The war has so disrupted parts of the Near East that scholars have just a few Roman Empire sites to study in what was the Roman province of Syria. But archaeologists are able to work a few sites, including Doliche in what is now Turkey, where they have recently discovered a wonderful floor mosaic with a delicate pattern, houses, alleys and water pipelines that will give them a look into the ancient people’s daily lives.
It is important to study such places because urban centers of this kind have barely been explored, and others, such as Apamea and Cyrrhus, have been destroyed, say researchers from the University of Münster in Germany.
“The situation today at the site of Apamea, one of the most important ancient cities of Syria, is particularly bad,” said archaeologist Englebert Winter the University of Münster’s Asia Minor Research Centre in a press release. “Illicit excavations, clearly visible in satellite imagery, have destroyed the entire urban area. It remains doubtful if research there will ever be possible again. The excavations in Cyrrhus, which had recently been resumed, also had to be stopped due to the current situation.”
Antioch, an ancient city and capital of the Roman province of Syria, is inaccessible because of modern construction. Therefore Doliche is very important. Winter said it will provide new information about the ancient urban culture of northern Syria.
The team of researchers plans to extend excavations from private homes into public areas of the ancient city. They hope to gain insight into the city of Doliche and its residents from the Greek era through the Crusades.
Archaeologists excavate the abbey of St. Solomon at Dülük Baba Tepesi, which is a mountain near Doliche where Romans and later Christians worshiped their various gods. (Photo by the University of Münster)
“The most outstanding discovery of our excavations is a high-quality mosaic floor in a splendid complex of buildings with a court enclosed by columns that originally covered more than 100 square meters [328 square feet],” archaeologist Michael Blömer was quoted as saying in the press release. “Because of its size and the strict, well-composed sequence of delicate geometric patterns, the mosaic is one of the most beautiful examples of late antique mosaic art in the region. These first findings already reveal the potential that the site has for further research into the environment of the urban elites and for questions as to the luxurious furnishing in urban area.”
The researchers are unclear as to the exact purpose of the building in which the mosaic was found but believe it to be the villa of a rich person.
Human habitation at the site of Doliche goes back much further than 2,000 years or so. The team of archaeologists from the University of Münster also has been excavating a nearby overhanging rock shelter that dates from between 600,000 BC to 300,000 BC. People settled there because of the presence of flint, from which they could make stone tools, said Professor Winter. He called the site central to the early history of mankind.
The dig turned up the bronze figurine of a stag dating to the first millennium BC at the mountain of Dülük Baba Tepesi, which neighbors Doliche. (Photo by the University of Münster)
At a related dig, the neighboring mountain of Dülük Baba Tepesi, archaeologists for 15 years have been excavating the sanctuary of Iuppiter Dolichenus (who is not truly the same as Roman Jupiter), which the press release calls one of the most important gods of the Roman Iron Age. The site was used as a temple or sanctuary as far back as the ninth century BC, which makes it much older than researchers initially thought. As confirmation of this, they found a high-quality bronze figure of a stag dating to the first millennium BC. They also have discovered and have been excavating well-preserved parts of a wall enclosing the Roman sanctuary and parts of Christian abbey that was established on the mountaintop after the heathen cult there ended. Featured image: This delicately elaborate mosaic has been excavated from a possible rich person’s villa in Roman Doliche, one of the few areas in Roman Syria where archaeologists can work. (Photo by the University of Münster)
By: Mark Miller
An unknown Roman god was recently unearthed at a sanctuary in southeast Turkey. The god, who is emerging from a plant, is depicted with both Near Eastern and Roman elements, and may have been a baal, or subdeity, of the temple's major god, Jupiter Dolichenus Credit: Peter Jülich
A sculpture of a mysterious, never-before-seen Roman deity has been unearthed in an ancient temple in Turkey.
The 1st century B.C. relief, of an enigmatic bearded god rising up out of a flower or plant, was discovered at the site of a Roman temple near the Syrian border. The ancient relief was discovered in a supporting wall of a medieval Christian monastery.
"It's clearly a god, but at the moment it's difficult to say who exactly it is," said Michael Blömer, an archaeologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, who is excavating the site. "There are some elements reminiscent of ancient Near Eastern gods, as well, so it might be some very old god from before the Romans." [See Images of the Mysterious Roman God]
The ancient Roman god is a complete mystery; more than a dozen experts contacted by Live Science had no idea who the deity was. Cultural crossroads
The temple sits on a mountaintop near the modern town of Gaziantep, above the ancient city of Doliche, or Dülük. The area is one of the oldest continuously settled regions on Earth, and for millennia, it was at the crossroads of several different cultures, from the Persians to the Hittites to the Arameans. During the Bronze Age, the city was on the road between Mesopotamia and the ancient Mediterranean.
In 2001, when Blömer's team first began excavating at the site, almost nothing was visible from the surface. Through years of painstaking excavation, the team eventually discovered the ruins of an ancient Bronze Age structure as well as a Roman Era temple dedicated to Jupiter Dolichenus, a Romanized version of the ancient Aramean sky or storm god, who headed the Near Eastern pantheon, Blömer said.
During the second and third centuries A.D., the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus became a global religion likely because many Roman soldiers were recruited from the area where he was worshipped, and those soldiers took their god with them, said Gregory Woolf, a classicist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who was not involved in the excavation.
After the temple was destroyed, medieval Christians built the Mar Solomon monastery on the foundation of the site, and after the Crusades, the site became the burial place of a famous Islamic saint.
Blömer's team was excavating one of the old buttress walls of the Mar Solomon monastery when they discovered the relief, which had been plastered over.
The relief depicted a bearded man rising up out of a palm-type plant while holding the stalk of another. The bottom of the relief contains images of a crescent, a rosette and a star. The top of the relief was broken off but when it was complete it would have stood about the size of a human being.
"It was quite a big surprise when we saw the relief coming out of in this area of the site," Blömer told Live Science. Unknown deity
The mysterious deity may have been a Roman spin on a local Near Eastern god, and the agricultural elements suggest a connection to fertility. But beyond that, the deity's identity has stumped experts.
The relief shows some elements associated with Mesopotamia. For instance, the rosette at the bottom may be associated with Ishtar, while the crescent moon at the base is a symbol of the moon god Sîn, Nicole Brisch, a Near Eastern studies expert at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, wrote in an email. (Brisch was not involved in the current excavation.)
"The bottom bits are from the Near East and the top bits are classical," Woolf told Live Science. "He looks to me like he was somebody from a native, very local pantheon." [Images: Ancient Carving of Roman God]
The fact that he is rising out of a plant is reminiscent of the birth myths of some gods, such as the mystery cult god Mithras, who was born from a rock, or the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who was born out of sea foam, Woolf speculated. Mashup god
Though the gods' identity is a mystery, the hybridization of gods isn't unusual for the time, Woolf said.
"When the dominant style in the area is Greek and Roman, they give their gods a face-lift," Woolf told Live Science.
For instance, the ancient Egyptian gods end up wearing the clothes of Roman legionaries, and ancient Mesopotamian gods, which were typically depicted as "betels" — stones or meteorites — get human faces, Woolf said.
The best chances of identifying this enigmatic deity is to find a similar representation somewhere with an inscription describing who he was, Woolf said. But getting the word out could also help. Sometimes findings get widely disseminated and "someone turns up a little object that they've had in their private collection and say, 'Do you know, I think this is the same person,'" Woolf said.
A statue is on display in the Assyrian hall of Baghdad’s National Museum in 2005. Photograph: Charles Onians/AFP/Getty
The lands of Syria and Iraq gave rise to some the oldest societies we know: the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Romans and many others. Traces of all of these peoples remain in archeological sites of the utmost significance.
And now they’re being destroyed.
A fortnight ago, satellite imagery revealed the cultural effects of Syria’s civil war. “The buildings of Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, has suffered extensive damage,” explained Archaeology magazine. “The ancient city of Bosra, the ancient site of Palmyra, the ancient villages of Northern Syria, and the castles Crac des Chevaliers and Qal’at Salah El-Din have all been damaged by mortar impacts and military activity.” So too in Iraq.
Sometimes, the destruction is accidental (if that term means anything in wartime). Sometimes it’s deliberate, with the Islamic State systematically leveling ancient religious sites.
After looters rampaged through Baghdad’s National Museum in 2003, Francis Deblauwe established the (now defunct) Iraq and Archaeology site, which eloquently expresses what’s now once again happening. He wrote:
War in this cradle of civilization beyond the horrendous, almost invisible casualties – always somebody’s husband, always somebody’s son – and downplayed ‘collateral damage’ – always somebody’s wife, always somebody’s child – inevitably takes its toll on the archaeological heritage as well. After all, this fertile flood plain and surrounding mountains gave birth to agriculture, to writing, to cities, to laws, to the 24 hours in a day, and many more things we take for granted.
*** Iraq takes its name from Uruk, the ancient city said to have been ruled by Gilgamesh, sometime between 2,500 and 2,700 BC.
In the epic poem that bears his name, Gilgamesh leaves Uruk, a place he constructed, stricken with grief after the death of his friend. After many adventures, he accepts that only the gods endure forever, and returns with a new appreciation of the city – a human achievement that offers the only immortality humans can expect.
David Ferry’s beautiful translation describes Uruk as follows:A beheaded looted sculpture in Iraq’s archeological museum in Baghdad.Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty
The outer wall shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner wall is beyond the imagining of kings. Study the brickwork, study the fortification; climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace; study how it is made…
Uruk’s ruins were rediscovered in the 19th century, 250kms south of Baghdad. That means we can, quite literally, study the brickwork and the fortifications and the outer walls upon which Gilgamesh once gazed – and when we do, we confront the same questions about eternity and loss he pondered some 4,500 years earlier.
The ancient stones exemplify the persistence of our collective culture, a persistence that provides, as the poem suggests, our sole consolation for the inescapability of our individual deaths. That’s why, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin argues that we have a responsibility to such artefacts. He warns:
They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their right in them: that which they labored for, the praise of achievement or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no right to obliterate.
Great architecture, Ruskin says, belongs to humanity as a whole, and not to “those mobs who do violence to it”. It’s an argument that surely applies to the relics of ancient Mesopotamia, caught between Islamic State fighters and US strike bombers.
But can we – or, rather, should we – proclaim the rights of the dead when patently we cannot guarantee the rights of the living?
***
Nearly 200,000 people have already perished in Syria’s civil war. Estimates of deaths from the 2003 Iraq invasion vary from several hundred thousand to over a million, depending on which source you cite. In the midst of almost unimaginable blood and suffering, is it wrong to care about the walls of Uruk?
“I wish to be absolutely clear,” writes Deblauwe, “no epic Sumerian cuneiform tablet, majestic Neo-Assyrian lamassu sculpture or any other Mesopotamian artifact is worth a human life, be it Iraqi, American, British or other.”
The bluntness of that statement, from a man who palpably cares about Sumerian cuneiform tablets, contrasts with the abstraction of Ruskin’s formulation, which champions a generalised humanity over the flesh and blood of today’s people. Call it the antiquarian temptation: a tendency to privilege a bygone world over the one in which we actually live.
There’s a long, disreputable tradition of venerating ancient Rome and Greece while denigrating anyone with the temerity to live in those cities today. When ideologues seized cultural treasures from subaltern populations, they generally did so on the basis that the ignorant locals couldn’t appreciate the stuff’s value. That’s how major British museums built their collections, from the Elgin Marbles to the bones of Aboriginal people.
Yet it’s worth thinking about the perceived need for such expropriation.
***An Afghan man rids his bicycle in front of the empty seat of the Buddha destroyed by the Taliban.Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Why did the Taliban dynamite the Bamiyan buddhas? Like all despots, Mullah Omar and his men made the past into a guarantor of the future. The giant statues represented an alternative system of thought. By blasting away the ancient sculptures, the Taliban proclaimed, “there are no choices here – and there never have been.”
The absorption of other civilisations’ treasures into the British empire spoke to the same need. Consider the incorporation of the diamond known as the Koh-i-Noor into the crown of Queen Elizabeth, an obvious and ostentatious demonstration of Britain’s power over India.
Likewise, settler societies such as Australia have always needed to denigrate the achievements of those they displaced, so as to justify the fiction of terra nullius. It’s a process that continues today. Some archaeologists calls the Brewarrina Fish Traps the oldest human constructions in the world – but how many white Australians have even heard of them?
In 1258, Genghis Khan sacked Baghdad, and systematically annihilated its famous House of Wisdom, the first ever university. “It was so horrible there are no words to describe it,” wrote the Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz. “I wish I had died earlier and not seen how these fools destroyed these treasures of knowledge and learning. I thought I understood the world but this holocaust is so strange and pointless I am struck dumb.”
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein records remarkably similar responses to the plunder of the National Museum of Iraq after the US invasion. “It was the soul of Iraq,” said one local merchant. “If the museum doesn’t recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen.” “Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture,” said another man, “and they want to wipe out our culture.” I wish I had died.My own soul has been stolen. Can we truly assert that no cultural artifact’s worth a human life?
Of course, the question’s unanswerable, since valuing the irreplaceable (whether a person or an artwork) constitutes, almost by definition, a category error. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the past and its culture cannot be so easily disentangled from the present and its politics.a Buddha head can be seen from the Mes Aynak archaeology site.Photograph: MCT/Getty ImagesKlein explains the pillage of Baghdad’s museum in terms of the neoconservative attempts to reconstruct Iraq as a deregulated, free market utopia. She quotes the coalition economic advisor Peter McPherson, who saw looting as a DIY privatisation, a legitimate beginning to the downsizing of state assets. “I thought the privatisation that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine,” McPherson explained.
How can you protect a common human heritage when you’re innately opposed to collectivity? More importantly, why would you even try?
***
In the New York Times, Ziauddin Sardar discussed the historical destruction taking place taking in Mecca, where ancient sites have been crudely bulldozed by developers.
“The house of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of toilets,” he says. “The Makkah Hilton is built over the house of Abu Bakr, the closest companion of the prophet and the first caliph.”
Like the Islamic State militants they fund, the Saudi Salafists despise alternative interpretations of Islam. It’s common to call their philosophy “medieval”, but the label misrepresents the entirely 21st phenomenon taking place in Mecca. As Sardar argues, the Saudis have turned the “spiritual heart of Islam [into] an ultramodern, monolithic enclave, where difference is not tolerated, history has no meaning, and consumerism is paramount.”
The same might be said of the Islamic State itself. Its supporters raze ancient sites, not only to wipe out the traditions they represent, but also to capitalise on the thriving market for antiquities in the west, reportedly raising US$36m alone from the looting of al-Nabuk in Syria.
On the surface, the rich cosmopolitans who buy the stuff and the ascetic fundamentalists who steal it could not be more different. But they share an identical indifference to history as a collective resource for humanity. Do we need, then, a team of George Clooney-style “Monuments Men”, specially trained to guide the US forces in Iraq and minimise the historical damage they cause?
In 2009, the archeologist Yannis Hamilakis wrote a stinging rebuke to colleagues embedding with western militaries, arguing that they simply legitimised the destruction they sought to forestall. He quoted the Iraqi-born academic Zainab Bahrani: “The entirety of Iraq is a world cultural heritage site, and there is no way that a strategic bombing can avoid something archaeological.”
Just as recent “humanitarian” interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya have culminated in humanitarian catastrophes, efforts by what Hamilikis dubs “the military-archaeology complex” are unlikely to succeed, since long-term preservation depends upon a relationship between the history of a site and those who inhabit it today.
The great poet and designer William Morris argued something similar during his campaign to spare the ancient buildings of Britain from the ravages of industrialisation.“Believe me,” he explained to supporters, “it will not be possible for a small knot of cultivated people to keep alive an interest in the art and records of the past amidst the present conditions of a sordid and heart-breaking struggle for existence for the many, and a languid sauntering through life for the few.”
On another occasion, he put it like this: “If we have no hope for the future, I do not see how we can look back on the past with pleasure.”
The same might be said about Iraq and Syria today. The fight for our collective heritage necessarily involves a struggle for peace and social justice, for it’s only when people feel a stake in the world around them that they can appreciate the achievements of the ancients as part of their lives.
The war has so disrupted parts of the Near East that scholars have just a few Roman Empire sites to study in what was the Roman province of Syria. But archaeologists are able to work a few sites, including Doliche in what is now Turkey, where they have recently discovered a wonderful floor mosaic with a delicate pattern, houses, alleys and water pipelines that will give them a look into the ancient people’s daily lives.
