Tell Brak

Start with the ground under your feet. It is not quite soil and not quite stone. It is a pale, crumbly mix of dust, broken pottery and old mud brick, and it crunches softly when you walk. Look down and you will almost certainly see a fragment of fired clay. That small shard may be several thousand years old. Out here on the plain, the wind is often the loudest sound you hear.

You are standing on Tell Brak, a huge mound in the Khabur basin of northeastern Syria. A tell is a hill made by people, not by nature. Each generation built its houses of mud brick on top of the ruins of the last. Over thousands of years, the city rose on its own remains. This mound rises around forty metres above the plain. From a distance it looks like a natural ridge, but it is a city stacked on itself.

Look out across the flat land around you. In spring it can turn green with wheat and barley. In late summer it fades to gold and brown. This is rain-fed farmland, part of a wide arc of fertile ground that curves across northern Mesopotamia, the ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. A small river, the Jaghjagh, runs nearby. Water, good soil and trade routes made this a natural place for people to gather and to stay.

And they gathered very early. Excavations here show that Tell Brak was already a large settlement in the fourth millennium before Christ. That is more than five thousand years ago. Archaeologists now count it among the earliest cities in northern Mesopotamia. For a long time, scholars believed that cities first appeared in the far south, in places like Uruk in present-day Iraq. Tell Brak helped change that picture. Here is the first surprise: the north was building cities at roughly the same time, and in its own way.

In ancient texts, the city had a name. It was called Nagar. Clay tablets found at Ebla, a great kingdom in western Syria, mention Nagar as an important power in the third millennium before Christ. The tablets also connect Nagar with a special kind of animal. Its people bred valuable hybrid equids, a cross related to donkeys and wild asses. These animals pulled wagons and were prized by kings. Imagine trained teams of them leaving this plain for royal courts far to the west.

The first major excavations here took place in the late 1930s. They were led by the British archaeologist Max Mallowan. With him came his wife, a writer you probably know: Agatha Christie. She helped on the dig, photographed finds and cleaned objects. Later she wrote a warm, funny memoir about their seasons in this region, called Come, Tell Me How You Live. So the queen of detective fiction once walked these same slopes, looking for clues of a very different kind.

Mallowan's team made one of the strangest discoveries in Near Eastern archaeology. Inside a building now called the Eye Temple, they found thousands of small carved figures. Most are flat pieces of stone with a simple body and one or two large staring eyes on top. Scholars call them eye idols. Nobody knows exactly what they meant. They may have been offerings, or symbols of watchful protection. Picture the floor of a temple covered with countless tiny figures, all looking upward.

The city's story did not end there. Late in the third millennium before Christ, the Akkadian Empire reached this region from the south. The Akkadians were the first rulers to unite much of Mesopotamia under one crown. On this mound, archaeologists found a massive mud-brick building from that time. Some of its bricks carry the stamped name of Naram-Sin, one of the most powerful Akkadian kings. The building was probably a fortified storehouse or administrative centre. Here is the second surprise: a king's name, pressed into clay, survived longer than his empire did.

After the 1930s, the site rested for decades. Then, from the 1970s, a long British project under David and Joan Oates returned to Tell Brak. Their team, and later teams led by other archaeologists, worked here season after season. They uncovered houses, temples, workshops and palaces from many periods. One of these was a palace from the kingdom of Mitanni, a powerful state of the second millennium before Christ. Slowly, layer by layer, the full timeline of the city came into view.

Newer research looked beyond the main mound. Smaller sites around it show that early Brak was not one tight walled town. It seems to have grown from several clusters of settlement that slowly merged across the landscape. Nearby, archaeologists also found evidence of violent deaths from the early city's time. These discoveries suggest that growth was not always peaceful. Early city life brought trade and craft, but also conflict. The plain around you holds more than the mound alone.

As you walk, notice how the surface changes. In some places you see old excavation trenches, with straight cut walls and visible bands of colour. Each band is a different layer of life: a floor, a fire, a collapse, a rebuilding. Where trenches are open, you may see the edges of mud-brick walls. Mud brick melts slowly in the rain, so these walls look soft and rounded now. Please do not climb on them. Every footstep wears them a little more.

This region has lived through serious conflict in recent years, and conditions can change quickly. Heritage sites across Syria have suffered damage and looting. Because of that, what you see today may differ from older photographs or descriptions. Some areas may be closed or fenced. Treat the place gently. Leave every shard where you find it. A broken piece of pottery tells archaeologists far more on the ground than it ever could in a pocket.

Now stand still for a moment near the highest point you can safely reach. Turn slowly in a full circle. Notice the long, flat horizon and the low lines of nearby villages. Feel the wind and listen to how far sound travels out here. Below you, layer under layer, are the floors of people who farmed, traded, prayed and argued in this place for thousands of years. As you walk back down, look again at the ground. Those small pieces of clay are the last pages of a very old city.