Tell Halaf

Start with the ground under your feet. It is pale and dusty, and it crunches softly as you walk. Look closely and you may see small broken pieces of pottery mixed into the earth. To the south, the land opens into wide, flat fields. Nearby, the waters of the Khabur River begin their long journey across northeastern Syria. This low mound looks modest. But it gave its name to a whole chapter of human history.

This is Tell Halaf. A tell is an artificial hill. It rises slowly over centuries as people build, live, demolish, and build again on the same spot. Each layer of mud brick, ash, and rubbish lifts the ground a little higher. So when you stand here, you are standing on top of many towns stacked one above another. The oldest lie deepest. The youngest lie near the surface, under the wind and the grass.

Here is the first surprise. The fame of this place began with a diplomat, not with a university. Max von Oppenheim was a German aristocrat who served his government in the Middle East. In 1899 he heard local stories about stone figures buried in the mound. He came to look, and he found carved stones in the earth. Years later, from 1911 to 1913, he returned with a full expedition. He came back again in 1929.

The deepest layers belong to the Neolithic, the late Stone Age, when people first farmed and lived in permanent villages. Roughly eight thousand years ago, the people here made very fine painted pottery. The clay is thin and well fired. It carries geometric patterns, checkerboards, rosettes, and bull heads in red, black, and cream. Archaeologists later found the same style across a huge area of northern Mesopotamia. They called it the Halaf culture, after this mound.

Think about what that means. Villages hundreds of kilometres apart shared one artistic language, thousands of years before writing. The Halaf people also built round houses, which archaeologists often call tholoi, a Greek word for round buildings. Some had rectangular rooms attached, like an entrance hall. So the name you hear in museum labels from Iraq to Turkey comes back to this one spot by the river.

Thousands of years later, a very different town stood here. In the early first millennium before the common era, this was Guzana, a city of the Aramaeans. The Aramaeans were a people who spread across Syria and spoke Aramaic, a language that later became widespread across the Near East. Guzana was the capital of a small kingdom called Bit Bahiani, which means the House of Bahiani, after an ancestor of its rulers.

The name of this city may sound familiar. The Hebrew Bible mentions a place called Gozan. The Second Book of Kings says the Assyrians deported Israelites to Halah, to Habor, and to the river of Gozan. Many scholars connect Habor with the Khabur River, and Gozan with Guzana. So this quiet mound may appear, briefly, in one of the most widely read books in the world.

A ruler named Kapara left the strongest mark on the Aramaean city. Inscriptions name him as the builder of a grand palace on the mound. Its entrance had no ordinary columns. Instead, huge stone figures stood on the backs of animals and held up the roof. Along the walls ran rows of small carved slabs in dark basalt and light limestone. They showed lions, hunters, scorpion men, and strange winged creatures.

Now comes the second surprise, and it is a sad one. Oppenheim took a large share of his finds to Berlin. He opened his own Tell Halaf Museum there in 1930, in a former factory building. During the Second World War, in 1943, a bombing raid hit the museum. The fire and the cold water from the hoses shattered the basalt. Many people thought the collection was lost forever.

But the fragments were not thrown away. They were stored in museum cellars for decades. After the reunification of Germany, conservators began a long project to sort them. They worked with many thousands of pieces, like an enormous puzzle without a picture on the box. Slowly, statues stood up again. In 2011 the restored works went on public display in Berlin. The exhibition title called them the rescued gods.

Not everything left Syria. Part of the finds went to the National Museum of Aleppo. Its main entrance used copies of the great palace figures, so many Syrians knew these faces long before they knew the name Tell Halaf. Later, between 2006 and 2010, a German and Syrian team returned to the mound. They used modern methods to study the city plan and the older excavation trenches.

The recent history of this region is difficult. The war in Syria and later fighting near the Turkish border have affected the area around the site. There have been concerns about damage and illegal digging at many Syrian tells. Conditions here can change quickly. So what you see today may look rough and unprotected. You may find open trenches, scattered stone, and earth banks instead of neat paths and signs.

As you stand here, let your eyes move slowly. Notice the shape of the mound against the sky, and the old trench lines cut into its sides. Notice the shards in the soil, some perhaps painted, all of them older than any written word nearby. Listen for the wind across the fields and the distant sounds of the town. Then take one more look before you leave. This plain earth carried both farmers and kings.