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Excavations near Antioch in 1936

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Leonard Woolley
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Extract

In the spring of 1935 I was sent by the Trustees of the British Museum to North Syria to look for a site for excavation. The object which I had in view was to trace the connexions, if such existed, between the civilization of Minoan Crete and that of the Asiatic mainland, and the conditions required by such theoretical intercourse limited my investigations to a relatively small area. Mycenaean and sub-Mycenaean remains are, of course, not uncommon in South Syria and Palestine, but no excavations there have produced anything of Minoan date. If commerce brought the Cretans to this coast, the influence resulting from it must have been largely one-sided, for Palestine was always a poor country culturally speaking, and South Syria offered no more than a local market; its civilization was confined to the coastal belt, and the hinterland of the Syrian desert cut off all direct intercourse with the great centres of the East. North Syria was clearly indicated: it was the part of the coast most easily reached by coasting-vessels (Mount Casius is visible from Cyprus), and it was the meeting-place of the Hittite and Mesopotamian civilizations, either or both of which might have had Aegean contacts. Here again the choice was limited. Commerce demands a sheltered anchorage for shipping and good trade-routes to the inland markets. In North Syria the coast is formed by a range of mountains whose flanks drop for the most part precipitously to the sea; harbours are small and few, and passes across the mountain ranges are extraordinarily difficult; in fact, only two are at all practicable. In the extreme north the Gulf of Alexandretta affords good shelter in most weathers, as an open roadstead, and at its southern end at Arsus there is a little rocky harbour which has been artificially enlarged and improved. Arsus is certainly an ancient site, though so deeply overlaid by Roman remains as to give little encouragement to the excavator; but from it the only road inland was by the steep and none too easy pass of Beilan, and to reach that one had to skirt the foothills for a distance of some twenty-five miles, for the flat land bordering the gulf is of recent formation and contains no remains earlier than the Roman. South of the gulf is the forbidding headland of Ras al Khanzir and the cliffs of Gebel Musa, and then comes the shallow arc of the gulf of Sueidia, with the ruins of Seleucia at its northern end, the Orontes mouth towards its southern end, and beyond that the rock-bound coast at the foot of Mount Casius. The only other harbour between this and Latakia, or rather between this and Mina-t-al-Beda, the Leukos Hormos of the Greeks, is Basit, and from Basit, whose remains seem to be exclusively Roman, a break-neck track alone leads up into the wild fastnesses of the hills.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1937 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1937

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References

page 6 note 1 The desertion of the al Mina site was so sudden and so complete that it may well have been the result of an enforced migration of the inhabitants to the new city. It is perhaps significant that one of the two chief gods of Seleucia was Zeus Kasius, who would naturally have been the god of al Mina, but would seem out of place in Seleucia seeing that the city lies at the foot of Gebel Musa, the rival mountain.

page 7 note 1 The mercury was in liquid metallic form. Cinnabar does not seem to be known in this part of Asia, and the metal may have been imported, probably from the great Almaden mines of Spain, for the extraction of gold, which is found in the Melas valley close to our site. I am indebted to Lord Rayleigh for this suggestion.

page 8 note 1 As a rule only isolated fragments, or at most two or three pieces of any one vessel were found, and then these two or three probably fitted together and had been broken after the dispersion of the remainder of the vase; we really found those fragments which had been overlooked when the bulk was carried off to be thrown on the rubbish-dumps.

page 10 note 1 See Gjerstad, Einar, Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus, 1926, and Cypriote Pottery (Paris: Union académique internationale; Classification des céramiques antiques).Google Scholar

page 10 note 2 See my article, ‘La Phénicie et les peuples égéens’, in Syria, ii (1921), 177et seqGoogle Scholar.

page 12 note 1 The parallel is even more close than the above facts suggest. Coins and pottery took us down to about the end of the fourth century B.C., and then there seemed to be a gap, but high up on the talus of rubbish fallen from the hill-side there were buildings of the Christian period, implying a fresh occupation of the site perhaps contemporary with that at Tal Sheikh Yusuf after the destruction of Seleucia. From a building of that age we obtained a set of five large copper vessels in a remarkable state of preservation, and a collection of iron agricultural tools which illustrate very well the methods of farming in North Syria in the Byzantine period.

page 12 note 2 Journal of Hellenic Studies, lvi, 124.

page 13 note 1 For a parallel to this we need look no farther afield than Ras Shamra with its port of Mina-t-al Beda; or for that matter Athens and the Piraeus.

page 13 note 2 Ὑδάτων πóταμοι, is probably the name of the site of Seleucia, a name older than the town; it has been pointed out that the descriptive phrase does apply to the natural features of the place.

page 14 note 1 In this report I have used the spelling Amk; Amuk is equally common and is the form used on the French maps. In modern Arabic Am(u)ki means an inhabitant of the Amk.

page 14 note 2 The character of the Amk towns is sufficiently proved by the discovery of Syro-Hittite reliefs and hieroglyphic inscriptions, e.g. at Taianat, the neighbouring tell to Atchana, and at Jedeideh on the eastern limits of the plain.