‘THE GRAVE OF THE COURT PIT’: A REDISCOVERED BRONZE AGE TOMB FROM CARCHEMISH

Abstract

This paper examines the British Museum unpublished records related to an Early Bronze (EB) Age pithos burial uncovered a century ago in the Inner Town at Carchemish. The grave, cursorily cited and variously dated (Chalcolithic, EB or even LBA) in the final reports, was described in some detail by Hogarth and Thompson; a precise dating is, however, possible today thanks to the information of paramount importance given by T. E. Lawrence who identified and took a picture of the associated finds, which was recently rediscovered in the Carchemish Archives. The pithos can be now ascribed to the third quarter of the third millennium BC and helps to confirm the recent theory according to which the Inner Town of Carchemish, with its massive earthen rampart, had already developed at the time of the second urbanisation in Syria and upper Mesopotamia.

Keywords:

• Carchemish
• British Museum excavations
• T. E. Lawrence
• D. G. Hogarth
• EBA burial customs
• Euphrates Banded Ware
• Syrian Bottles

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Dr John E. Curtis, Keeper of the Department of Middle East at the British Museum and to Mr. Jonathan Tubb, Curator of the Syro-Palestinian section in the same Department for giving permission to publish and facilitating the access to the Carchemish records. I'd like also to express my sincere thanks to Prof. Edgard Peltenburg and Dr Rupert Chapman for their insightful comments on an early draft of this paper and its meticulous editing. The responsibility for the ideas expressed here and any mistakes are solely of the author. Figures 1b and 2–5 are reproduced here by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. All the drawings and re-drawings at Fig. 6 are by the author.

Notes

1 This visit goes back to January 2006. See acknowledgments above.

2 Hogarth, digging at the foot of the stairs, found a late chalcolithic pot burial only 1.40 m below the latest Hittite road-level’ (Woolley and Barnett 1952, 234).

3 Following Woolley's description, in a previous article (Falsone and Sconzo 2007, fig. 5.8, no. 1) which was written before the discovery in the BM of the unpublished notes, we had also erroneously placed the grave of the court pit among the EB I-II findings of the Inner Town.

4 Carchemish Archives, Notebook no. 12. Written by D. Hogarth, page 1.

5 The ‘standing stones’ mentioned here were part of the eastern wall of the large complex, which flanked the court and counturned the ‘Temple of the Stormgod’.

6 Carchemish Archives, Notebook no. 12. Written by D. Hogarth, pages 2, 3.

7 Carchemish Archives, Notebook ‘Stairway and prolongation of Palace trench; Sculptures, etc.’, pages 5–6.

8 Hogarth 1911, 14.

9 Lawrence joined the expedition since the first season. It is to be recalled that during this period he had various duties: he was the photographer of the expedition and the pottery specialist. Unfortunately, as Woolley refers, almost nothing of his typological work on the Bronze Age sequence survived at the site after the First World War, except for some notes and pencil sketch-drawings still kept in the Archives, which were extensively quoted or reproduced in the Carchemish reports (Woolley and Barnett 1952, 227–37), and remain even today an invaluable contribution to understand the Bronze Age and earlier levels at Carchemish (Sconzo 2008).

10 Carchemish Archives, Notebook ‘Pottery Final Selections’, by T. E. Lawrence, pages 24–25.

11 Carchemish Archives, Notebook no. 3, page 25b (not numbered).

12 Further comments to the photo: “Some pot burial pottery and other. Photo 147. A cup and bottle from 4.20 m in NE cut, with large pot of bones; quite undistinguished wheel-made pottery. Another with small ears, from much the same depth: alike unimportant. There is also a plain-rimmed cup from East summit pit – probably Hittite. On the shelf above is very fine pebble-polished light-red plate: from the bath pit at 2 metres. The Hittite level was shallow all over this part of the site. This plate is smoothed inside, but outside is remarkable for its double ridging. Others were found there and in the ‘water gate’ house and in the deep trial pit (between I + G), it is quite distinctively Hittite” (Carchemish Archives, Notebook ‘Pottery Final Selections’, page 26).

13 For a comment on the sounding, see also Falsone and Sconzo 2007, 88–89. A further reference to the ring-burnished pottery from the deep sounding and from the burial discussed here is given by Lawrence in the same notebook, p. 23: “Outside this stair pit, its pottery was found: (i). −2 + −3 metres combed ware: … (ii). −4 + −5 metres ring-polished ware: in the foundation in the N. Cut of the Mound and in the grave in the court-pit”.

14 The two vessels are shown here by means of sketch line-drawings, which were obtained from Lawrence's original illustration (photo n. 147) with the help of the Adobe Illustrator programme.

15 See also type 98 in the author's recent analysis of the third millennium pottery of the Middle Euphrates (Sconzo forthcoming-b).

16 For the Jezirah, see the most recent contribution by E. Rova (2011). In the latter region the bottle (ARCANE EJZ type 66) appears in the EJZ 4 Period (Rova 2011, pl. 15: 14–5) and continues later. For inter-regional parallels, see also type Ib of the Schachners’ analysis (Schachner and Schachner 1995, 90–91) and type 2 in Sconzo forthcoming-c.

17 See type 99 in the author's recent analysis of the third millennium pottery of the Middle Euphrates (Sconzo forthcoming-b). Parallels from this region, among many, come from Gre Virike, Grave L8 (Ökse 2002, fig. 22); Horum, Jar burial B 0149 (Marro et al. 1999, fig. 6, pl. IX: 6); Tawi, T. 2 (Kampschulte and Orthmann 1984, pl. 1b: 5), T. 4 (pl. 2b: 8–9, the latter also painted) and T. 19–22 (pl. 28a: 261); Wreide, Tomb D (Van Loon and Meyer 2001, fig. 4A.5: 22–23); Bi'a, Graves 24/49:6 (Strommenger and Kohlmeyer 1998, 36, pl. 41: 6), 24/49: 10 (Strommenger and Kohlmeyer 1998, 36, pl. 45:23), etc. (Strommenger and Kohlmeyer 1998, pl. 177), and Terqa (Kelly-Buccellati and Shelby 1977, 53, fig. 25 TPR63, also painted). Cfr. also bottle type I:2 of Rova's classification of the pottery from the Wreide cemetery, although in a black/grey burnished version (Rova 1991, 136–137, pl. 47b: I:2).