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Excavations at Atchana-Alalakh, 1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Extract

Owing to the war I was unable to prepare for publication an account of the 1939 excavations at Atchana on which I had read a paper to the Society; the report was begun but never finished. Since then there have been fresh excavations (in the spring of 1946), but as the new work was on a comparatively small scale and was planned as a complement to the 1939 season, even covering in part the same area, it is far better to treat of the results of the two seasons together. I propose therefore in this report to describe the private houses and the Palace of Yarim-Lim, of which the former were entirely and the latter was mainly excavated in 1939, and to reserve for a subsequent report the description of the Temple site discovered in 1939 but thoroughly excavated in 1946, and of the stratigraphical results obtained mostly in the latter season.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1948

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References

page 2 note 1 See Antiq. Journ., vol. xix, no. i, p. 5.

page 3 note 1 Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos, vol. iv, pp. 894, 896.

page 4 note 1 See Antiq. Journ., vol. xviii, no. 1, p. 18.

page 4 note 2 For the foundations of buildings in damp soil a similar technique is sometimes employed in north Syria to-day.

page 8 note 1 Antiq. Journ., vol. xviii, no. 1, p. 16.

page 9 note 1 In 1947 a further wing of the palace was found running out from the west walls of rooms 17 and 22.

page 10 note 1 Note. For the sake of easy reference the rooms are numbered in order from the top left-hand corner; but the description here follows the logical arrange ment of the building.

page 12 note 1 At least, it can be presumed to have done so. With the collapse of the terrace edge the NW. end, nearly one-half, of the passage has disappeared.

page 13 note 1 This looks as if the alteration were made at the same time as that in the entrance-chamber (7), where again the new work had orthostats.

page 14 note 1 i.e. they belonged to the storerooms. As the tablets in room 11 were scattered all over the floor, whereas those in rooms 12 and 13 all lay in a line between the doors, it would appear that all the tablets really belonged to room 11 but that there had been an attempt to salve them when the palace caught fire and that those in rooms 12 and 13 as well as the one in the courtyard had been accidentally dropped in the process.

page 14 note 2 Owing to the war there has been no opportunity of examining and repairing the fragments brought to London; the description given here is taken from the field notes.

page 14 note 3 They were certainly not the columns dividing the main room of the piano nobile since those could not possibly have fallen or been thrown into the position against the wall in which the stones were found.

page 16 note 1 There was a slight pocket in the north corner, not very deep.

page 16 note 2 A fragmentary skull of a small child found here just before the box was recognized probably also belonged to it; it lay immediately above the box at its SE. end.

page 17 note 1 It might be suggested that the fragments of concrete paving found in room 18 came from here, but it is hard to explain why anyone should have been at pains to do that and not to have dug down (if they were treasure-hunters) into the lower filling of the shaft—unless indeed the real treasure of the shaft was only just below the floor and having secured that the robbers knew that there was nothing else worth digging for