On Tuesday, August 2, nineteen small objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will arrive in Egypt. The agreement to return the objects was negotiated in November 2010 when Zahi Hawass was Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, a post now held by Mohamed Abdel Maksoud. The objects come from the tomb of Tutankhamun and were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 20th century from the estate of Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb.

The story is being reported in several outlets, including here and here and here.

HT: Jack Sasson

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Unreported Heritage News reports on a lion statue discovered at Tell Tayinat. The excavation season began June 21 and will continue through August. The basalt statue is 1.5 meters tall and weighs 2 tons and depicts a seated, roaring lion. So far, it seems only to have been reported in the Turkish media, and so we rely on images and Google Translate to sketch out some of the story.

The Tayinat Archaeological Project official website has some small photos at the bottom of their homepage. The dating of the statue is 9th-8th century B.C.

Turkish Journal has a still photograph of the statue being moved. (The Google translation is kind of dicey.)

Heberler has a five minute video of the lion being moved to the Antakya museum. At about 3:28 in the video, Timothy Harrison, the director of the Tayinat Archaeological Project, talks about the find to Turkish reporters via an interpreter. He states that they are excavating beneath the new temple which was discovered in 2008 (where the Esarhaddon treaty tablet was found). The lion apparently came from these earlier levels beneath the temple.

HT: Jack Sasson

UPDATE (Aug 9): The University of Toronto has now issued a press release on the lion statue.

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In earlier posts (here and here), we noted plans to renew excavations at the site of Carchemish, perhaps even as early as this year. The ancient city straddles the modern Turkey-Syria border with the citadel and inner town in Turkey and most of the outer town in Syria.

A recent article at Antiquity’s Project Gallery describes ongoing work on the Syrian side of Carchemish. Since 2006, Tony Wilkinson, a specialist in landscape archaeology, along with Edgar Peltenburg, has been conducting surveys of the Carchemish region as part of the Land of Carchemish (Syria) Project. In 2009, that project has expanded to include the site of Carchemish itself with the initiation of the Carchemish Outer Town Project. The Antiquity article provides a description and preliminary report on the 2009 and 2010 seasons of the Carchemish Outer Town Project. The project has been conducting surface surveys, photographing features, and utilizing remote sensing data to map out the site.

We determined that the outer town ramparts were much more substantial than Woolley had surmised….Artefacts collected during 2009 and 2010 indicate a dominance of ceramics contemporaneous with Iron Age 2 levels at other sites in the region…Most parallel types appear in later eighth- and seventh-century contexts on these sites…The main phase of occupation was later than that suggested in the original excavation reports; our material suggests that it derives mainly from the time when the city was under Assyrian control, namely after their installation of a governor in 717 BC until the conquest of the city by the Babylonians in 605 BC. The surface ceramics imply that the Assyrians were responsible for the enlargement of the city, and that Carchemish was more significant in that period than has been previously assumed. Evidence of occupation in the periods preceding the Iron Age consists of a handful of sherds of possibly Middle Bronze Age date. The post-Iron Age ceramics are represented by small amounts of Hellenistic and Roman wares, making it difficult to determine the scale of the settlement in these periods.

See the Antiquity article for photographs, maps and more details about the project.

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Aren Maeir reports today on the Tell es-Safi/Gath blog that a two-horned altar was discovered about one-and-a-half weeks ago at Tell es-Safi. It was found in a destruction level dated to the 9th century and attributed to Hazael, the king of Damascus.

1) It is the earliest stone altar from Philistia, a precursor of the many stone altars that are known from 7th century Tel Miqne-Ekron.

2) It is one of the largest altars known (save for the Tel Sheva altar [which though is made of many stones] and an altar from Ekron which was found out of context).

3) It is one of the earliest such altars from the Iron Age, save for those from Megiddo which are late 10th-9th cent. BCE.

4) It has TWO and not four horns – quite unusual for such altars. This is VERY interesting, since this may very well confirm a theory put forward by our team member Louise Hitchcock that there is a connection between the Minoan/Cypriote “Horns of Consecration” and the horned altars – perhaps brought by the Philistines.

5) Its dimensions are virtually identical to the dimensions of the incense altar in the biblical tabernacle (1X1X2 cubit) in Exodus 30!

6) Quite surprisingly, the back part of the altar, and part of the top is unfinished! While the back part might have been “built-in” to a niche behind it (and this could explain the unfinished parts) the top is hard to explain.

7) No evidence of burning or residues were found on top of the altar, although a very nice Cypriote “Black on Red” flask was found right near it. Perhaps it originally stood on top of the altar!

8) Surrounding the altar we found large concentrations of various types of vessels and several concentrations of astragali.

For more details and several photos of the altar’s discovery, read Aren’s full announcement.

UPDATE: Joe Lauer sends along notice that the Foundation Stone website has a photo showing the newly discovered altar from another angle. There is also information about a radio interview with Aren Maeir on the LandMinds show, set to broadcast on Wednesday.

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In an earlier post, we mentioned a dispute between Turkey and Germany over a gate sphinx which had been excavated at the Hittite capital of Hattusa and which is now on display in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism had threatened to withdraw Germany’s permit to excavate Hattusa if Germany did not return the sphinx. Previous requests by Turkey had been rejected, but now it seems Germany is willing to discuss the return of the sphinx. You can read more here.

Iran has “cut ties” with the Louvre, according to this report. The Louvre did not meet a deadline to decide which Persian objects in its holdings it would loan to Iran for exhibition. The same article makes mention of the Cyrus Cylinder which the British Museum loaned to Iran. The Cylinder was supposed to be returned in January, but the British Museum has agreed to extend the loan for an additional three months (see here).

Saudi Arabia has been showing 300 objects, including pre-Islamic artifacts, from its cultural heritage in an international exhibition named “Roads of Arabia.” We made mention of the exhibition here. A lengthy article (for the web, at least) in Aramco World gives some historical background to the exhibition. “Roads of Arabia” has already shown at the Louvre and in Barcelona. According to the article, the exhibition “will visit St. Petersburg, Berlin and Chicago through 2013.” (The map which accompanies the article is interesting. I cannot determine what scheme was used for labeling countries. Some modern states are labeled, such as Yemen, Qatar, and Kuwait. Other countries are not labeled, such as Iran and Israel. Turkey is labeled “Minor Asia.”)

HT: Jack Sasson

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The site of Carchemish is located on the Euphrates River, straddling the Turkey-Syria border. The first excavations in 1878-1881 were conducted by the British consul in Aleppo, Patrick Henderson.

The main excavations at the site, however, took place in 1911-1914 and 1920. The first season was directed by D. G. Hogarth and R. Campbell Thompson. Subsequent seasons were directed by Sir C. Leonard Woolley with the assistance of T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and, in the final year, with the assistance of P. L. O. Guy. The work was interrupted both by World War I (1914-1918) and by the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). After the Turkish War of Independence, the modern borders were established, and it became impossible to excavate Carchemish any further.

Carchemish, orthostat in the British Museum with relief of the Storm-god.

Now, 91 years later, work is underway to resume excavations at the ancient site. We remarked on this before, but an online news article now gives additional details. According to a piece in Hurriyet Daily News, the renewed excavations will be conducted by Italian and Japanese archaeologists and are set to begin sometime this year. In preparation for excavations, a contractor had to clear 1,200 landmines from the site. During the mine-clearing, some coins and other objects were retrieved from the site and turned over to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

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