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Brief Overview
The definition of what is a plate is the same for all units and all time periods in the UGR. See here for further details. There are few contexts in which we have excavated ceramics from the Middle Assyrian period (MA): excavation unit J5 and just under the surface of the small mound below the present village of Mozan. Given that only these contexts were excavated for this period, the shapes in the present Middle Assyrian catalog are probably not representative of the whole MA corpus present in Urkesh. From these limited contexts we observed that many of the shapes overlap with Mittani shapes. Because of this overlap the shapes were given the same codes as those shapes found in the Mittani period in Urkesh. However in the sherd description it is identified as Middle Assyrian, not Mittani. See for instance a bowl shape from J5 bcrr801 and its chronological placement as Middle Assyrian (see here).
A number of plates were found in the MA period excavations. They were usually made in the MA version of CH ware. Few were decorated with a painted wide stripe on the interior just below the rim; sometimes the exterior of the rim was painted.
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