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Excavations at Tell Nebi Mend, Syria: Volume I
Excavations at Tell Nebi Mend, Syria: Volume I
Excavations at Tell Nebi Mend, Syria: Volume I
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Excavations at Tell Nebi Mend, Syria: Volume I

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The archaeological site of Tell Nebi Mend, a tell on the Homs plain in present-day Syria, is universally recognised as the location, first, of Qadesh (or Kadesh), where, in c. 1286 BC, the armies of Ramesses II of Egypt and Muwatalli II of Great Hatti fought the most famous battle of pre-classical antiquity, and, second, of Laodicea ad Libanum, founded most probably in the 3rd century BC as the capital of a district of the Seleucid empire.

Collaborative excavations undertaken over 12 seasons aimed to fill a major gap in archaeological knowledge between the northern and southern Levant and to develop an understanding of the archaeology and early history of the Levantine Corridor independent of, and supplementing, that based on Palestinian and Biblical research. The primary aim was to obtain as complete a sequence as possible of cultural and environmental data, sampling all periods of the site’s occupation, which included Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Hellenistic/Roman deposits, enclosures and defenses spanning the 7th millennium BC to the mid-1st millennium AD. A definitive classification of all types of Syrian pottery over two millennia was established, together with a much longer sequence of pottery, stone, metal and bone implements, terracottas and other cultural remains, accompanied by a wealth of environmental data and a series of radiometric dates.

The earliest settlement so far discovered at Tell Nebi Mend dates to the first half of the 7th millennium BC and is the subject of this volume. Five phases of occupation were recognised with architectural features including, at different times, house structures and remains of larger, probably communal, buildings, along with remains of plaster, floor surfaces, fire and rubbish pits and burials, followed by large-scale abandonment. More than 2000 sherds of Neolithic pottery and 1400 flint and obsidian artefacts were recovered.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 2, 2015
ISBN9781782977872
Excavations at Tell Nebi Mend, Syria: Volume I

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    Excavations at Tell Nebi Mend, Syria - Council for British Research in the Levant

    PART I:

    GENERAL INTRODUCTION

    1. The site and the excavations

    Peter J. Parr

    Geographical setting

    The archaeological site of Tell Nebi Mend (more correctly Tell el-Nebi Mendu: ) is today universally recognised as the location, first, of Qadesh (or Kadesh, the preferred spelling of Egyptologists), where, in about 1286 BC, the armies of Ramesses II of Egypt and Muwatalli II of Great Hatti fought the most famous battle of pre-classical antiquity, recorded in vivid detail in reliefs and texts on the pharaoh’s temples at Luxor and Abu Simbel; and, second, of Laodicea ad Libanum, founded most probably in the 3rd century BC as the capital of a district of the Seleucid empire and later becoming an important Roman country town and the seat of a suffragan bishop. It is situated in present day Syria, about 25 km south-west of Homs on the southern edge of the plain which takes its name from that city. At this point the river Orontes (the Nahr el-cAsi) is joined from the west by one of its few perennial tributaries, locally known as the Muqadiyah but often called the Tannur after the name of the spring the cAin et-Tannur, which is its source a few kilometres further south. It is in the fork of the two watercourses that the site stands (Figs 1.1 and 1.2). It comprises three distinct parts. To the north, almost at the apex of the fork, is the tell proper (Pls 1.1 and 1.2), called here the Main or Upper Mound, which is some 450 m × 220 m in extent at its base and thus approximately 10 ha in total area, with its highest point about 29 m above the flood plain at its foot. In 1975, when the University of London excavations began, much of its summit was occupied by a village and its cemetery, but since then these have been largely abandoned, apart from a mosque (recently rebuilt) dedicated to the weli after whom the village is named. South of the tell and separated from it by a modern road – almost certainly on the line of the ancient road into the city – is an area of roughly the same size that can most conveniently be referred to as the Lower Mound, and this can itself be subdivided into two more or less equal parts, the northern one some 8 m high at its highest and the southern one about half that, the two being separated by a distinct depression or waist. In 1975 the northern part showed signs of having been cultivated, although during the course of the excavations it was largely lying fallow, grazed only by sheep and goats, while the southern part was just beginning to be occupied by a new village replacing that on the Upper Mound, where building had recently been prohibited by the Syrian government. The Lower Mound and the new village are bounded on the south by an artificial ditch – clearly visible on the French aerial photograph (Fig. 1.3) published by Mesnil du Buisson in 1938 and on recent Google Earth imagery – some 40 m wide that stretches between the flood plains of the Orontes and the Muqadiyah and then continues westward on the far side of the latter, where in places the remains of an accompanying embankment on its inner edge could once also be plainly seen, although it was largely ploughed away by 2010, when these words were written. The ditch then makes a 90° turn to the north and can be followed for about another 800 m before all trace of it on the ground is lost, although another angle and eastward turn may perhaps be visible on the aerial photograph and is tentatively shown on the French 1:50,000 map of the region made in 1932. The only other surface feature to note is just north of the south-west angle, where the contours swing towards the east to form a kind of depression or ‘bay’ which may well indicate the site of the original entrance. The ditch and embankment thus form two (or possibly three) sides of a rectilinear enclosure, constituting the third major element in the configuration of the site. (Further discussion of the enclosure will be found in Part III of this volume.)

    In his seminal study of the Late Bronze Age battle, J. H. Breasted (1903, 21) referred to Tell Nebi Mend as occupying ‘the most important cross-roads in Syria’, and although this is something of an exaggeration it is certainly true that the plain around it is one of the most strategically crucial and environmentally favourable regions of the northern Levant. At about this latitude the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges and the rift valley which they enclose, the Beqac, have been disrupted by tectonic forces (Fig. 1.4). The coastal range is terminated by the valley of the Nahr el-Kebir (the classical Eleutherus), forming the plain of cAkkar, before rising again (though to a somewhat lower altitude) and continuing northwards as the Jebel el-Ansariyya (or Jebel el-cAlawiyin). Meanwhile, the inland range, the Anti-Lebanon, bears sharply away to the east as a low range of hills and crosses the Syrian desert to die away as the Jebel el-Bishri, overlooking the Euphrates valley. As for the rift valley, this widens into the Homs plain, a structural basin filled with lacustrine marls, and then continues northwards as the Ghab, flanked on the west by the Jebel el-Ansariyya and on the east by the Jebel ez-Zawiyah and the poorly defined edge of the Syro-Arabian plateau. Through the rift flow the only two major rivers of the region, the Litani and the Orontes, rising a few kilometres from each other near Bacalbek and then flowing in opposite directions, the Litani towards the south and the Orontes towards the north, both discharging eventually into the Mediterranean some 300 km apart.

    Fig. 1.1. Map of the Levant, showing main sites.

    Fig. 1.2. Contour plan of Tell Nebi Mend (surveyed and drawn by C. Davey, 1975–1979).

    These mountain ranges and the enclosed rift valley constitute the northern part of the so-called Levantine Corridor, the narrow (never more than 100 km wide) strip of land bordering the eastern end of the Mediterranean, stretching for about 600 km from Anatolia to Sinai and separating the sea from the steppe. Despite the frequent presence until fairly recently of marshy terrain and dense vegetation close to the rivers themselves, the Beqac and the Ghab provide a comparatively easy north–south route, less constricted and discontinuous than the narrow coastal plain to the west and better provided with water than the inland route – today roughly the line of the main Aleppo–Damascus highway – along the edge of the steppe further east. It was along this north–south route that, in ancient times, major cultural, ethnic, military and political movements took place between the great Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Anatolian centres of civilisation.

    However, for east–west communications the northern part of the Levantine Corridor forms a considerable barrier. The Lebanon mountains, rising in places to over 3000 m, and the Ansariyya to 1600 m, are rugged and are still today largely covered with dense forests which, although formerly a valuable and heavily exploited natural resource, present a serious obstacle to human traffic between the coast and the hinterland, often in the past impeding the flow of trade and of cultural and political influences between the Mediterranean world and Asia. It is no coincidence that, for example, in the 14th and 13th centuries BC relatively few Greek and Cypriot exports found their way beyond the coastal mountains, or that in the 12th century AD the Crusaders never secured a firm footing east of the Orontes. Only in a few places are there breaks in the mountains sufficient to provide reasonably easy natural passage between the coast and the interior. One such is in the far north, where the Orontes turns west to traverse the plain of Antioch (the cAmuq) and reach its exit into the sea; another, much more tortuous, is 300 km further south where the south-flowing Litani also breaks westwards through to the coast; while a third is halfway between the two, and is provided by the valley of the Nahr el-Kebir and the plains of cAkkar and Homs – the Homs–Tripoli Gap.

    Fig. 1.3. French aerial photograph (reproduced from Mesnil du Buisson 1935–38).

    The Homs plain is thus a crossroads and a meeting place for peoples, cultures and ideas. But although great benefits can accrue from such a position so can great dangers. Meeting places are not necessarily peaceful, and the historical information we have suggests that the plain suffered as well as prospered from its strategic position, often forming a disputed frontier between the northern and southern parts of the Corridor and an area of contention between the surrounding powers. The ongoing conflict between Egypt, Mitanni and Hatti during the 15th–13th centuries BC, which affected Tell Nebi Mend directly on a number of occasions, as we shall see below, is the best known but not the only instance of this. For example, it was just a few kilometres away, at Riblah, that in 608 BC the pharaoh Necho II established his headquarters while attempting to defend western Syria from the encroaching Babylonians, and, twenty years later, when the balance of power in the Near East was reversed, Riblah fulfilled the same role for Nebuchadnezzar, at the beginning of the Babylonian invasion which eventually led to the fall of Jerusalem. A few centuries later still, during the wars between the Successors of Alexander the Great, the Eleutherus river – the Nahr el-Kebir – formed the de facto boundary between the territory claimed by the Seleucids in the north and that claimed by the Ptolemies in the south; and when, in 221 BC, Antiochus III marshalled his army prior to marching south to confront Ptolemy V it was from Laodicea ad Libanum that he launched his offensive. Nothing is known of the circumstances, military or otherwise, attending the foundation of Homs (Roman Emesa) itself, but it is certain that the town escaped violent destruction by the Muslim Arabs in the 7th century AD only because of the peaceful capitulation of its inhabitants. Four centuries later it was, uncharacteristically, spared by the invading Crusaders, who, despite having gained easy access to the Ghab in the north from Antioch and moved south along the Orontes, turned west when they reached the plain to arrive at the Mediterranean near Tripoli, presumably having decided to secure the coastal cities before moving on to Jerusalem. However, in the following century Homs found itself on the front line between the Muslim rivals Zangi, ruler of Aleppo, and Buri, ruler of Damascus, one episode in the confrontation being the sack of the city itself and the devastation of the surrounding plain in AD 1135. The 13th century AD saw further conflicts here, in 1281 and 1260, when the Ayyubid sultan Baybars defeated the invading Mongols, thus contributing to the eventual expulsion of these Central Asian invaders from the Levant; while in the 19th century AD the events of the 13th century BC around Tell Nebi Mend might have seemed to have been repeating themselves when, just a few kilometres away at Qusair, the Egyptian army of Muhammad Ali Pasha defeated the Ottoman army of Sultan Mahmud II, thus preparing the way for the annexation of Syria. The plain of Homs did indeed form an important crossroads, but was often also a turbulent battlefield.

    Fig. 1.4. Geomorphology of the northern Levant (after Weulerrse 1940, fig. 3).

    It cannot, of course, be supposed that the first settlers at the site – who on present evidence were there shortly after 7000 BC (see Part II, below) – had in mind such geo-political considerations as those mentioned above; they would have been more concerned with its more local attractions. Like the Beqac and the Ghab, it is today well endowed with rich riverine soils, excellent for intensive agriculture, particularly if irrigation is practised, while the higher river terraces are eminently suited to fruit and cereal production. But whereas the Beqac and the Ghab lie in the rain-shadow of the coastal mountains, here the winter cyclones from the Mediterranean are able to penetrate further inland than they would otherwise, thus ensuring the plain a relatively high average annual rainfall – 460 mm at Homs compared, for example, with 343 mm just 50 km further north along the Orontes at Hama (Wirth 1911, 92 and Karte 3). The prevailing westerly winds also have the beneficial effect of tempering the summer temperatures, which, while less important for farming, certainly adds to the attraction of the area for human habitation. And with easy access to east and west, unlike the Beqac and the Ghab, communities on the plain can readily exploit the diverse natural resources of the coast and the mountains, such as fish, timber and minerals, as well as those of the steppe, primarily the products of pastoralism.

    The extent to which climatic conditions at Tell Nebi Mend in 7000 BC were different from or similar to those pertaining today is difficult to say; it is a problem on which more local palaeoecological research similar to that carried out recently at the other major site on the Homs plain, Tell Mishrifeh, ancient Qatna (Morandi Bonacossi 2007), needs to be done. There is, of course, no doubt that fluctuations, some of them significant, in temperature and precipitation have occurred across the Near East over the centuries, but it is increasingly being recognised that small sub-regions and even individual localities and communities were not necessarily affected by, or reacted to, such fluctuations in the same way. As Bradbury, in her recent comprehensive review of the palaeoclimate of the Homs region, has stated: ‘climate change cannot be seen as an overarching phenomenon which imposes its conditions on human populations, but instead needs to be viewed as a series of reciprocal relationships between the elements of environment, hydrology, geology, climatology, human adaptation and social, economic and political change’ (Bradbury 2011, 115). With regard to Tell Nebi Mend, its situation between two perennial watercourses and its proximity to a range of local environments must have shielded it from the worst effects of climatic deterioration. As the climate changed the rivers may well have moved a little closer or further away, the edge of the steppe in the east may have advanced or retreated, and the tree line in the Anti-Lebanon may have moved lower or higher, but the local environment may well have remained essentially the same. If this is so, then the natural vegetation to be expected in the vicinity of the site before human intervention would be open deciduous forest, thinning out eastwards to forest-steppe and savannah, with dense riverine vegetation and gallery forest along the watercourses. It is worth noting in this connection that local forests are several times mentioned in the ancient texts describing Ramesses’ battle, and that trees are shown in the representation of the city at the time of its capture by Seti I a generation earlier (Fig. 1.5(a)). Although the analysis of the palaeobotanical data from the recent excavations is not yet complete, remains of cypress, cedar, olive, pistachio, oak, juniper, pine, walnut and zizyphus, as well as of club rushes and sedges, have already been identified from the earliest known levels of occupation dating to the early 7th millennium BC, and are presumably representative of the natural Holocene vegetation (for details see Chapter 8, below). As for the fauna, these same early deposits have provided evidence for the presence of wild cattle, pigs, equids, deer and gazelle (Chapter 7, below), while it can be assumed that bears, still extant in the region until a few years ago, and elephants, known to have been hunted by the 18th Dynasty pharaohs in the Ghab, were already to be found.¹ It is noticeable that the water-meadows along the Orontes today support a dense cover of grasses and herbs, in spite of intensive grazing. If this type of vegetation was present in antiquity – and there seems no reason why it should not have been – the area would have had considerable potential for cattle- and, especially, horse-breeding; the latter, in particular, might help to explain its ancient military importance, since areas where mares and foals, essential for armies, can be grazed intensively throughout the year are not at all common in the Levant.

    Fig. 1.5. Representations of Kadesh on the Egyptian reliefs.

    Tell Nebi Mend is not, of course, the only ancient site on the Homs plain; many of the more obvious ones have long been known (Dussaud 1927, 103–15), while others have been discovered more recently by archaeological surveys (Kuschke et al. 1976; Kuschke 1979; Philip et al. 2002; 2005; Tubb and Dorrell forthcoming). All of them must have benefited from the favourable strategic and environmental features of the region, but it can be safely assumed that the special feature which led to Tell Nebi Mend eventually becoming the site of one of the most important cities in the region was the special degree of protection provided by the two rivers between which it is located. Although by themselves these could never have been a serious barrier to organised armies (as later history shows), they would from the beginning have proved an effective deterrent to small bands of marauders and predatory animals. In later times the distinction they gave to the settlement is shown not only by their prominence in the Egyptian representations of the town of Qadesh at the time of the battle (Fig. 1.5 (b–d)) but also – and perhaps more remarkably – by the fact that as late as the 3rd century AD coins of Caracalla from the Laodicean mint still showed the Tyche of the city flanked by the two rivers, represented by swimmers (Fig. 1.6).²

    Unfortunately it is difficult today to establish and analyse ancient settlement patterns in the immediate vicinity of Tell Nebi Mend since, even if the climate has not changed very much, the topography has, in small but perhaps locally significant ways. For example, in recent decades irrigation and drainage have removed most of the wide expanses of water just to the east of the site that were shown on the plan made by Koldewey in 1890 (see Fig. 1.10) and on a hitherto unpublished early photograph of the mound taken by Gertrude Bell during her visit 15 years later (Fig. 1.7; see Bell 1907, 175–6); today the river is closely confined to its bed (Fig. 1.8). We may also note the disappearance of the narrow arm of the Homs Lake which the French map mentioned above shows extending about 3 km upstream from its southern shore to almost the foot of the tell (for convenience see Calvet and Geyer 1992, fig. 8), although there is no indication of this on the earlier sketch maps of the region made by Conder in 1881 and Gautier in 1893 (see below and Figs 1.9 and 1.11), and it has disappeared again today. Earlier changes to the landscape were brought about by the lake itself. While this is universally acknowledged to be in origin a natural feature created by a lava outflow blocking the river (Weulersse 1940, 17), and recent geomorphological research suggests that it existed in one form or another as early as the 2nd millennium BC (Philip et al. 2002, 14), it is certain that at some time an artificial dam was built on the line of the outflow and was rebuilt and repaired on a number of later occasions (Brossé 1923, 234–40; Calvet and Geyer 1992, 27). Such an artificial dam would clearly have affected the size and shape of the original lake and the topography of the surrounding terrain, and it is therefore unfortunate that its date is unknown (estimates range from the 14th century BC to the 3rd century AD (Calvet and Geyer 1992, 33–8)), as are the dates of any subsequent repairs and alterations, apart from the latest, which took place in 1938 (Calvet and Geyer 1992, 27). It has often been observed that there are five or six small islands in the lake (marked ‘tell’ on the French) map, which are apparently artificial mounds (Calvet and Geyer 1992, fig. 8). One of these, Tell et-Tin, was investigated at the end of the 19th century and revealed evidence of occupation – though not necessarily continuous – from the prehistoric to the Roman periods (see below). Nothing is known of the other mounds, nor whether there are additional archaeological sites concealed by the waters, and this possible – indeed, probable – incompleteness of the data must be taken into account when ancient settlement patterns on the plain are considered.

    Fig. 1.6. Coin of Caracalla from the Laodicea mint (courtesy of Dr Jack Nurpetlian).

    Fig. 1.7. Photograph of Tell Nebi Mend from the east taken in 1905 by Gertrude Bell (courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University).

    Fig. 1.8. The Orontes east of Tell Nebi Mend in 1975.

    Archaeology in the northern Levantine Corridor: the research context for excavations at Tell Nebi Mend

    Despite the important role the Levantine Corridor must have played in the early cultural, economic and political history of Western Asia, much of it was, until fairly recently, largely neglected by archaeologists. Only in the southern third – historic Palestine, the Holy Land – was this not true. Here, right from the beginnings of Near Eastern archaeology in the early 19th century those many scholars whose primary interests lay in biblical antiquities and history rather than in Egyptology or Assyriology flocked in ever increasing numbers to pursue their research. In the north it was different: here it seemed that only the monuments of such classical sites as Bacalbek and Palmyra could compete with the magnificent ruins of ancient Egypt, Assyria and Babylon for the attention of scholars. This imbalance between north and south was remarked upon as early as 1922 by the French archaeologist Sebastian Ronzevalle, who, in the course of his pioneering investigation of Tell Mishrifeh (ancient Qatna) on the central Orontes, wrote:

    Jusqu’ici, la haute antiquité syrienne est restée à peu près inconnue … tout ce qu’on a trouvé dans la Syrie propre remonte rarement au-delà de la période hellénistique … Et cependant l’on s’acharne à l’envi, durant des années, sur trois ou quatre sites palestiniens, pour l’excavation desquels on engage de grosses sommes, sans qu’on ait jamais pu s’avouer jusqu’ici que le résultat répondait à l’effort. Loin de moi, bien entendu, la pensée de désapprouver ce qui se fait en Palestine; le sentiment particulier, qui préside aux entreprises archéologiques lancées sur ce sol, justifie amplement les sacrifices consentis … Et peut-on oublier, que, si le peuple d’Israël fut moralement très grand, il fut, par contre, très petit et par sa civilisation matérielle et par sa rôle politique? De deux chantiers de fouilles établis, l’un au cœur de la Judée, l’autre dans la Syrie centrale et fonctionnant simultanément, on peut dire, presque sans paradoxe, que c’est le seconde qui est peut-être appelé à fournir le plus de renseignements historiques ou archéologiques sur la Palestine elle-même. (Ronzevalle 1911–21, 123–4)

    One does not have to agree with all of Ronzevalle’s comments to recognise the essential truth of his observations. They were still valid a generation later when, in 1948, Schaeffer published his monumental Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie de l’Asie Occidentale, in which he was able to marshal evidence from less than half the number of excavated sites in Lebanon and western Syria that he was from Palestine. Nor did the resumption of archaeological activity in the two decades following the Second World War do much to improve the situation: if anything the imbalance became greater, with the dramatic development of ‘national’ or ‘heritage’ archaeology in the new state of Israel. In the north, although work was soon resumed at coastal sites such as Ras Shamra and Byblos, it was some time before major expeditions began to examine new sites, notably Tell Sukas (1958) and Tell Kazel (1962) on the coastal plain, and Tell Ghasil (1956) and Kamid el-Loz (1963) in the Beqac. Further inland – and arguably not strictly speaking in the Corridor itself – work commenced at Tell Rifac at in the far north in 1956 and at Tell Mardikh, south-east of Aleppo, in 1963. The dramatic impetus given to Syrian archaeology later in the 1960s by the international salvage project preceding the construction of the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates had relatively little direct effect on archaeological activity in the west of the country, the newly excavated sites all being on or close to that river, in what can perhaps be termed the ‘Mesopotamian Corridor’. Since it naturally took time for the new data provided by this fieldwork to become disseminated, it comes as no surprise that syntheses of western Syrian archaeology in the Bronze and Iron Ages, such as those of Drower and Kenyon in the first volume of the new Cambridge Ancient History, published in 1971, still relied entirely on the evidence already assembled by Schaeffer almost a quarter of a century previously, as Kenyon acknowledged (Kenyon 1971a, 583–94; Drower 1971, 333–51). And it is noteworthy that even in a very recent handbook in English entitled The Archaeology of Syria (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003) very few of the many sites by then known in the northern Levant other than those already mentioned appear in the index or on the distribution maps.

    The Tell Nebi Mend project

    It was in the 1960s that the University of London’s Tell Nebi Mend Project had its conception. Having recently begun teaching at the Institute of Archaeology on the pre-classical Archaeology of Palestine (shortly to be renamed the Archaeology of the Levant), the writer soon realised not only the difficulty of fully understanding the subject – except perhaps in its narrowest definition as ‘Biblical Archaeology’ – without taking cognisance of evidence from the region immediately to the north, but also the paucity and unreliability of that evidence. Apart from the main coastal sites, Byblos and Ras Shamra, and Tell Atchana and the other cAmuq sites at the far northern end of the Corridor, only Hama on the middle Orontes had produced a long stratified sequence of material such as was necessary to establish a cultural chronology for the interior; and the Danish excavations there (from 1932 until 1938) were not without their problems of interpretation, as witnessed, for example, by the profound disagreements over the dating of the Middle and Late Bronze Age strata between Ingholt, the excavator, Fugmann, the author of the final report, and Schaeffer (Schaeffer 1948, 108–16; Parr 1968, 35 and nn. 108 and 113; Bourke 1993, 263–4).

    It was in the hope of helping to rectify this situation by investigating a site in southern or central Syria that the writer, in collaboration with the then Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, Crystal M. Bennett, and with the financial support of the Palestine Exploration Fund, undertook, early in 1964, a reconnaissance in the region south of Damascus, a region chosen because it was reasonably accessible from the School’s base in Jerusalem and because it was considered that a site here would provide a convenient first step towards filling the archaeological lacuna between central and northern Syria and the better-known Israel and Jordan. A methodical systematic survey was not contemplated, since such surveys are useful only if the artefacts collected – mostly potsherds – can be dated with reasonable accuracy, and in a relatively unknown region such accuracy can be achieved only through the prior excavation of a well-stratified site with a clear succession of occupational remains ideally spanning a long period of time – in other words, a multi-period tell. It is true that one suitable mound had already been tested by a Swedish expedition in 1953 – Tell es-Salihiyeh, a few kilometres east of central Damascus – where occupation from at least the Middle Bronze Age to the Roman period was found in one restricted area of excavation; but the work here had lasted only four months, there were few finds, and the final report was correspondingly slight and tentative (von der Osten 1956). Moreover, Salihiyeh was rapidly being encroached upon by the suburbs of the city, presenting logistical problems. The Swedish archaeologists had, however, identified another mound, Tell Deir Khabiyeh, about 20 km south-west of the capital, with surface sherds of Middle Bronze and later periods and surface indications of basalt walls probably representing fortifications (von der Osten 1956, 13, 77, 82); most importantly, the site was very accessible and of a size which suggested that useful work could be done even by an expedition with only limited resources, which were all that could be expected while the BSAJ was still primarily engaged in Kenyon’s excavations at Jerusalem. With the encouragement of the Department of Antiquities in Damascus an application for a digging permit was therefore made and preparations begun to commence work in the autumn of 1966. However, as is often the case, these preliminaries took longer than expected, and an actual permit had still not been granted by the beginning of 1967.

    In June of that year the political situation changed dramatically. War in the Golan Heights broke out, and very soon the town of Quneitra, less than 50 km from Deir Khabiyeh, was largely destroyed and occupied by the Israeli army, and remained inaccessible for years to come. The entire region suffered the effects of an uneasy truce, and all hope of carrying out archaeological research there had to be abandoned. Nor were the prospects of working elsewhere in western Syria now very promising, though for a very different reason. After 1967 the main focus of archaeological activity in the country, by both local and foreign expeditions, was understandably on the salvage operations on the Euphrates already mentioned. These were absorbing most of the time and resources of the authorities, and the chances of obtaining a permit to excavate except on one of the threatened sites were reported to be poor. Nevertheless, enquiries continued to be made and during informal contacts over the next few years it became clear that, in fact, the authorities would consider favourably an application from a British institution for work on a site outside the Euphrates region. Two major sites in the Homs region were suggested: Tell Nebi Mend and Tell Mishrifeh. The offer of the latter was soon withdrawn, however, since the government’s intention of moving the modern village from the site prior to any excavation had not yet been achieved. Tell Nebi Mend remained an attractive possibility. It had the advantage over Deir Khabiyeh not only of having a longer sequence of occupation, proved by previous excavations (see below), but also – and more interestingly – of having been often mentioned in written sources and thus providing an opportunity to consider the question of the extent to which political events were, or were not, reflected in the archaeological record. It was, however, a much larger site than Deir Khabiyeh, and its investigation would require considerably more resources. Nevertheless, the opportunity provided by the Syrian authorities seemed too good to be missed, and it was decided to consider the possibility of a joint expedition with another sponsor. Following various unsuccessful approaches to a number of institutions (including the University of Mississippi, at the suggestion of Dr Frances James, an authority

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