, located in Turkey, in the modern province of Gaziantep, was excavated by a German expedition under the directorship of C. Humann and F. von Luschan between 1888 and 1902. The German archaeologists extensively brought to light the first Syro-Hittite capital, and its architecture became a point of reference and continuous element of comparison for the north-Syrian town centres of the Iron Age. Inscriptions, carved orthostats, statues and small finds were divided between the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin and the Imperial Archaeological Museum, now Archaeological Museums in Istanbul.

Archaeologists published five volumes, four of them concerning architecture, inscriptions, carved orthostats and statues discovered on the mound. In 1943, in the fifth volume the director of the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin W. Andrae published a selection of small finds kept in the museum, basing his work on the manuscript left by von Luschan; the objects were chosen with a focus on relevance to archaeological research at the time. For this reason, and the then lack of a reliable pottery sequence for the Iron Age in that area, the majority of the ceramics found underneath and inside the excavated structures were not included in the volume.

Following the reopening of the excavations at the site under the directorship of D. Schloen on behalf of the Oriental Institute and as a consequence of the now better known Late Bronze and Iron Age pottery sequences for the area, further research has become possible and necessary. On the one side, the analysis and publication of the pottery from the German excavation can provide scholars with relevant elements concerning the more precise dating of the excavated structures and the chronological timeframe of occupation at the site. On the other side, an exhaustive catalogue of small finds and pottery from the site with their current location is still desirable and could also point out possible losses occurred in the last century.

B. Statement of Purpose

1. History of research.

In 1883, the German scholars Carl Humann, Otto Puchstein and Felix von Luschan formed an expedition, reached the Nemrud-Dag heights in south-eastern Turkey and travelled further to the south. At this time, at Sagçagözü, a local miller informed them that Hamdy Bey, the founder of the archaeological Museum in Istanbul, had found carved orthostats at the nearby site named Zincirli. Puchstein and von Luschan went there for a day-trip and, in the few hours they visited the mound, they gathered enough information to warrant a return trip for further investigation. After returning from this expedition, Puchstein promoted the formation of the Orient Comité to provide financial support for the excavations. Humann was to become the director of the first campaign, while von Luschan took his place in the following seasons.

German digs on the site lasted for five long campaigns (1888, 1890, 1890-91, 1894, 1902) focusing on the architecture of the acropolis. The archaeological expedition had as main aim the excavation of the largest possible extent of representative structures and the gathering of “works of art” to bring the Vorderasiatische Museum to the same level of the European ones. German excavations brought to light a large acropolis with several imposing buildings decorated with carved orthostats. After having brought to light most part of the structures on the mound, the excavations were interrupted in 1902.

Most part of the small finds, statues and orthostats were brought to Berlin, were inventoried on the field and only some of them were provided with a Museum inventory number. The first objects arrived on 1889 and remained in boxes until 1930, when the storerooms of the Museum were opened. The objects brought to Berlin were not completely inventoried, a “Feldtagebuch” was consistently kept during the excavations and got apparently lost during the war, a Fundjournal did exist (ZI:9), was used by Andrae during the war together with a Zincirli number catalogue, which survived the war and is currently kept in the Vorderasiatische Museum.

Archaeologists published over a period of ten years five volumes: the first four were published during and immediately after the excavations, the last one, the small find volume, was published with a consistent delay, due to the fact that archaeologists had waited to pursue a sixth previewed campaign in order to provide a complete inventory of the objects. Once the German political situation and the death of von Luschan made the chances to fulfil a sixth campaign an utopia, the director of the Vorderasiatische Museum, W. Andrae, decided to publish a selection of small finds which were kept in the Museum with the main aim of giving a general overview on the asset from the mound. He grouped the small finds according first to their material and then to their shape, reviewed part of the manuscript left by F. von Luschan, and selected the small finds according to what it was considered to be relevant in the history of research at the time. 363 objects were published with drawings and/or photos among the more than 6,000 small finds currently in the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin.

After the end of World War II the Vorderasiatische Museum was reorganised and repaired; part of the asset was temporarily transferred to the Soviet Union and given back to Berlin once the building was completed. Statues and orthostats were restored on display in the Syro-Anatolian room while the Zincirli storeroom was rearranged. A general inventory of the asset of the Museum was not pursued following to the result that only in the last years it was possible to point out a loss of several objects and that it is still not possible yet to provide a definitive inventory of the small finds from Zincirli kept in Berlin.

After the publication of the fifth volume, several classes of materials have been examined in specific works, such as the inscriptions (Tropper 1993), the carved orthostats and statues (Orthmann 1971, Gelb 1939), fibulae (Pedde 2000), the history of excavations (Wartke 2005), ivories (Winter 1973, 1976) and architecture and stratigraphy (Naumann 1971, Pucci 2008, Lehmann 1994).

In 2006 the Oriental Institute in Chicago re-started archaeological investigations at the site and completed until today three campaigns focusing the attention on the lower town and on a few spots on the mound. Following modern excavations technique and methods American archaeologists investigate the Iron Age urban life and culture in order to grasp the social and economic structures through which the city functioned over a period of several centuries. These investigations are still currently ongoing and the project is a long term venture.

2. Relevance of the materials from Zincirli in the Archaeology of the Near East

As a result of the German excavations at the site, Zincirli was identified with the Iron Age settlement of Sam’al which was occupied at least from the 10th towards the 6th century BC. The town was the capital of Sam’al, one of the regional kingdoms, which developed as a consequence of the political crisis of the late Bronze Age II in north-western Syria and south-eastern Turkey. During Iron Age I, several new town-centres were founded and developed a culture, which included both local tradition from the Late Bronze Age and the external influences, which kept in increasing during the Early Iron Age. The relevance of the site became evident immediately during the excavations due both to the large quantity of carved orthostats, statues and inscriptions and to the imposing structures found on the mound.

Although the main features (such as iconography and architecture) of the Syro-Hittite culture have been analysed in detail in the last fifty years, several questions remain open mainly concerning the formation and development of new political entities at the beginning of the Iron Age. What happened after the collapse of the Hittite empire (passage from LBA to IA) and the subsequent lack of power in the area, and in particular when were founded the new capitals and according to which criteria were chosen the sites? In order to answer these question for the settlement of Zincirli, recent studies have shown the importance of the analysis of the pottery as an element fundamental not only in providing a relative chronological sequence for a specific site, but also in showing external influences and local traditions, i.e. continuity with previous periods and the arrival of external elements.

The pottery from the older excavations, which was the most neglected class of materials in the publications from the first half of the 20th century, was not completely discarded in the field, but was rather collected in most cases, as it is for Zincirli, and is currently kept in diverse museums, and constitutes a not yet exploited asset.

Pottery from Zincirli was collected both from the excavated structures dating to the Iron Age and from the trenches along the foundations of the same structures under their floor level, and therefore dating to a period previous to the same buildings. As a matter of fact, a considerable part of it dates to the Early Bronze Age, covering with several breaks a time span from approximately 2500 to 500 BC. Consequently an analysis of these materials has several potentialities: on the one side, it provides a large overview on the Iron Age pottery inventory found in connection with the well known structures, on the other side, it supplies a sequence focusing on a still open problem. As a matter of fact, in the passage from the LBA II to the Early Iron Age several sites were abandoned and/or destroyed (like Ugarit, Alalakh) and other settlements were new founded (S. Mazzoni 1994). Scholars do not agree whether there was a gap in the occupation of the area due to a destruction followed by a reoccupation with new arrived peoples or there was a substantial continuity in the occupation; the settlements were re-founded and developed following a different pattern due to the political changes, which affected the region during the 13th and 12th centuries. Because the Syro-Hittite centres reached their apogee in the 10th-9th centuries, archaeological evidence for the two centuries before that time is lacking. The site of Zincirli, with its material excavated also underneath the Iron Age structures, can provide as a result a timeframe for the foundation of the site.

In the last years, the reopening of several older excavations, not only at Zincirli, but also at Tell Halaf and Tell Tayinat (and probably in the near future at Carchemish) has shown the importance of having an exhaustive catalogue of excavated small finds with their current location and their original archaeological context. A complete catalogue for the objects from Zincirli, would not only provide scholars with a complete overview on the asset from Zincirli, but also facilitate the access to the objects and mainly point the attention of the scientific community towards specific objects which in consequence of World War II and several political changes both in Turkey and in Germany have been lost and may be on the antiquity market.