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<< Other Photo Pages >> Urkesh - Ancient Village or Settlement in Syria

Submitted by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 24 November 2010  Page Views: 6879

Site WatchSite Name: Urkesh Alternative Name: Urkish, Tell Mozan, Tall Mozan
Country: Syria
NOTE: This site is 37.172 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Amuda
Latitude: 37.056944N  Longitude: 40.997222E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
2 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4

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External Links:

Urkesh
Urkesh submitted by bat400 : View of Tell Mozan (northeast Syria), ancient Urkesh, from the north. The dighouse can be seen in the middle of the tell. 10 June 2005, work by: Zoeperkoe. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. (Vote or comment on this photo)
An ancient settlement possibly founded by Hurrians dating from the 4th millennium BCE and abandoned in about 1350 BCE.

It was taken over by Amorite Mari in the early 2nd millennium BCE.

The Urkesh website.

Note: Archaeologist, villagers protect ancient Syrian city as civil war rages.
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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 21.4km ENE 75° Girnavaz* Ancient Village or Settlement
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"Urkesh" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Archaeologist, villagers protect ancient Syrian city as civil war rages by bat400 on Monday, 02 June 2014
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Almost 20 years ago, UCLA archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati and his team identified the ancient city of Urkesh in northeastern Syria as a site of an important religious and political center more than 4,000 years ago.

The discovery received international media attention and acclaim for Buccellati (Near Eastern Languages and Culture and history) and his wife, Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati (UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.) Buccellati had hoped that the next 20 years would lead to even more discoveries at Urkesh as well as the development of an archaeological park to welcome and educate visitors to the site and preserve a national treasure.

But civil war, has put those plans on hold. Because of the eruption of violence in Syria, the Buccellatis haven’t been able to visit the site since December 2011. They became among the last foreign archaeologists to visit Syria.

"The reason we cannot go back is tragic," said Buccellati about the violence between the Assad government and opposition groups that has taken the lives of at least 120,000 and displaced more than 6 million people from their homes. "It is devastating to see what is happening in Syria."

"Our particular area is more protected, but there have still been battles within 60 kilometers (37 miles) in either direction so the area is potentially at risk," said Buccellati,
His efforts to win the cooperation of the local people who now serve as guardians of the site are documented in a recent report, "In the Eye of the Storm," that details how a plan to protect Urkesh from crumbling unfolded there.

Six Syrian villagers, whom Buccellati is constantly in touch with via cell phones, e-mail and Skype, work at the site. One of their main duties is protecting the site’s centuries-old mud brick walls from rain and snow. So far, the damage to the mud brick has been minimal because the workers have covered the site with metal trellises and tarps.

UCLA and Gulfsands, a London-based oil company that operates in Syria, help fund the villagers’ employment.
"What impresses me is the fact that there is no sense of fatigue on their part," Buccellati said. "After three years of worrying about mud brick walls and one thing and another, in the midst of what the country is going through, you'd think that they might say, ‘Let’s forget about it.’
"Instead, they are becoming more and more aware of the significance and impact of their work."

In 1995, after more than eight years of excavating the modern city of Tell Mozan located some 400 miles east of Damascus, Buccellati and his colleagues identified the city as the site of ancient Urkesh, a major hub of ancient Near Eastern civilization known in mythology as the home of a primordial god. “The identification of Urkesh is analogous to knowing that Rome is in central Italy and then finding Rome,” Buccellati said at the time. “Urkesh now has a geographical as well as a mythical location.”

Urkesh, one of the largest known archaeological sites from the third millennium B.C. in the Near East, housed monumental public buildings, including a large temple. It was the main religious center, as well as a political capital, of the ancient Hurrians. Little was known about Urkesh and ancient Hurrian civilization prior to Buccellati’s excavation.

Prior to 2011, Buccellati and his team had found some artifacts that potentially could reveal that Urkesh was an important city even earlier in time. "We were really eager to go back to explore this very ancient dimension of the city," he said.

Also put on hold for now are plans to develop "The Gates of Urkesh," the archaeological park for visitors. The villagers have embraced the idea because it would stimulate the city’s economy, Buccellati said, and have never lost hope that it may one day be built.

The park would include a gift shop featuring dolls, knitwear and other items made by local women. Villagers are already making items in a workshop in two buildings that a local

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Research finds crisis in Syria has Mesopotamian precedent by bat400 on Monday, 23 September 2013
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Research carried out at the University of Sheffield has revealed intriguing parallels between modern day and Bronze-Age Syria as the Mesopotamian region underwent urban decline, government collapse, and drought.
Dr Ellery Frahm from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology made the discoveries by studying stone tools of obsidian, razor-sharp volcanic glass, crafted in the region about 4,200 years ago.

Dr Frahm used artefacts unearthed from the archaeological site of Tell Mozan (Urkesh) to trace what happened to trade and social networks when Bronze-Age Syrian cities were abandoned in the wake of a regional government collapse and increasing drought due to climate shifts.

“Unfortunately,” explained Dr Frahm, “the situation four thousand years ago has striking similarities to today. Some archaeologists and historians contend that the Akkadian Empire was brought down by militarism and that violence ended its central economic role in the region.

“Additionally, farming in north-eastern Syria today relies principally on rainfall rather than irrigation, just as in the Bronze Age, and climate change has already stressed farming there. Farming, rather than herding, has been encouraged at unsustainable levels by the state through land-use policies, and as occurred during urbanisation four millennia ago, populations have dramatically increased in the area.”

Dr Frahm explained the motivation behind the research: “This time of transition in Mesopotamia has received great attention for the concurrence of aridification, de-urbanisation, and the decline of the Akkadian Empire about 4,200 years ago. However, our current understanding of this ‘crisis’ has been almost exclusively shaped by ceramic styles, estimated sizes of archaeological sites, and evidence of changing farming practices. Trade and the associated social networks have been largely neglected in prior studies about this time, and we decided obsidian was an ideal way to investigate them.”

Obsidian, naturally occurring volcanic glass, is smooth, hard, and far sharper than a surgical scalpel when fractured, making it a highly desired raw material for crafting stone tools for most of human history. Obsidian tools continued to be used throughout the ancient Middle East for millennia beyond the introduction of metals.

“Obsidian in Urkesh came from six different volcanoes before the crisis, whereas they normally came from just two or three at surrounding sites, implies that Urkesh was an unusually cosmopolitan city with diverse visitors, or visitors with diverse itineraries. During the crisis, however, obsidian only came from two nearby sources, suggesting that certain trade or social networks collapsed. It was two or three centuries before diverse obsidian appeared again at this city, and even then, it came from different quarries, signalling the impact the crisis had on trade and mobility throughout the wider region.

“By drawing these parallels to the current situation in Syria, we are not making light of it,” explains Dr Frahm. “The situation in Syria is heartbreaking, horrifying. As an archaeologist, there is nothing that I can do to help the situation right now. But those of us who study people and the past are in a unique position to consider what could happen after the immediate crisis ends. What happens to cities when a state falls? How do the residents sustain themselves if that infrastructure collapses? This is the type of contribution that archaeology can make towards improving the future.”

The paper, "Environment and Collapse: Eastern Anatolian Obsidians at Urkesh (Tell Mozan, Syria) and the Third-Millennium Mesopotamian Urban Crisis," has been published online by the Journal of Archaeological Science and is available here: Journal of Archaeological Science

Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more, see http://www.shef.ac.uk
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