Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Ancient Urkesh (Tell Mozan)


Urkesh: The First Hurrian Capital (Buccellati) Volume 60 Number 2 June 1997 Tell Mozan in northeastern Syria has been identified as the important late third millennium Hurrian Capital of Urkesh. "Urkesh" was found at Tell Mozan on three fragmentary impressions of seals belonging to Tupkish King. The monumental building excavated at the margin of Tell Mozan offered its legacy in miniature: hundreds of seal impressions and small and fragile nuggets of clay. These official seals revealed the presence of a distinctive artistic style and a new phenomenon in third millennium art. Further excavations have shown that the building is attached to a much larger architectural complex entering thereby into the nerve center of one of the great seats of power of ancient Syro-Mesopotamia ... 
The Hurri or Hurrian Culture (Kingdom Of Mitanni)
Note: The area is Khanigalbat in loose geographical terms (Excerpt 23) ..... By about 2400 BC the Hurrians had expanded southward from the highlands of Anatolia. They infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River Valley to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. The Hurrians established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. They have been identified at ancient Nuzi and Urkesh and other sites .....
.............


Ugarit (Ras Shamra)
Selected Excerpts on Ugarit
The Neolithic of the Levant
The Mysteries of Ugarit

2nd-millennium BC Canaanite city at modern Ras Shamra near the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Although securely identified as ancient Ugarit only in the 2nd millennium BC the site was occupied from much earlier and the city overlies a series of earlier Bronze Age, Chalcolithic and Neolithic settlements going back to the 7th millennium BC. The city flourished throughout the 2nd millennium but its heyday was in the 15th to 12th ccnturies when it came first under strong Egyptian influence and then under Hittite dominance. At this stage the town walls enclosed circa 20 hectares.
Commodious family houses have been excavated and a number of important public buildings including two temples (one dedicated to Baal and the other to Dagon), a priest's library yielding many sacred texts and a palace with a very large archive of administrative and economic documents. From these we know that Ugarit was a major commercial settlement at this time and must have housed a decidely cosmopolitan community. Not only were there tablets in Akkadian cuneiform - the lingua franca of trade throughout the Near East - but others also using the cuneiform script were in the local language Ugaritic and a few others were in Hurrian; some seal impressions are in Hittite hieroglyphics. Moreover the population of Ugarit may be credited with the development of the first true alphabet: simplified cuneiform signs were used for an alphabet of 32 letters probably in the 15th century BC. The city was destroyed in the early 12th century BC, perhaps by the Sea Peoples ..... (AHSFC)

No comments:

Post a Comment