Later excavations and research at the site of Tell Ahmar, some continuing up to the present day, have generated considerable information about the site, allowing the material investigated by Bell to be put into its proper historical context. French excavations under the direction of the scholar F. Thureau-Dangin in 1929–31, and the more recent work of Australian and Belgian missions under the direction of Guy Bunnens from 1988 onwards, have revealed that this site had been the place of ancient Til-Barsib, part of the Aramaean tribal kingdom of Bit Adini, established sometime in the early first millennium BCE.114 The Aramaean rulers of this settlement, which was also known by its Hittite name Masuwari, expanded and strengthened the city, and it enjoyed considerable prosperity until being conquered by the Neo-Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in 856 BCE.115 The site was renamed Kar-Shalmaneser and was transformed into an imperial control centre, complete with a lavish Assyrian palace on its fortified summit. Other Neo-Assyrian period remains have also been found in the lower town, namely the large houses of wealthy elites, some of these featuring elaborate black-and-white pebble mosaic courtyard floors.116 In addition to the Iron Age remains, excavations have also brought to light materials from a much earlier habitation of Tell Ahmar. Some of this dates back to the mid-third millennium BCE and consists of a richly furnished, monumental, stone-chambered, elite tomb, dubbed the ‘Hypogeum’, and a temple.117
Fig. 2.4 Bell’s photo of an intricately carved engaged collonnette and capital on the façade of the fourteenth-century al-Tawashi mosque, Aleppo.
The stone stele fragments that Bell had copied for Hogarth were again seen at the site in 1928 by F. Thureau-Dangin, then transported and reassembled back in the museum in Aleppo (now the Aleppo National Museum).118 They depict a Hittite storm-god wearing a horned helmet, standing on the back of a bull and brandishing an axe in one hand and a trident in the other. The Hittite hieroglyphic inscription that Bell so faithfully copied was eventually studied and translated, and we know now that it was written to celebrate the restoration of the throne of Masuwari to the son of the king Ariyahinas after a short period of inter-dynastic struggles.119 Although it provides a chronicle of the city's Aramaean rulers, the stele's inscription was written in Luwian, the language of the Hittites, and its carved motif of the storm-god belongs to the so-called Neo-Hittite tradition of sculpture that was employed at places like the neighbouring city of Carchemish.120 The explanation is that since Aramaeans at this time had no tradition of their own in terms of monumental art and architecture, the rulers of Til-Barsib chose to adopt the effective medium of propaganda of their powerful neighbour, Carchemish, as a means of underlining their authority.121
Fig. 2.5 Bell’s photo of the Great Mosque in Aleppo. Originally built during the Umayyad period in the early eighth century, it was subsequently repaired and refurbished many times, including during the Seljuk period in the eleventh century, when the exquisitely adorned stone minaret was added. Sadly, the minaret was brought down amid an exchange of heavy weapons fire in 2013.
In 1999, a similar stele was spotted near the village of Qubbeh, just a short distance downstream from Tell Ahmar.122 Fortunately, the stone, which was found in two pieces, was recovered just before the completion of the Tishreen Dam on the Euphrates and the ensuing rise of the waters, which completely submerged the area upon which the stele was found.123 Today, this stele stands alongside the Hogarth–Bell stele in the Aleppo National Museum. With a similar image of the storm-god standing on the back of a bull, its accompanying inscription celebrates the military victories of Hamiyatas, the son of the usurping king of Masuwari, and is slightly earlier than the stele from Ahmar itself that Bell copied.124 But its composition, style of iconography and use of the Luwian language is very similar to that of the Hogarth–Bell stele as well as others found at Ahmar, and it demonstrates the popularity of the Neo-Hittite commemorative style in the Ahmar region during this period.125
Fig. 2.6 Bell’s photo of the inner façade of the doorway of the Khan al-Wazir, a seventeenth-century caravanserai in Aleppo. The two-tone stone masonry and delicately carved decorations around the upper windows above the entrance greatly enriched the appearance of the inner courtyard.
Bell did not see this particular stele in 1909, but she did pass through Qubbeh and made observations of other ancient remains, including two other carved stone fragments, one inscribed with Hittite hieroglyphics (Fig. 2.9) and the other with a relief. Further along, she found the head and legs of a basalt lion.126 T.E. Lawrence also spotted a relief carving in the village of Qubbeh, possibly the same one seen by Bell.127 Recently, yet another relief fragment was found near the village. Given this amassed evidence, it seems likely that Qubbeh was the place of an ancient settlement contemporary to Tell Ahmar.128
Fig. 2.7 One of the stone fragments of a large stele from Tell Ahmar, from which Bell obtained a squeeze impression of its Hittite hieroglyphic inscription. Also adorned with the relief image of the Neo-Hittite storm god, the stele celebrates the restoration of the throne of Masuwari (ancient Tell Ahmar) to the son of a local Aramaean king in the early part of the first millennium BCE.
Carchemish
While still camped at Tell Ahmar and before embarking on her journey down the Euphrates, Bell resolved to make the short trip up to the site of Carchemish, fully aware of its importance as a ‘great capital’.129 Her visit required a ferry ride back across the swiftly flowing Euphrates to its western bank and then northward overland on horseback.130 Approaching the massive, mounded site, its north-eastern citadel rising upon the ‘majestic sweep of the river’, Bell declared no other site on the Euphrates to be as imposing as Carchemish, except for Babylon itself.131
Carchemish had a rich and long history. Occupied from the fourth to the first millennia BCE, it had attained considerable importance during the Hittite empire period, especially around 1352 BCE, when the king Suppiluliuma I captured the city and installed his son to act as Hittite viceroy of Syria.132 This royal dynasty lasted for several generations, maintaining the site's commercial and political importance within this region of northern Syria and surviving even after the end of the Hittite empire, around 1200 BCE.133 Carchemish regained some of its prominence during the so-called Neo-Hittite period, beginning in the tenth century BCE and continuing until around 717 BCE, when the city was ruled over by two successive dynasties belonging to the houses of Suhi and Astiruwa.134 This period was punctuated, however, by Assyrian conquest and imperial expansion, and during this time the Carchemish kings often opposed or had to pay tribute to Neo-Assyrian kings.135 The last Neo-Hittite king of Carchemish was deposed during the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II in 717 BCE, and thereafter the city and its territory were directly administered by an Assyrian governor. The site was ultimately abandoned shortly after 605 BCE, the year in which the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar inflicted a crushing defeat on Assyria's Egyptian allies, led by the pharaoh Necho II.136 Carchemish was partly reoccupied much later, during the Hellenistic period, under the name Europos.137
Fig. 2.8 A carved stone orthostat with the image of a winged, eagle-headed genius, from the village at Tell Ahmar, dated to the early first millennium BCE, located and photographed by Bell.
By the time Bell visited Carchemish in 1909, the site had been explored and excavated by Europeans, including Patrick Henderson, who between 1878 and 1881 had exposed a large stairway bordered with carved stone reliefs on the south-western side of the citadel mound. Six of these carved stones had been sent back to London, but the rest of the reliefs remained in situ and partially exposed to the elements; Bell spotted and photographed these as she walked over the site.138 In the spring of 1908, David Hogarth had visited Carchemish along with several other sites of archaeological interest in the region, including Tell Ahmar. Only shortly after Bell's visit, Hogarth, sufficiently impressed with the potential of Carchemish to yield further significant remains, including the highly desired Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions, applied and received permission to excavat
e the site on behalf of the British Museum.139 This work commenced in early 1911 under Hogarth's direction. Subsequent seasons of excavation, led by Leonard Woolley, were carried out during 1912–14, as well as in 1920.140 The British Museum excavations were reported in three lavish archaeological publications, most of the key findings dating back to the Neo-Hittite period, particularly from the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, when the city was greatly built up and embellished with a palatial bit-hilani, a temple, gates providing access to the inner town and citadel, and façades adorned with richly carved stone orthostats.141
The modern political border between Turkey and Syria, established in 1920, runs straight across Carchemish's outer town. The citadel mound and inner town, both of which are on the Turkish side of the border, have since 2011 seen renewed excavations by a Turkish–Italian archaeological team that continues to uncover and comprehend Carchemish's long settlement history.142
For many today, the significance of Carchemish lies not necessarily in its ancient remains but in its special connection to one of the most notable figures of the early twentieth century, T.E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. This remarkable person, who would play a key role in the Arab Revolt against the Turks during World War I, participated in the archaeological excavations of Carchemish during the 1911–14 seasons. Working as a young archaeological protégé, first under the direction of Hogarth and his second-in-command, Campbell Thompson (1911), and subsequently under Leonard Woolley (1912–14) (Fig. 2.10), Lawrence assisted with the day-to-day operations of the project's excavations. His various tasks included copying ancient inscriptions, drawing sculpture fragments, measuring and cataloguing other artefacts and occasionally purchasing antiquities from locals in the neighbouring vicinities, where other ancient settlements and cemeteries were known to exist.143 With his particular interest in ceramics, Lawrence was given specific charge over the pottery finds, producing drawings, photographs and written descriptions of the ancient vessels and their provenance.144 Finally, he assisted with supervising the local labour force of diggers, the majority of whom were peasant-farmers from the nearby Arab village of Jerablus. Often comprising 100–250 men, unskilled and unfamiliar with the methods required to dig an ancient site, this workforce could sometimes be daunting to direct.145 Nevertheless, Lawrence wholly enjoyed the task, entering into an amicable relationship with his workers, visiting them in off-hours in their homes, meeting their families and learning about their personal lives.146
Fig. 2.9 A page from Bell’s field notebook, showing her hand copies of two Neo-Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions from the sites of Tell Ahmar (top right) and Qubbeh (top left, for which no further studies have yet been undertaken), a Latin inscription from a stone in the Qubbeh graveyard (lower left), and a sketch plan and notes of the north tower tomb at Serrin (lower right).
Despite Lawrence's continuing engagement with the inhabitants of Jerablus, he did not make light of or forego his archaeological responsibilities.147 On the contrary, he appears, on the whole, as a committed and conscientious contributor to the success of the Carchemish project. Recent assessments of Lawrence's field notebooks, sketches and other written reports have shown that he was a perceptive excavator who maintained detailed and accurate records of the archaeological finds, particularly the pottery.148
Carchemish was a critical training ground for Lawrence's own understanding of the Near East, not only its tumultuous past but its present, which was on the cusp of seismic socio-political change. He developed and perfected his skills in Arabic there, and through his close relationships with his workers and their families, he formed an appreciation for their values, traditions and beliefs, and sympathy for their poverty under a corrupt Turkish administrative system and a medieval-like feudal system dominated by tribal sheikhs.149 Lawrence saw in these people – and especially in Dahoum, a Jerablus village boy with whom he developed a particularly close friendship – the qualities of an ideal Arab. With their relative isolation in a rural area of inland Syria, the people of Jerablus, in Lawrence's eyes, had not yet been tainted by the corrupting forces of European modernization that were overtaking the cities of the Near East. Lawrence admired their simple nature, humour and generosity.150 It is said that Lawrence's affection for these people provided some of the stimulus for his active role in the Arab Revolt against Turkey in the war years that followed, this further culminating in his efforts to secure Arab self-determination in the aftermath of the fallen Ottoman Empire.151
It is remarkable that Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, two of England's most significant players in the theatre of Middle Eastern politics in the early twentieth century, both had an archaeological past, and that they would actually first meet in an archaeological setting, at Carchemish. Upon her return through eastern Anatolia from her second Mesopotamian journey in spring 1911, Bell decided to visit the site in the hopes of finding Hogarth there.152 He had already left, so instead, Bell received a tour of the excavation work at the site from the two other expedition members, R. Campbell Thompson and T.E. Lawrence.153 Lawrence's letter home provides an amusing account of the lively exchange that followed among the three. Comparing Carchemish to the impressive German diggings at Qal‘at Sherqat (Assur), which she had visited earlier in April, Bell called the British operations ‘prehistoric’, whereupon Lawrence and Campbell Thompson felt obliged to temper her criticism with a ‘display of erudition’:
She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite & French architecture (my part) and over Greek folk-lore, Assyrian architecture & Mesopotamian ethnology (by Thompson); Prehistoric pottery & telephoto [sic] lenses, Bronze Age metal technique, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octobrists (by me): the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway (by Thompson). This was a kind of hors d'oeuvre: and when it was over (she was getting more respectful) we settled down each to seven or eight subjects & questioned her upon them. She was quite glad to have tea after an hour and a half, & on going told Thompson that he had done wonders in his digging in the time, and that she thought we had got everything out of the place that could possibly have been got: she particularly admired the completeness of our note-books.154
To be sure, the standards of archaeological recovery undertaken by the British archaeological team at Carchemish fell below those of other archaeological projects working in other parts of the Near East by this time.155 Bell, having visited the German projects at Babylon and Assur in both 1909 and 1911, had actually seen some of the finest excavation work of the early twentieth century, renowned for the thoroughness with which the archaeologists articulated and planned architectural structures and discerned the chronological position of the buildings through time (see Chapter 4). She was reasonably justified in her criticism of the diggings at Carchemish, whose primary goal appears to have been the collection of inscribed material and sculptured stones at the expense of stratigraphy and context,156 although it was rather discourteous of her to say so to the site's own excavators. In any event, we know that Bell did not harshly condemn Thompson's or Lawrence's excavation efforts in her diaries, letters or elsewhere in writing, merely commenting on what they had found and that she had spent a pleasant day with them, and remarking that Lawrence was ‘an interesting boy, he is going to make a traveler’.157 Lawrence, in his letter to his mother, described Bell as ‘pleasant: about 36 [Bell was actually 42 years old at the time], not beautiful, (except with a veil on, perhaps)’.158 Such was the nature of this first, somewhat inconsequential meeting between Lawrence and Bell. Over the course of their eventful lives, they would cross paths many more times, not in the arena of archaeology but in the theatre of Middle Eastern war and politics, and it is to these two that we may attribute some of the most critical – and, in retrospect, controversial – political decisions about the Middle East, the repercussions of which are still being felt over a century later.
Serrin Tower Tom
bs
Archaeology continued to be Bell's principal focus as she travelled down the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, and she was intent upon visiting and recording the remains of all periods. Given her familiarity with Classical remains, from her earlier archaeological work at Binbirkilise in Anatolia, however, Greco-Roman artefacts and architecture continued to hold some fascination. Thus, she was quite excited to visit and record the remains of two Roman-period tower tombs about four hours down the river from Tell Ahmar, in the rolling hills behind the village of Serrin.159 Bell already knew of the tombs’ existence; Max von Oppenheim had visited them back in 1898 and had mentioned them in print.160 Nevertheless, as Bell reported, his focus on one of the tombs’ inscriptions meant that further observations of the buildings’ architecture and other special features merited additional investigations and photographs.161 Bell's resulting report on Serrin's tower tombs, which was included in Amurath to Amurath (pp. 36–8), was the most detailed architectural description of these monuments until a fresh study by R. Gogräfe appeared in 1995.162
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