 Photo J. J. Jarmakani |
A central goal of our project echoes the interest of the L. J. Skaggs and Mary D. Skaggs Foundation in the preservation and interpretation of historic monuments and events. We wish to foster a live understanding of a life once lived, however deeply buried it may be today under the centuries of its own collapse.
The careful preservation of the ruin as discovered is a distinctive trait of our excavations. And so is the commitment to recover, behind the “things,” the ancient perception of meaning.
Thus the mudbrick walls of the Royal Palace, each one encased in its own individual shelter, retain the ancient document and recreate at the same time the architectural volumes of the monument.
From the myriad small finds we have begun to reconstruct history in ways that are adding a new facet to our understanding of the beginning of civilization.
Open any current book on the history of the ancient Near East, and you will read that the Hurrians came into Mesopotamia late – at the turn of the third millennium B.C., following the demise of the Akkadian empire. And that Urkesh arose only then as a petty local kingdom.
Our discovery of much earlier material at Urkesh pushes back by one and a half millennium the beginning of this history.
Given the cultural continuity that we see in the material remains, and given especially the unique religious character of the great Urkesh Temple Terrace, we can now see the Hurrians as the autochthonous population in the region from as far back as the late prehistoric periods.
 Revision of early Syro-Mesopotamian history |
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