§1. Introduction

§1.1. I am obsessed with Uruk, the more so the older I become. On the one hand, this is a consequence of the narrowing focus that accompanies getting older, and on the other hand, it is from the clarity that arises when one begins looking back on what was and what was not accomplished. What especially comes into focus for me are the missed opportunities and the unfinished activities and lines of enquiry. Most of mine accumulate under the name of ‘Uruk’, uniting moments both of contentment, and of failure and dissatisfaction.

§1.2. First of all, I count myself lucky to have been acquainted with Uruk which over the years has opened so many research opportunities for me beyond the normal archaeological activities like digging, dating and comparing. But the more I became entangled in the problems of Uruk, the more I became aware of the limitations which prevented the great potential for research - which will be outlined presently - to be fully realized. The main problem can be summarized under the heading ”an architect’s dig”, which entailed a negligence in the documentation of all data except those concerning architecture.

§1.3. At a certain point, I decided to render myself an account of the reasons for my dissatisfaction by writing down my relations and my experiences with Uruk, both positive and negative. The ensuing report contains some candid words about the organization and direction of the excavation. In order to mitigate the tone, I will situate these comments within broader narrations of my relations with Uruk, of various aspects of the course of work, of life in Uruk including some dig-color. Since I am the last one of the crew under the direction of H. J. Lenzen, it might be of interest to hear about life on an old-fashioned mega-dig (260 workmen). The goal is to present a picture which might help to understand the different attitudes towards retrieving archaeological material in earlier years from those of today. At the same time, the idea is to provide some guidelines which might help to avoid pitfalls when studying materials from Uruk.

§2. Early Contacts with Uruk

§2.1. I became acquainted with the name of Uruk while still a student in the law department of the Free University of Berlin when I took some courses with Anton Moortgat. Closer contacts, however, began only when I left the field of law, and took up my studies of cuneiform languages with Adam Falkenstein in Heidelberg in 1957. Falkenstein loved to tell stories and anecdotes on Uruk, where he had participated for several seasons. Highlights in connection with Uruk were the biannual visits to Heidelberg of the director of the excavation, Heinrich Lenzen. On the one hand, the visits served as an opportunity to restock depleted equipment for the next season – I recall that on more than one occassion during my years in Heidelberg I was sent out to buy the last things at “Wettstein’s” stationery shop.

§2.2. On the other hand, one of these visits marked the arrival of crates filled with those items which, during the partition of finds, were allotted to the German side. Ultimately these finds were destined for the Near Eastern Museum in Berlin since, as recounted by Falkenstein, there was an understanding that the Uruk material was to be provisionally stored in Heidelberg until everything could be transferred to Berlin after a unification of Germany. Heidelberg was never meant to be more than an interim depot, which was the reason that for many years no efforts were made to create appropriate storage for the material. Until the move of the institute into the larger premises of the 18th century Palais Weimar in 1959, the finds were stuffed into the garages behind the building of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in such a manner that one would not be able to locate any specific items. The premises of Palais Weimar included a row of service buildings like stables and spaces for carriages etc., part of which became the new home for the Uruk material. This new arrangement did allow a separation of the material according to the type of find. A real improvement, however, came only with Karl-Heinz Deller taking the chair in 1967, and another transferral of the institute to premises in Sandgasse, accompanied by an acquisition of proper cabinets. After the unification of Germany, inconceivably, the former understanding was pushed away, which in my view is a grave case of dishonesty. Of the arrival of finds, I particularly recall the unpacking of the extremely sensitive unbaked clay tablets. Everything else remained in its original, raw cotton packing material, being unaware that the acid of the raw cotton corroded the finds, especially the unfired clay material of the tablets and the seal impressions. The tablets were chosen to be unpacked because they were supposed to be fired, as this was held to be the best way of conserving them. In those years, nobody was interested in the seal impressions.

§2.3. Firing was done in the university’s department of physics. No one was aware of the fact that the normal ink used for marking the tablets would not withstand high temperatures. Before recognizing this, an entire batch of tablets was returned to the institute without markings – as far as I remember this concerned most of the Neo-Babylonian/Achaemenid tablets of the XVI- XVIIth season.

§2.4. In order to regain the lost information, the tablets were laid out on a large table in the institute together with a stack of photos taken during the excavation that contained the excavation numbers. We – in particular I recall Jo Renger, Jochen Krecher, Claus Wilcke and Herbert Sauren – grabbed a photo and circled around the table until a tablet was identified. Fortunately, this remained my only contact with the microscopically small characters of the Neo-Babylonian/Achaemenid tablets. Unfortunately, not all tablets could be identified, either because not all tablets were photographed on the dig (and no photo existed), or because some had not been cleaned properly and were not identifiable.

§2.5. This mishap, incidentally, had the consequence that an electrical kiln was bought for the Baghdad institute, with a firing chamber of 50x50x50 centimeters. The then archaeological assistant at the institute, Mark A. Brandes, found a much easier way to save the information. The clay tablets were laid out on trays of fire-clay and a sketch of the tablets recorded their position and excavation number. During my years, I adhered to this system without any problems. Problems arose, however, from the fact that the kiln needed much energy, and that the provisioning of electricity was not very reliable, with heavy fluctuations resulting in the release of the main fuse and an interruption of the firing process at irregular intervals. This necessitated one to be constantly on the alert, because an interruption of more than a couple of minutes could lead to irreversible damages, particularly during the phase of cooling down. Since the heating-firing-cooling process took about 50 hours, I had to sleep in my office next door. Though I never had any problems, I frequently had nightmares over the years since I was not only processing the Uruk material but also large batches from other sites housed in the Iraq Museum, as they had no kiln.

§3. My Contributions on Uruk

§3.1. As of January 1st, 1964, my contract started as archaeological/philological assistant with the German Archaeological Institute in Baghdad. Since, however, I was denied entrance to Iraq because it had been reported to the Department of Antiquities that in 1957 I had participated in the excavations of Hazor (Israel), Falkenstein entrusted me with the task of establishing a general catalogue of the Archaic Texts from Uruk (ATU) and copying the tablets stored in Heidelberg. When I was finally allowed to enter Iraq in 1965, I divided my time between continuing the study of the ATU and participating in the excavations in Uruk. Of the three seasons from 1965 until 1967, the 1967 season became the most memorable because of my cooperation with Robert McC. Adams from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in the archeological survey of part of the Uruk hinterland. Both my experiences of the seasons in Uruk plus survey, and of the work on the ATU have left strong impressions on my further work.

§3.2. Ever since my publication of ”The City Wall of Uruk” in 1972, I used several opportunities, and especially my ”Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Frühzeit des Vorderen Orients” (1983; translated as ”The Early History of the Ancient Near East”, Chicago 1988), ”Protostoria del Vicino Oriente” (Rome 1990), ”Ana Hatlariyla Mezopotamya” (Istanbul 2004), ”Geschichte Alt-Vorderasiens” (1999, revised 2012), ”Von Mesopotamien zum Irak” with Peter Heine (2003; translated as ”From Mesopotamia to Iraq”, Chicago 2009), as well as numerous lectures before national and international audiences, to emphasize both the peculiarities and the potential of Uruk and to propose interpretations beyond the presentation of finds. In so doing, I brought Uruk to the attention of the wider public at a time when, into the 1970s, information on Uruk was primarily hidden in preliminary reports, restricted to closed professional circles. It is telling that the widely disseminated bestseller of C. W. Ceram’s, ”Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte”, published in 1949 (translated as ’Gods, Graves, and Scholars’), does not even mention the name of Uruk, despite the fact that at that time excavations had been going on for 11 seasons, and had produced, among other finds, evidence for the oldest script - a feature which would well have figured among the numerous ”highlights” of Ceram’s.

§3.3. The experience from both working in Uruk and studying part of the material from there have led me to recognize basic failures and omissions of the excavation, particularly concerning the documentation of the finds, and this allowed me to develop the plan to write a ”History of Uruk” which, because of reasons to be dealt with presently, all of the excavators shirked from doing. In fact, the only major account came from an outsider: Father Robert North S.J., in Orientalia NS 26 (1957) 185-256. This ’History’ of mine would have started with a chapter entitled: ”Thoughts on the potential of and missed chances in Uruk”. The critique entailed would have been mitigated to some extent by the following parts, where the positive aspects would have prevailed.

§3.4. When, after retirement, I envisaged having the leisure to undertake such a huge project, my attempts always came to an early end, partly because the basic information was either badly arranged or inaccessible. The main obstacle, however, came from a different angle: in the meantime, the number of volumes of the final publication of the excavation results - architecture and finds (AUWE = Ausgrabungen in Uruk/Warka, Endberichte) - had grown constantly. At first glance, this seems to contradict my comments above, and it rather should be assumed to be helpful; yet these volumes prove to be the main hindrance because they are arranged in such a way which renders an overview difficult. Finds are published according to categories like metal, stone, sculpture etc., in disregard to their wider context, without the details of specific find-environments or associated buildings being retained. This was a deliberate decision against my proposition back in 1982 that the proceeding should follow the same arrangement that had successfully been applied to the publication of Babylon and Assur, i.e. to publish both the results and finds according to the building complexes, or at least in their find context. However, my fellow reviewers of the German Research Foundation opted for the plan of R. M. Boehmer. Now, with the present manner of publication, reestablishing the context of finds can only be remedied to some extent by laboriously sifting through the various volumes. In addition, no exhaustive attempts are made to question the validity of the description of the find circumstances, as with few exceptions the volumes are only repeating the information given in the preliminary reports or find inventories. As will become clear, it would have been necessary to call all information on find circumstances into question. Though these volumes are prepared with much effort, dedication and archaeological expertise of the various authors, they are nevertheless hardly useful for more than comparison purposes or ‘battles-of-material’.

§3.5. The worst example of disrupting the context concerns the so called Riemchengebäude, a subterranean complex filled with finds of all kinds. Again, finds are distributed over several volumes, without discussing the find circumstances and the heterogenous dating of the particular items. The study of the complex is further impeded by the fact that at the moment of excavating the complex during the seasons X and XIV-XVI there was either no archaeologist present, or the change of people from one year to the next prohibited any continuity both in the kind of description and general information provided. Because of a personal feud between the excavators before (E. Heinrich in the Xth season) and after World War II (H.J. Lenzen), the reports on the later season’s work made an effort not to refer to what had been accomplished before World War II. An attempt to unravel these problems was successfully undertaken recently by Helga Vogel. In addition to the difficulties met when planning to reestablish a complex, one is confronted with another problem. The architecture volumes of the Endberichte present stratigraphy and architecture in such a way that pays little heed to the older terminology set up by the excavators who had subdivided the sequence of Archaic Levels into gross units like ‘Archaic Level I’, etc. Instead, a completely new system was established based on a thorough review of the original architectural data, ending in long sequences of minute successive layers. The results certainly form a good basis for a new general assessment of the architecture, but they are of little or no help for attempts to connect the various finds to the stratigraphy. As will be shown presently, relating the finds to the ’old’ Archaic Level system was already problematic or even impossible - this is even more the case once the new system is employed. Working with finds, trying to tie them to architectural layers and thus to date them strati-graphically, one still has to use the old system – or else one is forced to save oneself from one conjecture into the next auxiliary construction, like Boehmer in his volume on early seal impressions (AUWE 24).

§3.6. The peak of concealing the problems is reached in this volume on early seals where only incidentally is it mentioned that seal impressions were never found in situ. It is deliberately avoided admitting that all were found in rubbish pits, and no words acknowledge the incredibly poor documentation of the find environments. Moreover, it is still assumed, following Lenzen and Brandes, that rubbish and its contents overlying a building stand in direct relation to this building and should be dated accordingly. But a simple reconstruction of the course of events leading to the situation that was met at the time of excavation - i.e. the demolition of the building, removal of the debris, fetching material including tablets and seal impressions for flattening the ground and putting on an “equalizing layer” (Ausgleichsschicht) - speaks against connecting building and overlying rubbish, especially in light of the repeated assertion of the excavators that all buildings were totally swept empty. As I was able to show in ATU II (Zeichenliste der Archaischen Texte aus Uruk), a dating of the rubbish and of its contents is possible only if a dated building is overlying it. Then the date of that building serves as a terminus ante quem for the time of the deposition of the rubbish while the date of the contents must be older. Because of the poor documentation in which frequently only the square of 20x20 meters is given as provenance, there are only a few cases where the actual physical superimposition of a building over a specific rubbish layer can be documented. The possibility of inserting any finds vertically into the stratigraphic sequence using data on their exact height does not exist because heights of features other than architecture were never recorded, except in some of the early seasons prior to World War II.

§4. An Architect’s Dig

§4.1. The following is a general critique, both of the proceedings in the field and the presentation of the material. Because I am limiting myself to my own experiences, the remarks basically concern the Archaic Levels, but mutatis mutandis they concern the work in and on Uruk in general.

§4.2. From the outset, the excavators of Uruk were part of the tradition of Robert Koldewey’s and Walter Andrae’s, who were architects, then historians of architecture, but never archaeologists, let alone historians. Although the excavators of Uruk were trained to use the same techniques as those developed in Babylon or Assur, the course of work in Uruk took a different direction.

§4.3. The main reason is that there was a completely different architectural situation at Uruk compared to that at Babylon or Assur; in particular when, after initially having been engaged with buildings made of baked bricks of historically known periods, the excavators of Uruk were confronted with walls of unbaked mudbricks (libn). To be sure, the difficulties involved were known, at least after Koldewey’s disaster in el-Hibba where, unprepared to deal with structures of unbaked material, he did not recognize the walls but only those baked bricks which had been used for lining graves, leading him to conclude that el-Hibba was nothing but an extended burial place. Recognizing this mistake led Koldewey in Babylon to design a new technique of excavation for working with unbaked material which was eventually adopted in Assur and Uruk. However, work in Uruk was impeded by the fact that in the main area chosen for excavation, the central complex of Eanna, buildings either because of age or for other reasons were constantly dismantled down to wall stumps of three or four courses of unbaked bricks, of which the upper edges furthermore tended to be disintegrated into the original soil at the time of excavation. Clearing away the incurring masses of building debris after demolition did not allow the usual formation of substantial separating layers between subsequent buildings, causing the fugitive remains of walls of subsequent buildings to sit right on top of each other, eventually separated by a thin intermediate layer. Tracing such walls proved to be extremely tedious and was entrusted to the fine sensitivity of young boys who, using steel needles, did develop a sense for distinguishing the minute differences in texture between brick-material and mortar, which had both originated from the same ordinary soil. In order to retain as much information as possible during excavation, every brick was drawn in its bonding. Taking frequent level data enabled us to establish a true image of the walls and their succession.

§4.4. Architectural plans were drawn on 40x40 centimeters cardboard enforced by an inter-leaf layer of aluminum to avoid distortion caused by the wide oscillations in temperature. Drawing implements were pencils of the highest grade of hardness in order to avoid smearing because of the heat. Plans were drawn in 1:25 scale, i.e. four 40x40 centimeters sheets to one 20x20 meters square, accumulating an immense mass of data. This was but one reason why already during the excavation I had sometimes started wondering if it would ever be possible to integrate all the data and obtain a comprehensive view.

§4.5. An additional problem arose from the numerous pits and other disturbances resulting, for instance, from deeply cut wadis destroying the architectural context by intruding into the lower layers. Short lacunae between parts of a wall posed no problems at re-establishing the course of that wall, but sometimes the lacunae proved to be too long, and therefore rendered restoration difficult.

§4.6. The large mass of data and the ensuing difficulty in bringing together the architectural details was probably the main reason why all of the excavators evaded presenting a synthesis. I mentioned already that the only summary of the results up to 1956 was written by an outsider, Father Robert North S.J., who had been a short-term guest during the 1955/1956 season.

§4.7. I keep wondering how, considering these problems, somebody could be entrusted with the task of disentangling the data who had never been to the site, who was never confronted with the specific problems of the site, and who, moreover, was constantly put under pressure by the main editor to avoid anything that could be taken to befoul the nimbus of Uruk. To be sure, I am full of admiration for the incredible trouble, diligence and persistence put into the volumes dealing with the stratigraphy and architecture, but I remain sceptical when, for instance, I find a reading of +22,61 meters above sea-level for the base level of the White Temple in one of the ’Preliminary Reports’ and a height of +21,60 meters in the new version, without any explanation for the difference. Below I present two cases which make me fear that joining the sheets may not always have been possible without (minor?) ’adjustments’.

§4.8. Considering the enormous diligence put into these volumes on the architecture it is equally disturbing to find that one of the main problems of the early phases in Uruk, the stratigraphic and temporal connection between the two main excavation areas of Eanna and Anu, has been tackled in only a few lines; a closer examination would have revealed already at this point the discrepancy in height of 6-8 meters between the contemporary building levels of the two parts of the city, a feature which must have had far-reaching effects on the relation between the two parts and their inhabitants, and thus on the history of the city.

§4.9. In contrast to the meticulous recording of architectural data, nearly all other aspects of proper documentation were neglected. Only minimal attention was given to the observation of finds and to recording their find situation. Accordingly, it is possible only in rare cases to locate finds in their context in order to insert them into the stratigraphy. One of the reasons is that in a large number of cases only the name of the 20x20 meters square (= 400 square meters!) is noted as the find-spot and there is almost never an indication as to the elevation - yet both a precise location and elevation is recorded for almost every brick! A particularly sad chapter is the treatment of pottery, which everywhere else in archaeology had been recognized as a powerful tool for dating and other purposes. It was a standing remark of Lenzen’s that “pottery was of no dating value” and in fact, the huge masses of excavated pottery sherds were carried to the dumps without further investigation.

§4.10. Because an ill-guided ’esprit de corps’ was followed, these basic problems of insufficient documentation were rarely mentioned in all those volumes of the Endberichte, making it almost impossible to come to a meaningful and coherent synopsis. I therefore decided to discuss these problems here at some length and in full detail, thus presenting students of Uruk’s material with guidelines to be considered before starting work.

§4.11. As previously mentioned, my basic point of critique is that from the beginning until almost the end, the direction of the excavation had been handed over to architects, who, to be sure had been historians of architecture, but were neither historians nor archaeologists. Accordingly, the main interest was always focused on uncovering and studying buildings, in particular large or monumental buildings. This was alright for the later periods with monumental buildings like the Eanna-Ziqqurrat, or the temple complexes of Bit Resh and Irigal. However, although the excavators were confronted with more delicate problems when tackling the older remains, they basically kept to their former line of being interested in the history of architecture and the typology of buildings. This focus was maintained when unexpectedly monumental buildings had to be dealt with again, except that their building material turned out to require another approach. Incomprehensible for historians of architecture remains the fact that reconstructing the history of the city was never envisaged and made part of the research strategy.

§4.12. This narrow focus on architecture may be considered normal in the case of the usual occupation of historians of architecture with periods and historical complexes, where it is understood that all other aspects are taken care of by a wide spectrum of other disciplines. Philological material would go to the philologists; material of art historical nature would be handed over to archaeologists or art historians, etc. It would be enough to collect these materials and present them to the respective specialists. Compiling such catalogues would not require archaeological expertise. This concept, by the way, is still alive as shown by the manner in which the Uruk material is published: ’objects speak for themselves’. It therefore does not come as a surprise that before World War II, only during season IX was an archaeologist on the staff (A. Moortgat), and after World War II only irregularly: B. Hrouda in XII; W. Nagel in XIV, A. von Müller in XV. Only from XVII on did it become customary to have an archaeologist on the staff, but there was never more than one as opposed to the three or four architects. Thus, as mentioned already, at the time of the particularly difficult excavation of the Riemchengebäude, there was either no archaeologist present or various people which prevented any continuity both in digging technique and documentation.

§5. My Years in and with Uruk

§5.1. The following report is written ”cum ira et studio”. It is an outcome of longtime attempts to render an account to myself as to why, over the years, I developed the deep general distrust which I mentioned before.

§5.2. One of the reasons is the disappointment resulting from a confrontation of the research potential of Uruk with the well-intentioned but helpless attitude of the excavators towards historical and archaeological problems. The basic flaw lies, as explained before, in permanently handing over the direction and the delineation of a strategy to unidirectionally interested architects. The worst example was the maxim of Lenzen’s, mentioned frequently to Jürgen Schmidt and myself, to carry out work in Eanna only down to the - admittedly grandiose - buildings of Archaic Level IVa, to leave them exposed and not to go deeper in order to grant a total view of this building level. This was completely unrealistic in the first place, because after one summer storm all of the walls, which had been preserved only up to three or less courses of unbaked bricks, had disintegrated, and the remains of walls were barely visible. This obsession of Lenzen’s resulted in sacrificing all opportunities to extend research into earlier periods, affecting not only earlier manifestations of architecture but also all other aspects such as the context of the emergence of writing or of glyptic art. One year, during Lenzen’s absence, Schmidt started inadvertently to uncover walls beneath a building of IVa; he then continued and by following the walls he uncovered the so called “temples” F to H of Level IVb. This led to a major dispute after Lenzen’s return.

§5.3. Another example of an historian of architecture’s narrowmindedness is the treatment of the so called Hallenbau of Archaic Level IVa in Eanna. The architects Heinrich and Lenzen were so fixated on the form of the Mittelsaalhaus (“Tripartite Building”), that they took pains to explain the ground-plan as a variant of the Mittelsaalhaus, where the side aisles of the central long space would have been replaced by U-shaped blocks. They could not, or did not want to, acknowledge that it was a plan of its own, most probably a long, vaulted building when the U-shaped blocks on both sides were nothing other than the massive buttresses which were supposed to neutralize the shearing forces of a vault. Lenzen took this possibility into consideration but only to dismiss it immediately. Eichmann (AUWE 14, 171) evades a comment.

§5.4. If there ever existed a research strategy at all, it was exclusively geared to the interests of the history of architecture. For instance, almost nothing is known about the older part of the 3rd millennium because work was almost exclusively concentrated on the massive structure of the Eanna-Ziqqurrat and its predecessors. Since no finds were associated with this massive structure and since no work was done in contemporary stratified areas there was not an opportunity to link it up with the general historical context. It is telling that a period of time of more than 800 years was subsumed under “Archaic Level I”. A small subsidiary dig in a housing area provided evidence resulting in a subdivision into I,7 to I,1 but there was not enough substance to it to make it meaningful beyond a local affair.

§6. The Organization of the Dig

§6.1. Throughout my years in Uruk, work was directed by Heinrich Lenzen (architect) and deputy Jürgen Schmidt (architect), who were joined by Arndt von Haller (architect; long standing member of the crew since 1929), the institute’s secretary Renate Fischer, and myself. Additional members were:

Season XXIII (1964/65)
Marianne Berndt, architect
Bernhard Wutka, student, son of friends of Lenzen’s
Eva Töpperwein, classical archaeologist (part of the season)
Gerlinde Wülker (part of the season), Near Eastern archaeologist
Wolf Sander, photographer

Season XXIV (1965/66)
Konrad Markgraf, student of architecture
Ekkehard Duis, student of architecture
John Bellingham, friend of Lenzen’s
Jürgen Fehrmann, photographer

Season XXV (1966/67)
Konrad Markgraf, student of architecture
Ekkehard Duis, student of architecture
John Bellingham, friend of Lenzen’s
Uwe Finkbeiner (part of the season), Near Eastern archaeologist
Hermann Hunger (part of the season), Assyriologist
Robert McC. Adams, anthropologist (part of the season)
Jürgen Fehrmann, photographer

§6.2. Since at the start of season XXIII, all except von Haller and Fischer had never been to Uruk before, it would have been appropriate to receive an extended guided tour of the ruin, but all we got was a brief tour of Eanna. Since I knew the plans and had studied the various publications, I had no problems getting a full grasp, and before long I found myself explaining the contexts to my fellow newcomers.

§6.3. While Lenzen and the other architects took care of documenting the building remains, I was in charge of everything else: keeping the register, processing the finds, particularly the clay tablets, as well as participating in the Grabungsdienst (“dig supervision”), see below. In addition, I participated in taking the data and producing a new plan of the Anu-Ziggurat with the aim to record all those changes which the ruin had encountered over the many years since the last activity before World War II. The intention was to produce a plan before opening a new row of investigation in this area.

§6.4. The actual digging was done by around 260 local workmen, mainly from the local tribe of the Tobe. Of these, 210 men were assigned to 10 gangs of 21 people each: 1 ustad (“master”), who did the actual digging and was supposed to look out for finds, particularly those which eventually would fetch a bakhshish (“tip”); four men with broad hoes shoveling the soil into baskets made of old tires, each one employing four carriers who would transport the soil into lorries of a narrow gauge railway. Each of these gangs was in charge of a particular site.

§6.5. The remainder of the work force was divided into the ’libn boys’, who were tracing the joints between the bricks by means of pointed needles, who took over once the coarse work was done by the gangs mentioned before. They were supported by a varying number of carriers and supervised by one or more foremen. The boys, at the same time, served as assistants during the taking of elevations and architectural data. And finally, there was the group of those who pushed the lorries to the dumps, again under a supervisor, who had to take care of the smooth running of the railway system – this was an important task because the arabanci once in a while had fun provoking their fellow workmen by letting lorries collide, particularly on the single-track sections.

§6.6. During my years, digging was mainly done in Eanna while in Anu work was restricted to cleaning and documenting the present status as mentioned previously.

§6.7. The excavated material – mainly from Eanna – was carried to the dumps in the so-called ’harbor-area’ without further inspection after items which the ustad had found and deemed worth keeping were separated (see below). For the railway, causeways had been left, partly using the baulks between the 20x20-meter excavation areas.

§7. Daily Routine

§7.1. In general, the daily routine was more on the relaxed side - except for those who were on early morning duty, the main task of which was to clip the ticket of each workman – these were little cardboard pieces in the shape of old railroad tickets. Every worker had his name written on the ticket, and you had to make sure that it was presented by the entitled owner, because very often a brother or son was sent to substitute the owner, who then turned out to be unskilled and ignorant about what he was supposed to do. This procedure and the handing out of the tools took a while so that every morning about half an hour was lost. The other person on early duty was the photographer, because the best light for taking good photos was briefly before sunrise and lasted only for a short duration because at the geographical position of Uruk there is almost no twilight; within minutes the sun would be too bright to take photos without disturbing deep shadows. Whoever was not on duty was either occupied with drawing architectural plans or, in my case, registering finds.

§7.2. Over lunch between 12:00 and 13:30, it was frowned upon to talk business; likewise, over the extended coffee break in the afternoon at 17:00 when everyone gathered in the cay-hane after work. This was the time when guests were entertained by Lenzen, who loved to tell stories about the years before the war, and/or about societal life in Baghdad. Unofficially, there existed a rule of compulsory attendance - work was not accepted as an excuse.

§7.3. Before dinner came the opportunity for washing off the dust of the day. To this end, a bucket of hot water was placed in front of every room, announced by may harr hadher (“hot water available”). After dinner, which was celebrated in jacket and tie, the entire company retreated again to the cay-hane for an extended period of kef (best translated as “common, comfortable idleness”), where tea was served, and the small-talk session of the afternoon resumed. Since it was dark already and light was provided only by traditional oil lamps, there was no opportunity to do serious work.

§7.4. I am afraid I had fallen out of favor by acquiring two gas-pressure lamps in Baghdad. Unfortunately, their incandescent mantles were difficult to find and had to be replaced frequently, but the lamps produced bright light which allowed not only drawing and writing but also deciphering clay tablets. The disadvantage was a loud noise which prompted Lenzen to find the lamps abhorrent and an impairment of the evening’s silence. Yet, he could not forbid them as the lamps were benefiting work.

§7.5. The chance for a different atmosphere came when in January 1967 Lenzen left for the annual executive meeting at the headquarters in Berlin; the secretary Fischer had left for Baghdad and all of a sudden Schmidt fell ill (a typical case of desert tantrum), leaving only a reduced crew for the kef, joined by Bob Adams and guest Douglas Kennedy. It was the start of a series of lively evenings, not only because of the whisky brought by Doug, but we had long and serious discussions on Uruk, its history, and on archaeology in general - which had never happened before during my years on the dig.

§8. The Grabungsdienst (“dig supervision”)

§8.1. This is the source of all problems connected to the documentation of finds. To be ’on duty’ meant that one (!) member of the team had to supervise the entire work force of 260 men while all other members of the team were free for their normal duties. Apart from driving the workers to work, the main task consisted of preregistering the finds by noting down on slips of paper a short description of the finds, the current date and the find spot. Apart from the director and the photographer, everybody present at the dig – sometimes including guests – was assigned for one of the duties, which ran from 7:00 to 9:00, 9:00 to 12:00, and in the afternoon from 13:30 to 16:30.

§8.2. Whoever was on duty was responsible for the general running of the dig – including looking after the railway – but primarily he or she was in charge of supervising the gangs and registering the finds placed on a tray. Pottery sherds were not among them because they did not fetch a bakhshish, unless they were painted or complete pots. There was no chance to verify the ustads’ selection as the remainder of the soil had already been carried away. Since the positions of part of the gangs were at some distance from each other – Eanna and Anu were 10 minutes apart – the person on duty never had a full overview of all operations. He or she went from one group to the next, examining the finds on the tray, asking the ustad about the find circumstances, and filling in the form accordingly. With 10 gangs at work, it could take an hour or so until you returned to the same gang, which in the meantime had continued digging.

§8.3. Even experienced archaeologists who would have been able to recognize the importance of a particular find could not do more than subject the ustad to heavy questioning about the exact find spot. Measuring and taking exact data was impossible because before visiting the same gang again work had proceeded and the probable find spot had been dug away. Non-archaeologists did not even have a chance to put specific questions to the ustads, and simply had to take the information provided by the workers at face value. No wonder that in most cases only the square was noted as a provenience – the size of squares measured 20x20 meters, or 400 square meters! So much for the trustworthiness of the register.

§9. The Find Register

§9.1. Whoever was in charge of the register simply had to accept what was put down on these slips of paper. Only in a few cases when I became suspicious, I managed to ask the workmen again, normally without better results. I even managed to find the spot and the workers involved in the finding of the sealed bullae. But this had occurred already two years earlier and even the ustad was not able to recall any details.

§9.2. A further insecurity arose from the fact that Lenzen took no interest in the way the register was kept, visible in the crass differences in the layout used from one registrar to the other. I was not introduced to the method, and I simply followed the line of my predecessor, M. A. Brandes, who had done a brilliant job within the limits outlined above.

§9.3. The quality of the find description was one problem; another was the performance of the registrars. A particularly disturbing point is the handling of larger groups of finds like clay tablets or clay sealings. These finds would normally receive a main number, if found in one spot, and each item would be marked individually by either a lower-case letter or a number, sometimes a combination of both. There are cases of main numbers, however, where every item came from a different context (XVIII: W 19948 etc.), or vice versa, when each individual item received a different main number, despite coming from the same spot. Even worse, however, some registrars had the habit of ceasing at a certain point to register all items within a group, and simply put the remaining items into a box labeled “unregistered fragments” in addition to the main number.

§9.4. This same system was continued by the registrars of the Iraq Museum where the boxes were labeled li-dars (“for study [only]”). When tablets of an entire season stored in the museum were handed over to me for processing, I found in many cases that these boxes indeed contained only scrap material of no use, though not always. A particularly serious case was discovered when, during the collating process of Bob Englund in Baghdad some years later, some boxes were presented to him which had been overlooked in my time.

§9.5. Under the main number of W 20266 of the XIXth season, the register mentioned ”20 archaic texts, plus a box of unregistered items”. Instead of tiny fragments, however, two such boxes contained 168 tablets of considerable size. They all belonged to the category of Lexical Lists and did make a major contribution to our publication of this genre (now published in ATU 3 (1993)). The same applies to W 29493, where in addition to 14 registered items, 14 pieces of some size were found in such boxes.

§9.6. An example of how the brevity of entries proved to be troublesome to research is items listed under the main number W 20266; all 188 items belong to the category of Lexical Lists. At first sight, this seemed to be a stroke of luck because, unlike the usual circumstance that administrative and lexical tablets are mixed when found in the same pit, this situation could be a case of non-mixture, indicating the possibility that both groups had entered the general dumps separately, possibly indicating that they were used/written in different places. Looking closer, however, it turns out that the administrative texts of number W 20258 were registered as having been found in the same square on the same day, suggesting that the two groups in fact had been found mixed, but were sorted by category before registering. Still, the possibility is left open that they have been found in different spots since as provenience only the 20x20 meter square is named - an area of 400 square meters!

§10. Processing and Final Destination of Finds

§10.1. Each day after work, all finds were brought to the ’Registrar’s Office’ in the shed behind the dig-house where I took initial steps before registering. In particular, every item had to be cleaned as much as possible before it went to be photographed. Apart from some tooth- and other brushes there were no other means of cleaning the items, let alone any possibilities of conservation. Coins were put in lemon juice to be able to discern at least a vague idea of their image and date.

§10.2. Using water was problematic since it had to be fetched by donkeys over some distance. When during my dig in squares K/L XII, contrary to the normal procedure, I wanted all potsherds to be cleaned - and washed - this initiated a longer discussion about the necessity. Because of my interest in keeping all sherds my nickname among the workers became abu fakhar, ’Father of the Sherds’.

§10.3. After the closing of the dig, everything bearing a registration number was brought to the Iraq Museum. These were still the days of a division of finds between ’Baghdad’ and the ’Expedition’. In order to prepare for this division, everything was laid out on long tables, separated according to category. From the outset, all ’nice’ finds of specific importance, or that were unique in their category, were sorted out to remain in Baghdad. Of the larger categories like tablets or sealings or the ubiquitous Neo-Babylonian clay figurines, two superimposed rows were formed, where the objects would roughly correspond in size, condition and ’beauty’, i.e. eventual aptness for exhibition. The museum had first choice of which line would remain in Baghdad, so it was in our own interest that I made sure that both rows were indeed equivalent.

§10.4. Attention was given to the date of the items. Thus, for instance, in the case of cuneiform tablets, Neo-Babylonian tablets would not be positioned against archaic ones. Otherwise the display was purely mechanical: of large batches, the first 10 sub-numbers were put in the upper line, the next 10 in the lower, etc. The same procedure was observed with the clay sealings, despite the fact that contexts were torn apart, rendering research difficult and preventing the joining of fragments except in a few cases.

§10.5. Larger items like inscribed bricks, or large pithoi which had served as containers for burials primarily of the Neo-Babylonian period, were stored in the shed close to the dig house in order to remain at the site.

§11. Photography

§11.1. Both for field shots and for photographing finds, a Linhof camera 13x18 centimeters (5x7 inches) was used. With the total absence of electricity - not even the local helpers and servants in their adjacent compound were allowed to use a generator because of the noise - an image of this size was advantageous because contact paper prints made on the spot could serve as repositories for comments or further information which was written on the reverse. In order to obtain these prints, an opening was left in the north-western outer wall of the photography lab, which was just large enough to receive a frame with a paper pressed onto the negative; thus, printing was done by using the normal day light. In principle, all finds were supposed to be photographed, but sometimes, particularly in the case of large batches of tablets or sealings, this was not obeyed. A couple of days after finds had been delivered to the photography lab, every member of the crew was presented with the prints of the area of his responsibility - both architecture and finds - in order to write additional remarks on the reverse.

§11.2. All photographic work was done in black-and-white using the Linhof camera. Only irregularly small-sized cameras were used for color shots, not for documentary purposes but only as much as Lenzen wanted to use them for slide presentations. After use, they remained in the slide collection of the seminar in Heidelberg. They were never recorded systematically, what would have been difficult anyhow in the absence of any accompanying information.

§12. The Treatment of Pottery

§12.1. The treatment of pottery poses severe problems, not because of insufficient documentation but because of deliberate negligence. Apart from the deep sounding of 1930/31 in which allegedly every sherd was kept (obviously not true; see my ’Key Site’ article), pottery did not receive much attention. In the 1930s, the notion that pottery, with its differences in material, methods of manufacture, or shape could be used to answer a number of problems beyond the ‘normal’ use for comparison purposes had not yet entered Near Eastern archaeology, let alone the field of architecture. In fact, this ignorance was not restricted to Uruk. It is also found, for instance, among the Diyala excavations where, except for some exemplary sherds, the publication only lists complete vessels. Thus, the situation at Uruk was in line with the general opinion of the time. This, however, was not the only flaw in the treatment of the pottery of the deep sounding. The publication made it seem that everything published stemmed from a controlled stratigraphic sequence, including pottery listed as originating from Archaic Levels V - I. This concealed the fact that the actual sequence of the deep sounding only started below the foundation level of the so-called limestone temple of Archaic Level V (see my “Key Site” article). Hence the controlled sequence started only with Archaic Level VI, while the sherds published for Levels V-I were drawn from different parts of less controlled situations, allowing even 2nd millennium sherds to slip into the presentation. Moreover, there was not a single presentation of a beveled rim bowl, although these vessels account for up to 80% of the sherd output of Levels IV and V (and earlier).

§12.2. The latter omission caused some problems because Strommenger/Sürenhagen used it to support their argument that Habuba Kabira South, with its masses of beveled rim bowls, should be attributed to a pre-Archaic Level VI date; this has meanwhile been corrected.

§12.3. It was Ernst Heinrich who recognized the dating qualities of pottery. When interpreting the Datierungsschnitt, the trench which was supposed to link the stratigraphies of Eanna and Anu, he relied on the presence of beveled rim bowls as indicators for a Late Uruk date. This procedure of Heinrich was possibly responsible for the maxim of Lenzen in later years that, except in special cases, pottery was not good for anything: Heinrichs reliance on beveled rim bowls for dating purposes contradicted Lenzen’s ideas of dating the White Temple of the Anu-Ziggurat to Archaic Level III. Absurdly, Lenzen himself had relied on the dating quality of one (!) plum-red painted sherd which he allegedly picked out of a wall of the Anu complex. Since he was convinced that such sherds were an unmistakable indicator of a Jemdet Nasr - or Archaic Level III - date, he attributed a Level III date to the so-called White Temple as opposed to Heinrich’s Level IV dating. Unfortunately, this sherd was never recorded and Lenzen’s crown witness, Seton Lloyd, only hesitantly admitted that he may have seen the sherd when he accompanied Lenzen on a tour of the Anu district (cf. the almost touching narrative of Lenzen’s in Nöldeke’s Briefe aus Uruk-Warka, p. 336 note. 171, of how the sherd slipped from his trouser pocket).

§12.4. In particular, no attention was given to the mass-produced wares of beveled rim bowls or flower pots (conical cups), remarking ”that’s known already”. Tons of sherds of conical cups were transported to the dumps without any inspection, which had formed the huge sherd deposit of sometimes more than 2 meters’ thickness covering a large part of the southwestern part of Eanna, including the so-called ‘Great Courtyard’. It was a very dense deposit with almost no soil between the sherds. I got hold of a small tip of it when, during the XXVth season with Lenzen having departed to Berlin and Schmidt to Baghdad because of a desert tantrum, I suddenly from one day to the next had found myself directing the dig, facing the problem of employing 260 workmen with no directive for further procedure - or enough money for the next payday, for that matter. I employed a large number of workers to remove part of this sherd deposit over and south of the ‘Great Courtyard’ which had remained standing as part of the railroad causeway system. Every sherd was counted and measured, which afterwards would enable me to play around with some statistics. I sorted them according to the scheme I had developed in Baghdader Mitteilungen 5 and had long lists prepared - but unfortunately, they got lost in transport. The sherd deposit of a thickness of 2-3 meters originally must have covered an area of twenty 20x20-meter squares, or 8000 square meters, all the way between the Steinstifttempel and building E. From what I could get ahold of, I calculated that at least 9000 cubic meters of pottery must have been poured into the dumps without any inspection.

§12.5. Not recognizing the potential of pottery was not only detrimental to the research on Uruk itself, but more so for any attempts to incorporate Uruk into the general framework of Babylonian history. For a long period of time, excavators in Uruk lived in a self-contained, self-referential universe by using the Eanna sequence as the only point of reference. This prevented linking up with the terminology developed for the other Babylonian sites, in particular to the sequence of Early Dynastic sub-periods as put forward by the Diyala project. Consequently, the Early Dynastic I period was not recognized as such in Uruk, in spite of the fact that pertinent material had turned up in the small sounding in squares La/Lb XII. In the meantime, Early Dynastic I has been recognized as one of the crucial phases of early Babylonian history, and for Uruk in particular.

§12.6. I was confronted with another example for the negligence of pottery when I started working in the Baghdad Institute. Instead of a larger office, I chose an adjacent smaller one because part of the larger one was filled with high stacks of rubber baskets, full of pottery sherds without any indication of recording or provenience. Upon inquiring further, I was told that this pottery came from the long trench in Babylon which Lenzen had used to try to tie, stratigraphically, the Etemenanki depression (the ”Tower of Babel”) to the mound of Esangila. There was never any published report on this activity. This pottery, if properly documented, could have been of major importance because the mound of Esangila presents an uninterrupted sequence of layers from the Neo-Babylonian to Early Islamic periods; the mound is crowned by the funeral monument for Amran ibn Ali. The trench therefore must have cut through a sequence of layers from the 6th/5th century BCE until the 11th century CE, the pottery sequence of which is missed badly. This aforementioned pottery was useless without accompanying documentation.

§13. Rubbish - Excavated Material

§13.1. Though the accumulated soil from the excavation processes originated from different contexts, everything was treated alike and carried to the dumps without inspection. This applied not only to the normal soil but also to the soil from the numerous rubbish layers and pits which contained tablets and sealings. After the workmen had sorted out these finds, the remainder was of no interest anymore. Since the composition was never observed, let alone recorded, I have to rely on my own observations and some remarks in the registers, for instance with the groups of tablets W 21127, or W 21208, according to which apart from tablets and sealings and sherds of the mass-produced types, these layers contained animal and fish bones, and ashes. Only in special cases were animal bones kept for further investigation. The same applies to the contents of drainage pits of either prefabricated rings of pottery or large jars with cut-off bases. Intruding from dissolved Old Babylonian houses into the Archaic Levels of my dig in KL/XII, I had the opportunity to inspect such drains. They contained masses of fish bones and ashes but were labeled as being not worthy of closer examination!

§13.2. As indicated by the find of fragments of one and the same tablet in different rubbish layers at some distance from each other, this rubbish has been fetched from central dumps, probably to level off the ground where necessary in order to create platforms for the erection of new buildings. The components must have been mixed already in the dumps.

§14. Problems With the Recording of Architecture

§14.1. The accuracy of the recording of architectural data has been mentioned several times already. Nevertheless, some weak points have to be discussed. One regards the term Zwischenschicht (“intermediate layer”) used particularly for an enigmatic stratigraphic situation in the Kopfbau (“head-part”) of the so-called Tempel C. During season XX, a number of archaic tablets were found in this area, which Lenzen attributed to Archaic Level IVa - but he was not entirely convinced. So, he sent photos to Falkenstein in Heidelberg to solicit his opinion. Falkenstein marked the tablets as ”IVa-”, meaning “slightly younger than IVa”, on the reverse of the prints and returned them to Lenzen on the dig. That formed the base for the introduction of the term Zwischenschicht for the find spot of the tablets. But even if Falkenstein was correct - in fact there is no way to differentiate between these tablets and the normal IVa look - it would have been highly problematic to link tablets and architecture that closely, since the tablets were not found exactly on the floor, but in a layer of rubbish like all the others.

§14.2. Another note concerns the accuracy of capturing architectural data. The main credo of recording architectural data is that when a grid of squares is used, the measurements to every point within the square should be taken from three corners of the square. Of course, measuring from two points should normally be sufficient, yet taking a third measurement would avoid any inaccuracies, and be ”much more reliable than the Anglo-Saxon method of using a surveyor’s table”, as Lenzen would put it. However, serious doubts came up whether he himself would adhere to that principle. As I wrote to my wife in the first days of the 1965 season: ”yesterday I had to mark the corner points of the squares of the new excavation area. Because the wooden crosses and some iron pipes of the original grid had been stolen between the seasons, I had to fetch the grid from still existing marks. Doing so I discovered that the sides of the old squares were off the regular lengths of 20x20 meters by half a meter in both directions. I mentioned it to Lenzen who hesitantly admitted to these differences but then remarked that these deviations did not really matter. I was astounded because it was obviously violating the ’holy principle’”.

§14.3. The confirmation came when, in the beginning of the 1967 season, I was again to mark the new squares. It turned out to be an extremely difficult task because again all marking pegs had disappeared over the summer and the main measuring line had to be fetched from the old excavation some distance away on the other side of the high railway causeway, obscuring a direct sight. Since I was in a hurry because of the impending start of the work, and in the absence of proper equipment (there was only a surveyor’s level available on the dig; no theodolite), I managed to get the line across the causeway with the help of some ranging poles and the assistance of Uwe Finkbeiner, intending to finalize it properly that same afternoon - but I forgot to do it!

§14.4. On one of the following days, Lenzen mentioned over lunch that he finished drawing the new walls, when I immediately realized my mistake and confessed it to the crowd. When hurrying to remedy it, I found that I was wrong by 30 centimeters off the straight line and 50 centimeters off the length at a total distance of 50 meters (not too bad considering the conditions!), but Lenzen had not reported any problems. The answer was that he apparently had measured only from two corners and therefore did not become aware of the wrong marking. Under normal circumstances, measuring from two points should not create serious problems, but with the minute recording of the position of bricks and the necessity of joining the single recording sheets I would not be surprised if in one case or the other it became necessary to ’push’ things a bit during joining the recording sheets.

§14.5. These are some of the reasons why I would have expected some words of caution in the architecture volumes of the Endberichte.

§15. Problems Occurring During the Processing of Finds: the case of the Archaic Texts

§15.1. As I mentioned in the beginning of this account, my contract as assistant at the DAI Baghdad started on January 1st 1964, but I was unable to report for work because someone had denounced me with the Baghdad Department of Antiquities because of my participation in the excavations in Hazor (Israel) in 1957, and I was denied a visa for Iraq. Consequently, my contract was terminated on April 30th. In order to let me do something meaningful during those four months, it was decided that I should prepare a catalogue of all archaic texts from Uruk and make drawings (’copies’) of those archaic texts which over the years had come to Heidelberg.

§15.2. As it turned out, apparently nobody was aware of the number of texts which had been found in addition to those 600 texts published by Falkenstein in 1936. It was a big surprise to everyone, including Falkenstein and Lenzen, that the number had risen to several thousand tablets and fragments. By the end of April 1964, I had completed the catalogue and copying most of the Heidelberg texts.

§15.3. The perseverance of Hansjörg Schmid - at that time specialist for the history of architecture with the Baghdad Institute – resulted in solving the problems and I received a new contract starting January 1st, 1965. Though my normal duties were going to be different, it was decided that I should continue working on the archaic texts. This meant that over the next years, I copied the texts in the Iraq Museum, in the East Berlin Museum and the remaining ones in Heidelberg. Because of our expulsion from Baghdad in 1967 as a result of the six-day war with Israel, only the Baghdad texts of the XIth season remained unfinished. This is not the place for a history of the project - which has been haunting me to this very moment - rather, a report shall be given on the struggle with the documentation. It began already when starting work on the catalogue: I compared the list of find numbers in Falkenstein’s ATU with the dig inventories, and I found a number of double entries on the one side, and missing ones on the other. Since in this initial phase I only started becoming aware of the problems, it did not occur to me that Falkenstein in his ATU had omitted all tablets containing only numerical signs (now published by Englund in ATU 5).

§15.4. The next problem was the discrepancies between the inventories and the number of texts found in the various museums. Though in most cases the items not found in the museums were probably tiny fragments, sometimes showing only part of a sign, this resulted in different counts of the texts. Thus, while Englund in OBO gives the number as ”slightly more than 5000”, a final count of the entries in the inventories amounts to 4249. This figure, however, does not include the ”unnumbered fragments” mentioned above. Thus, the actual number rises, but an exact figure will never be reached because the Iraq Museum started giving IM-numbers to most of the ”unnumbered” items - ”close to 5000” may be the best choice.

§15.5. Another problem arose from the fact that as a result of war-damage, find or accession numbers were lost on some tablets housed in the Berlin Museum. To a large extent, they could be restored by the museum’s staff based on minute traces; some restorations, however, proved to be wrong. An overall investigation was impeded by the fact that the East Berlin Museum authorities had no access to the dig inventories or the photos, housed in the headquarters of the German Archaeological Institute in West Berlin. I repeatedly asked the DAI to make copies and offered to take them to East Berlin, but in the best Cold War mentality my requests were always refused. These shortcomings, however, were trifles, which gave both me and my collaborators headaches but did not pose real problems because the tiny fragments would not have contributed to solve anything. Another issue - more pressing because it attracts wider attention - is the date of the earliest appearance of the script. The reason it does not find an easy answer is the fact that not a single tablet was found either at the place where it was used or in a context which would tie in with the architectural sequence of layers. Without exception, all tablets were found in pits or layers of rubbish which had been put in place in order to create an even surface to be used as ground for new building activities. The preliminary reports constantly report an “equalizing layer” (Ausgleichsschicht), showing that origin and purpose had been recognized. But no conclusions were drawn which at an early point could have contradicted their general opinion that the contents of the rubbish were to be dated according to the building underneath.

§15.6. Tablets found in a rubbish context overlaying a building of IVa date, therefore, are not automatically dated to the time of IVa. Instead, we have to follow another procedure. If there is a possibility of dating at all, then it is only when a dated building is overlying the rubbish layer. In that case, the date of the building serves as a terminus ante quem (”t.a.q.”) for the date of the deposition of the rubbish. If, for instance, the rubbish layer is covered by part of the large terrace of IIIc date, the date of the deposition could either be the beginning of IIIc - if the equalizing with rubbish was part of the preparation of the IIIc terrace, or IVa - with the consequence that the date of the contents of the rubbish should be older than IIIc. Similarly, the superimposition of a building of IIIa stratigraphic affiliation would indicate a IIIb attribution for the contents of the rubbish.

§15.7. At this point the absolutely poor quality of the documentation comes to bear, because the sole reference to the square of 400 square meters does not allow a direct superimposition to be reconstructed, except in very few cases. Fortunately, using the t.a.q. procedure these rare cases allow two groups of tablets to be differentiated, dating either to the time of IVa or to IIIc, which incidentally correspond to the difference between these texts based on palaeographic observation (this has been explained at some length in ZATU).

§15.8. Owing to the ineptness of the records and the uncertainty of the t.a.q. dating system, the question of the appearance of the oldest script cannot be answered definitively, but a IVa-date appears to be the most probable answer - although a slightly earlier date cannot be excluded. But whatever date is accepted, the main assertion remains valid - that writing appears at the very end of the Late Uruk period.

§16. Conclusions Drawn from the Excavation and Work on the ATU

§16.1. The information on find-spot and context is utterly insufficient and unreliable. Since this situation results from a deficient organization of the documentation at the moment of discovery, there is no way of correction.

§16.2. The insufficient quality of the documentation does not allow one to reconstruct the relation between finds and architecture except in a few cases; this is even less possible if the intricate stratigraphic system of Eichmann is used.

§16.3. With all the inherent uncertainties, the t.a.q. dating system provides the only method of getting close to the dating of finds.

§16.4. The problems encountered while working with the archaic texts will be met again once the large group of sealings is tackled.

§17. The Potential of Uruk for Research

§17.1. Throughout what has been said so far, several biases of mine have become apparent and it is about time that I present the benchmark which I apply to the achievements of the excavations in Uruk and to the methods employed.

§17.2. With an area of close to five square kilometers, Uruk is one of the larger ruins of the ancient Near East. The place was continuously occupied from the middle of the 5th millennium BCE until the middle of the 4th century CE, and was an urban center from the middle of the 4th millennium BCE until the end of the occupation of the site.

§17.3. For a number of crucial questions for the early history of the Near East, Uruk offers an ideal object for research on several levels: with an extension of 2 1/2 square kilometers in the second part of the 4th millennium, Uruk is the first city with structures related to economic and social activities, which, because of the complexity needed, gave rise to a vast array of rules and controlling instruments. Over the course of some centuries, the latter ones gained in efficiency, ending in the invention of the first writing system around 3300 BCE. A long sequence of archaeological layers covering most of the 4th millennium offers not only the possibility of exploring this complexity but also its origin and its gradual development. These achievements formed the basis for urban civilization of the following millennia in Mesopotamia.

§17.4. Unlike almost any other site, Uruk offers the opportunity to follow both vertical and horizontal lines of exploration: within the urban area, you find areas which had been occupied over longer periods of time, and therefore allow long historical sequences to be established. Since, however, the extension of the settled area within the area delineated by the city wall varied over time, different areas were left unoccupied for longer periods of time. This offers archaeologists the opportunity to find remains of periods older than the last occupation directly beneath the surface and uncover remains of different historical layers in large areas. For instance, remains of the period of the Akkadian empire would be accessible on a large scale in the northern part of the city, which are widely unknown for the southern part of Mesopotamia.

§17.5. The archaeological survey of part of the Uruk hinterland has shown that, from at least the middle of the 4th millennium, the city had been a central place and the point of reference for a large, multi-tiered catchment area. This offers the possibility to explore urban-country relations over a long period of time. For instance, this situation becomes interesting because Uruk was never the seat of supra-local power like Ur or Nippur, and therefore should be considered as a ”center of an agrarian area” par excellence. A history of Uruk thus could be an example of a ’normal’ course of development of relations between the center and the hinterland, without the interference of non-pertinent influences.

§17.6. All of these aspects would have contributed to a history of a city which, owing to the possibility of exploring large areas of nearly all periods, would have led to an overall picture, mirroring with all strong and weak phases, the general course of history of Mesopotamia from the 5th millennium BCE until the 4th century CE.

§17.7. Unfortunately, however, the creation of such a general picture was never a goal of the Uruk excavators. Instead, most efforts were put towards isolated pieces of architecture which eventually produced excellent single studies but do not contribute to the general history of the ancient Near East, except in small specific areas.

§18. General Conclusions

§18.1. Looking back on the remarks, observations and quotations, some pieces may seem irrelevant or exaggerated, but it is not the individual points which matter but all of them, which taken together have revealed fundamental deficiencies in the organization of the dig. The most detrimental of which has turned out to be the documentation of finds.

§18.2. Aforementioned are the reasons why I do not trust any studies and results which do not explicitly point to the problems of the material and the poor state of the documentation and include them in their approach to the material. Specifically, this applies to the Endberichte, where critique has been forestalled, except in some moderated cases.

§18.3. As mentioned in the beginning, this essay has been written ‘cum ira et studio’, measuring the fantastic potential of Uruk and the patchwork of the results of the excavation. Of course, this is a very subjective statement since it depends on the kind of goal you envisage - which in my case is the history of Uruk in all aspects. This ’critique totale’ therefore may appear unfair and shabby considering the fact that the magnificent achievements, for instance of the 4th millennium, have become known only through the work in Uruk; and it may be unjust. But I cannot cope with the fact that considering the enormous financial expenditures over the years, a slight change in the research strategy - if there ever was one - would have sufficed. At any rate, there is no excuse for the absolute dilettantism in the field of documenting anything except architecture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, R. McC., and H. J. Nissen. 1972. The Uruk Countryside. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Version: 2024-05-30

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