From the top of a prehistoric mound in northern Syria, Dutch excavator Peter Akkermans looks out over a dust-swept plain. We're on top of a mound, one of many “whacking great tells” in the words of Agatha Christie’s archaeologist husband. The narrow Balikh River winds its way southward here to join the Euphrates near a town called Raqqa. It’s a desolate place, with the wind often blowing up fierce clouds of dust.
“For one reason or another, this Balikh Valley which is before us has been forgotten, archaeologically,” Akkermans tell me. That’s a shame, I soon learn, because some of the stuff turning up here would probably make Dame Agatha’s head turn.
The British crime writer’s husband, Sir Max Mallowan, literally broke much of the ground in the study of ancient Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. By all accounts, Christie and Mallowan had a good relationship: In 1930, four years after suffering from what appears to have been a nervous breakdown owing to the infidelity of her then-husband, she remarried the younger man.
The pair had met in what is now Iraq, at the ruins of Ur, an ancient Mesopotamian capital and the birthplace of Abraham. Mallowan had been serving as apprentice to Ur’s lead excavator, Leonard Wooley, when Christie (by then famous) visited after taking up an interest in Middle Eastern archeology. She was 40 at the time; he was 26. In the years that followed, the writer often followed Mallowan on his travels, bringing her along her typewriter, which her husband nicknamed Beit Agatha (“house of Agatha”).
I’ve come to Syria probably for the same inexplicable reason Agatha Christie came to Ur: Old stuff just fascinates me. I learn that much of the groundbreaking work in Syrian archeology is happening not at the country’s more famous sites, like Palmyra, but at the “forgotten” places like this one, called Tell Sabi Abyad, or “mound of the white boy,” after a spirit that local villagers claim haunts the hill at night. It's tiny rural outpost located about 30 kilometers from the Syrian-Turkish border.
Archeologists spend their lives working in the shadow of the past. For Akkermans, who had been excavating this remote site for close to two decades, one figure in particular towers over his work: not a prehistoric potter or an Bronze Age scribe, but Mallowan.
In her memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live, written as Agatha Christie Mallowan, she mentions asking her husband innocently about the Balikh River. “Whacking great tells all along it,” Mallowan replied, reverently. At first, he gushed about the historical finds buried along the banks of the Balikh. But after working here for just five months, he decided the whole area, from the Turkish border to Raqqa, was a backwater in Middle Eastern archeology.
The lure of the Balikh Valley paled compared to that of great sites elsewhere, such as Iraq, apparently. “He didn’t find it very exciting,” says Akkermans dryly.
Jump forward fifty years. In 1986, Akkermans worked on a nearby tell as a graduate student. By then, Syria was the site of some vigorous digging. During the 1960s, European archeologists had rushed in after Syrian authorities asked for help rescuing sites threatened by the construction of the Tabaqah dam and the filling of Lake al-Assad. Many of them never left.
Perhaps due to Mallowan’s lingering influence, Akkermans found the Balikh Valley still virtually untouched in 1986. As a pre-historian, he was drawn to the undiscovered riches of the tells that dot the landscape like bumps on an otherwise flat plain. He chose Tell Sabi Abyad for his Ph.D. project, and he's been excavating the site ever since.
Many parts of Syria are still ripe for discovery, for the armchair and professional archeologist alike, and there’s a lot to see beyond the famed sunsets of Palmyra. The ancient city of Ugarit, for example, near Latakia, is home of the world’s earliest alphabet. Out east, near the Iraqi border, lie the ruins of Mari, one of mankind’s first modern cities. Work continues at Mari to this day, led by a French team.
Tell Halaf, Malloway’s old haunt in the northeast of the country, may also tempt those interested in the prehistoric period. Discovered in 1899 by Max von Oppenheim, a Prussian engineer building the Berlin-Baghdad railway, the finds at Tell Halaf were shipped off to Oppenheim’s museum in Berlin. Tragically, aerial bombardment in World War II destroyed most of the artifacts. Those looking for the latest discoveries there will come away disappointed.
The most important work in Syrian archeology is being done at the places you would be least likely to visit as a tourist. There are no decent hotels near Tell Sabi Abyad. Indeed, there are no hotels, period. When on site, the team of about 30 excavators lives in the dig house, a small compound of mud-brick buildings a short distance from the mound. The buildings here are constructed in the same way as the prehistoric structures being unearthed on the mound.
Archeologists tend to be wandering types, working on a site for a few seasons before moving onto the next, but not Akkermans. His tenacity at Tell Sabi Abyad is beginning to yield notable results. Among numerous finds here, for instance,
is what he claims is the world’s earliest known evidence of milk being stored by humans.
Perhaps most strikingly, Akkermans is applying for funding for research he hopes will support his theory that a sudden climate change 8,200 years ago – a “mini ice age” only discovered in the 1990s by paleoclimatologists – led to a sudden, radical lifestyle change for some of the pre-historic forerunners of the first civilizations.
Above the pre-historic layer are the remains of a border fortress that the Assyrians built on top of the abandoned prehistoric mound in the Late Bronze Age (approximately 1200 B.C.). The ruins continue to yield cuneiform tablets that provide new insight into life in the Middle Assyrian era, especially into how the outlying areas of the Assyrian Empire were governed.
The team’s own philologist, a man with a shock of white hair named Frans Wiggerman, translates the tablets on site as they are found. One of them tells of a mysterious courtly intrigue (see interview with Wiggerman, below).
Work at Tell Sabi Abyad, which goes on each year for much of the summer and early autumn, is a community affair. The excavators employ about 70 men from the nearby village of Haman al-Turkman, many of whom have worked on the site for years on end. Digging alongside them and helping to sort and manage the finds are about 20 aspiring archeologists, most of them students at Leiden University “digging for credit.”
“I have learned so much from these guys,” one Dutch student said of the workers from the local village. After years of excavating, they’re adept at making distinctions that would be imperceptible to a layman or even an undergraduate archeologist: the difference, for instance, between the wall of an 8,000-year-old dwelling and the dirt that surrounds it.
When I visited in late October 2005, just as work was wrapping for the season, I was lucky enough to arrive just as the team was throwing a party for the men in village who had toiled daily at the site for much of the summer. The villagers feasted on baklava and danced while the workers’ children posed to the sound of clicking cameras. Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie, had they been there, would have had a whacking good time.
Assyrian intrigue with Frans Wiggermann
Frans Wiggermann, a philologist and Assyrian expert from Amsterdam Free University, discusses some of the tablets found at Tell Sabi Abyad.
What are some of the things you’ve discovered from the Assyrian tablets found in the remains of the fortress?
In my opinion, the Assyrians tried to re-settle areas to prevent nomads from taking over a whole province. The colonized it with prisoners of war. When they conquered land to the north, for example, they removed the people and implanted them somewhere else where they needed them. So a large part of the population here – the people who worked the fields that belonged to the fortress – were deportees.
The Assyrians weren’t very nice, were they?
Well, yes, they have a bad name in history. But they were well organized.
They made the trains run on time.
Right – our German colleagues in the war felt they must be a Germanic influence in the Assyrian Empire. They couldn’t imagine they could organize anything without that.
You discovered a letter about some courtly intrigue in the Assyrian capital, Assur, involving the Empire’s grand vizier, Ili-Pada, who was also the local ruler of this province. Tell us about that.
When Ili-Pada is in Assur, apparently King Tukulti-Ninurta [1231-1197 B.C.] is murdered by his son and the nobles of Assur. Ili-Pada was part of this group of murderers. There is uncertainty in the provinces about the succession: The housekeeper here was one of the officials expected in Assur, but he was afraid, so he sent somebody else to feel out the situation. This somebody else writes a letter back to here, in which he relays a conversation he had in Assur with Ili-Pada.
How does the letter actually go?
I can quote you a few lines.
“So Ili-pada said, ‘Why is he not in Assur? Kings from another country have come to grieve the dead one and bless the living one.’”
And then the man who was sent to Assur says to Ili-Pada, “Well, Mannu-ki-Adad couldn’t come, because he has trouble with Sin-mudammiq.” Sin-mudammiq is a local official.
“‘About what does he have trouble with Sin-mudammiq?’ Ili-Pada says.
“‘It’s about a field.’”
“And Ili-Pada says, ‘What about the field?’
“‘Sin-mudammiq has taken Mannu-ki-Adad’s field. That is the reason he doesn’t come to Assur.’”
Then Ili-Pada says something that is difficult to translate, but somehow he says, “How could a subaltern of mine, this Sin-mudammiq, take a field from my servant? I’m the only one who can take his field. Tell Mannu-ki-Adad not to worry and that Ili-Pada is very happy with his performance.”
We know that as soon as Ili-Pada comes back here, Mannu-ki-Adad disappears.
The guy that didn’t show up?
The guy that didn’t show up.
This article appeared in the magazine Syria Today in 2005.