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The Treasure of Ziwiye

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Extract

The first account of the discovery of the Treasure of Ziwiye was published in two places by the then Director of Antiquities of the Persian Government, M. André Godard. The first, Le Trésor de Ziwiyè: (Editions de l'Institut Franco-Iranien) gave the text of his lecture to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The other was Le Trésor de Ziwiyè, a beautifully illustrated book published at Haarlem in 1950 by the Iranian Archaeological Service. For these publications we are deeply grateful to M. Godard. I need not describe this collection in detail, only mention that it consists of objects of gold, ivory and bronze of great beauty, variety and interest which were discovered, unfortunately in the course of clandestine excavations, at Ziwiye near Sakkez in Azerbaijan 120 km. south east of Lake Urmia. It is now dispersed, some pieces being in Teheran, others in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, others elsewhere. According to M. Godard, some of the pieces, e.g., those of ivory, are Assyrian work of the ninth-eighth century B.C., and were exported from Assyria to Sakkez. The other objects, in M. Godard's view, belong to the ninth century, or in some cases to the seventh century B.C. The fact that some of these pieces contain motifs and features hitherto regarded as characteristic of Phoenician, or in other cases of Scythian art of the sixth century B.C., is explained by M. Godard by means of a new and striking theory: that we have (except in the case of the ivories, which he considers Assyrian) in these mixed works of art examples of the native art of the kingdom of Mannai, an art which later was appropriated or copied by the immigrating Scythian tribes, who afterwards dispersed it widely, and thereby caused it to be known to the modern world as Scythian. I shall not discuss this theory here, I shall offer only some notes about the dating.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1956 , pp. 111 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1956

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References

page 111 note 1 The basis of this paper was a communication given to the Rencontre Assyriologique in Paris, 1954. (5901).

page 112 note 1 Metropolitan Museum Bulletin, 04 1952, p. 233ffGoogle Scholar.

page 113 ntoe 1 From Hancar, , Eurasia Septentrionalis Antiqua, IX, fig. 22Google Scholar.

page 113 note 2 See Iraq XII, Pt. I, Pls. VI, XX.

page 113 note 3 Ebert, ; Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte 13, pl. 34 BGoogle Scholar. See on this Jacobstal, , Greek. Pins, 74, n. 2Google Scholar.

page 113 note 4 Eurasia Septentrionalis Antiqua, XII.

page 114 note 1 Barnett, & Watson, , Iraq XIV, pt. 2, p. 154Google Scholar.

page 114 note 2 Height 19 cms. Diam. 28–5 cms. Se Ancient Art in American Private Collections) 1954 (Fogg Art Museum) Cambridge, Mass., pt. xxviiiGoogle Scholar.

page 114 note 3 Basitan-i-Shenas (Teheran) 1951, pl. opp. p. 67; cf. pl. opp. p. 70Google Scholar.

page 114 note 4 von Luschan and Andrae Ausgrabungen in Send-schirli V., pl. 57.

page 115 note 1 Woolley, , A.J. VI., 379Google Scholar.

page 115 note 2 Extracts from Sir Leonard Woolley's Publications of the Excavations at Ur, Vol. IX: Neo-Babylonian and Persian Graves and their Contents.

“The graves were dug from floors not all by any means from the same horizontal plane to depths which varied with the whim of the grave-diggers…. The Cassite period merged almost insensibly into the Neo-Babylonian, and there is no obvious reason why the latter should have been distinguished by any innovation … This a priori likelihood is borne out by the facts.

“Type 6 consists of oval larnax burials. The coffin is of clay with straight sides and rounded ends, the bottom flat…. We found two such coffins made of copper (P. 1 and P. 2) …

Note: The Persian copper coffins of graves P.1 and P. 2 were actually inside rough brick vaults.

“The Cassite houses … were razed and above their ruins new buildings on entirely different lines were erected. They are dated by the tablets found with them to the reigns of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar. The houses were re-used and in part re-modelled in Persian times, when the levels of their floors also were raised, and the tablets found in these higher rooms take us down through the Persian age to the twelfth year of Alexander the Great. It is obvious that all graves which are concealed beneath the pavements of the earlier houses and are related to them must be of the late Neo-Babylonian time. All graves which lie above or are cut through those pavements must belong to Persian houses…. There were 27 burials in the square-ended coffins which can safely be assigned to the Persian period and there were 15 inhumation or pot burials whose relation to walls and floors made it seem certain that they too were Persian. Thirty graves lay so far below the Neo-Babylonian floors that in the field notes they were confidently labelled Neo-Babylonian.

“All that can be said is that already by the beginning of the Neo-Babylonian period glazed clay vessels are fairly common in the Ur graves and in the Persian period they are very numerous.

“One thing which distinguishes the Persian from the Neo-Babylonian graves is the common occurrence in the former of the bow fibula”.

page 115 note 3 The catalogue of contents is:—

P.1. (C.G.I) glazed pot, type 99 (Fig. 3): beads, U.6676 (Pl. XVII); gold ear-ring, U.6677 (Pl. XVII): two fibulae (U.6679), bone comb.

V.2. (C.G.2) glazed pot, U.6667 (Fig. 4): beads, U.6678 (Pl. XVII): gold ear-rings U. 6680–1 (Pl. XVII): mirror U.6668; 2 bow fibulae U.6683 (Pl. XVII); bangle; copper bowl, gadrooned, U.6666; wooden bowlU.6665 and box and basket (the wooden bowl was oval (0·065m × 0·045m.) with two lug handles, but was too perished for even a drawing; the box and basket were represented by only three fragments.

It must be noted that Sir Leonard Woolley in a letter to me (15.xi.53) doubts the attribution of these coffins to a pre-Achaemenid period: “As regards date: every coffin with one flat and one rounded end that could be dated by external evidence—i.e., by relation to dated buildings—belonged to the Persian period. (The type runs on till the fourth century B.C. as is shown by our having seal-impressions and casts of Attic coins (see Legrain, , Ur Ex. Vol. X)Google Scholar.) Each of the copper coffins contained two fibulae. We found fibulae very commonly in Persian graves (i.e., coffins of this shape) but only two examples in coffins attributed to the late Babylonian period. You must disregard my first impressions of date which were due to the coffin-shaft being dug down into Kassite remains—so I put them to the next period: this must be revised in the light of later evidence, and the position of the coffins only means that the grave being an important one was set rather deeper down than usual.

“This is as much as I can say, but it would seem to me rash to give the two coffins an earlier date than Persian. The typological evidence for Ur is very strong and would scarcely be affected by different evidence on other sites”.

page 116 note 1 Syria IV, 194 to 201Google Scholar.

page 116 note 2 Reuther, Merkez, pls. 62–72.