Tomb Yields Clues to an Ancient Syrian Culture

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday , November 13, 2000 ; Page A11

The two women were in their twenties, bedecked with gold and silver ornaments and jewelry of lapis lazuli. Each was buried with an infant, and all were surrounded by the low walls of a simple sarcophagus atop a hill.

The tomb is dated at 2300 B.C., part of an early Bronze Age civilization in northwestern Syria, flourishing at the same time as its more famous Middle Eastern neighbors in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

"Some suspect that urban civilization developed in Syria in response to the existence of the Mesopotamians," said Johns Hopkins University archaeologist Glenn Schwartz. "There is no question the Syrians were borrowing some ideas, but the [two cultures] are not especially matched up."

Schwartz led a team that recently discovered the tomb on a hill at Umm el-Marra, an ancient urban center 25 miles east of what is today the Syrian city of Aleppo. Archaeologists from Johns Hopkins and the University of Amsterdam have been excavating Umm el-Marra since 1994.

The tomb is the latest find in a region emerging in importance since the 1970s. Italian archaeologists at Ebla, 33 miles southwest of Aleppo, then found evidence of a sophisticated early Bronze Age civilization, including more than 17,000 cuneiform tablets.

Schwartz said he regards Umm el-Marra, a 60-acre site that probably supported a population of 3,000 to 5,000, as a "smaller, junior version of Ebla." Archaeologists have suggested that Umm el-Marra could be the ancient city of Tuba, mentioned often in early Egyptian texts.

James Armstrong, a curator and Syria specialist at Harvard University's Semitic Museum, said the Ebla cuneiform describes northern Syria in the third millennium B.C. as "a fertile landscape with lots of crops and enormous herds of sheep and goats." Most resources were controlled by wealthy, powerful elite families and royalty that dominated the region's city-states.

At the same time, Armstrong said, the city-states were optimally situated to serve as trading centers. They bought gold, silver, copper and other raw materials from mineral-rich Anatolia to the north and from the nomads on the Asian steppe and sold them to the Sumerians farther south.

"Umm el-Marra is apparently a smaller player in this landscape, but clearly there's a lot of wealth there, at least concentrated in the elite," Armstrong said, noting the "spectacular" artifacts recovered by Schwartz's team during the past summer.

The Umm el-Marra tomb is unique in the region because it has not been looted, Schwartz said. This is especially peculiar, he added, because it was an above-ground chamber located high on the Umm el-Marra hillside--apparently readily visible.

"It really is a mystery," Schwartz said. "Maybe it was held to be sacred. Maybe it got covered over with dirt. Maybe looters didn't realize it was a tomb since it appears to be part of a larger complex."

Because the tomb was undisturbed, Schwartz's team was able to learn that it had three levels. The two women and babies were in the uppermost layer. Two men and another baby were buried below the two women, and another man was buried even lower.

"What's strange is that the gold objects are restricted to the women," Schwartz said. "I would have expected that if the men were high-ranking, they would have been buried with gold, too."

But one man in the second level has only a silver headband and wristband, while the other has a bronze dagger. The man in the bottom layer has a silver cup and silver pins.

"I couldn't help but speculate: Could it be women accompanied by their retainers?" Schwartz said. "On the other hand, you could suggest that in this society you had gender differences, and women were more likely to be dressed up."

Schwartz also speculated that the presence of two women in their twenties, along with two tiny babies, could indicate ritual sacrifice, but no conclusion can be drawn because there is nothing with which to compare it. Other tombs in the region routinely show evidence of looting.

Still, it is clear from the tomb that Umm el-Marra, like other sites in northern Syria, had elites with plenty of money and a long commercial reach. The closest source of lapis lazuli in the ancient Near East was in the farthest reaches of what is now Afghanistan, about 2,000 miles to the east.

One of the women was wearing a gum ball-sized lump of iron on a pendant around her neck. Schwartz said iron was not readily available in the Syrian Bronze Age, and was probably a highly prized curiosity, perhaps a fragment of meteorite.

Schwartz said the site at Umm el-Marra was founded about 2800 B.C., contemporary with the first flourishings of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The city was oval-shaped and heavily fortified, with outer and inner walls, he added.

"It's on the edge of the zone between the sedentary agricultural communities [to the west] and nomads to the east," Schwartz said, noting it was a perfect place to exchange foodstuffs and processed goods for raw materials.

Around 2000 B.C. the settlement all but disappeared, Schwartz continued, beginning what archaeologists call northern Syria's "period of collapse." Similar events occurred throughout the region.

At Umm el-Marra, there appeared to have been "a loss of central authority" for about 200 years, Schwartz said. But there was no evidence of outright famine, he said, because the inhabitants continued to eat domesticated sheep, cattle and goats from ceramic dishes made by professionals.

Still, nothing was built at the site until the urban society reemerged in the region around 1800 B.C. for another 500-year flowering. Umm el-Marra "was a sub-capital of a larger Yamkhad empire, whose leader lived in Aleppo," Schwartz said.

"One school of thought suggests that the [cause of the collapse] was climatic--severe desiccation in the last couple of centuries of the third millennium B.C.," Armstrong said.

Armstrong also noted that there appeared to have been a large-scale "movement of peoples," especially Amorites from what is now Palestine, into the region.

"When the curtain lifts in the second millennium, people with Amorite names are in control of the entire Asian Near East," he said.

In Umm el-Marra, prosperity abruptly ended for good in the 14th century B.C. Archaeologists have found widespread evidence of burning, suggesting that invaders may have overrun and pillaged the city before abandoning it.

"There is an Egyptian text that mentions the site," Schwartz said, but later tablets suggest that Umm el-Marra did not, as first thought, succumb to an Egyptian expeditionary force. "At this point, I suspect the Hittites," Schwartz said.