The Construction Inférieure at Tello. A Reassessment

The Construction Inférieure at Tello. A ReassessmentAuthor(s): Harriet CrawfordSource: Iraq, Vol. 49 (1987), pp. 71-76Published by: British Institute for the Study of IraqStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4200266 .

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71

THE CONSTRUCTION INFERIEURE AT TELLO. A REASSESSMENT

By HARRIET CRAWFORD

It has recently been suggested that the Early Dynastic buildings at Tello were so inadequately recorded that they should be excluded from any study of the architecture of the period (Tunca 1984: p. xxi). A re-examination of the published material suggests that this is an unnecessarily defeatist conclusion. A number of possibilities deserve serious consideration, at least insofar as they concern the buildings on Tell K known as the Construction Inferieure and the Maison des Fruits. The evidence presented here is drawn from the summary of the excavations published by Parrot in 1948, and from the earlier work by de Sarzec and Heuzey. The sections and plans are taken from Parrot's plans 13 and 15 and his identifying numbers and letters have been retained for ease of reference (Fig. 1).

The first construction which concerns us here (Fig. 1 (ii)-(iv)), is a pavement of Mosul marble lying 8 48 m above plain level and marked 'a' on Parrot's plan 13. This is the first in a series of building operations (de Sarzec 1884-1912: p. 412) of which the second seems to have been the erection of a single room on the platform, marked on the plan as room 1. The section in the centre of plan 13 marked "Deuxieme etat" (Fig. 1 (iii)) indicates clearly that room 2, which Parrot thought was contemporary with room 1, was in fact a later addition as its exterior wall rests on the later brick packing 'f' and not on pavement 'a'. It should be noted that the section marked "Premier etat" on plan 13 does not appear in the earlier excavation reports and seems to be Parrot's secondary interpretation of the evidence, rather than that of the excavators. It should also be noted that the direction of the North arrow appears to have been reversed on Parrot's plan when compared with the earlier ones. The direction shown on de Sarzec's plans will be used here.

The original room 1 measured 4- 10 x 4 30 m and its corners were roughly oriented to the cardinal points; it had a door on the south-east side which led out onto the pavement of marble slabs, which also formed the floor of the room. In front of the door, on the pavement, lay fragments of a circular relief, possibly the base of a statue as the top suface had two holes in it into which the feet of a statue could have been inserted (Parrot 1948: Fig. 17e). Relief decoration in a similar style was found on the base of the statue of the god Abu from Tell Asmar (Frankfort 1939: P1. 1). Inside the doorway were other fragments including part of a large stele, 2 m wide and 80 cm tall, showing a procession of figures broken off below the waist. Another round-topped fragment shows a bald-headed man and numerical notation, perhaps recording offerings. The fittings of the room certainly suggest a religious function as they include a cross-shaped brick support hollow in the centre, standing 1 80 m high, which the excavators suggest may have supported a standard or even a statue of the god. A group of copper foundation figures was found buried below the pavement in front of this support and a further group had been buried under the west corner of the building. The figures are male with clasped hands, tapering to a point below the waist. Sadly, they are not inscribed. In spite of the absence of an altar, the evidence



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THE CONSTRUCTION INFERIEURE AT TELLO. A REASSESSMENT 73

suggests that this room was a shrine. The orientation, the fixtures and the presence of a commemorative stele, which seem frequently to have been deposited in religious precincts, would all support this conclusion. The great stele of Ur-Nammu, for instance, was found in the temenos at Ur. Parrot marks a bench, 'd' on his plan of the "Premier etat", but this is not mentioned by Heuzey who refers to a revetment wall in the same position, standing 2 m high, and apparently relating to the second phase of the building (Fig. 1 (iv)).

The next phase of the building saw room 1 infilled and a packing of baked brick, 'f'on the plan, built up around it, almost blocking the original doorway and rising to 2 15 m above the pavement. The top 0 65 m of the original walls was left showing above the baked brick coffer and the interior of the room was filled to the same height. Beyond the coffer the pavement was raised, this time with unbaked brick marked 'e' on the plan. It is at this time that room 2 seems to have been added, with a baked brick floor laid at the same height as the infilling of room 1, to form a sort of ante-chamber. If a door is reconstructed in the centre of the wall separating rooms 1 and 2, we have a plan which is reminiscent of other bi-partite plans of the period such as that of one of the shrines in the Inanna temple at Nippur in level VII (Hansen and Dales 1962). It must be said that the presence of a bitumen-lined cavity (see below) in the middle of the cross wall between rooms 1 and 2 argues against the presence of a door here. Level VII at Nippur is dated to the ED II period so is probably very slightly earlier than the Construction Inferieure. The continued absence of an altar in room 1 in the later phases of the building is perhaps an obstacle to the interpretation of this building too as having religious significance, but on the other hand, the whole complex was carefully sealed in by later builders and seems to have been too important to have been merely levelled.

A curious feature was observed by the excavators. Fifteen bitumen-lined, vertical, bottle-shaped cavities were found in the walls of rooms 1 and 2 of this second building stage. They were placed at regular intervals to form transverse pairs across the rooms with one on the cross wall. It is possible that they represented foundation deposits for the later stage of the building, but this is rather unlikely as they are above floor level and nothing was found in them except for transverse impressions of reeds in the bitumen lining (Fig. 1 (v)). These impressions suggest that the cavities may possibly have been sockets for the support of reed bundles bound together with reed thongs, of a type used to support reed screens which are then thickly plastered to form the superstructure on mud-brick bases. This type of building is commonly found in southern Iraq today and the excavators of House D at Khafaje report the presence of two walls in room 10 made by this technique (Delougaz 1940: p. 94). The sockets are only 15 cm in diameter at the mouth so are too small to have supported the great reed ribs seen in the mudhifs of the marshes but could have supported flimsy structures. Heuzey proposed a similar explanation for the cavities, but then abandoned the idea in favour of de Sarzec's suggestion that the cavities were containers for storing liquids. A further pair of cavities was found in the floor of room 2 near the partition wall and could have supported the uprights for the proposed door between the two rooms. Finally, four more were found outside the door of room 2 possibly supporting a portico of some sort. A portico supported on cedar wood pillars is proposed for the exterior of the Maison des Fruits by de Sarzec. If



74 HARRIET CRAWFORD

this somewhat flimsy type of walling was being used in the second stage of the Construction Inferieure, it may suggest that this phase was fairly short-lived.

After an unknown interval of time, which we have suggested may have been quite short, both rooms were filled in and sealed with a pavement of baked bricks inscribed with the name of Ur-Nanse. Rubble was piled onto the pavement to level the site and 70 cm of fill was laid down before the pavement below the Maison des Fruits was constructed. As two of the inner walls of the Maison lie almost exactly above the inner faces of the earlier room 1, it seems possible that the sealing of the earlier building and the erection of its successor, were all part of the same operation as the masons were obviously aware of the position and plan of the earlier building.

It is not possible to date the Construction Inferieure with any degree of precision. The possible parallel with the Inanna temple of ED II date at Nippur has been mentioned and the attribution of the sealing pavement to Ur-Nanse gives a terminus ante quem. The objects, and especially the inscribed items said to have been found associated with the building come in many cases from the rubble infill and post-date the building itself. They include inscriptions of both Ur-Nanse and Entemena, the latter of whom post-dates the sealing pavement. The balance of the evidence seems to suggest that the Construction should probably be placed in the period just prior to that of Ur-Nanse and may indeed date back to ED II in its earlier phase. It has also been noted that the second phase of the building may have been fairly short.

The Mazson des Fruits (Fig. 1 (i)), built, as we have seen, above the carefully sealed-in remains of the earlier building, is a different type of construction, and at present an even more enigmatic one. The information relating to it is still more fragmentary and includes one section at the bottom of plan 13 which shows the relationship of the walls of the main room of the upper and lower buildings (Fig. 1 (iv)). The plans and text tell us little more than the bare bones. The Maison consisted of an outer wall forming a rectangle 10-50 m x 7 30 m with its corners correctly oriented to the points of the compass. No entrance was identified and the walls only survived to a height of about 1 m. Inside this rectangular box are two "rooms" separated from the external wall and from each other by passages. The floors of the rooms and the passages are coated with bitumen. The larger enclosure, room A, is about 4 m square and two door sockets inscribed with the name of Ur-Nanse were found against the south-east wall; the southern one is a standard shape and size, but the eastern one is shaped approximately like an inverted cone with flattened base, 0 37 m high and tapering from 0 25 m to 0 20 m in width with a socket in the top (Heuzey 1900: p. 1, Fig. 5). If these sockets are in their original positions, which seems possible as no other finds were apparently found on the floor, then we may have a door on this south-east wall. The smaller enclosure has one wall deeply recessed, but apart from this we know only that the remains of a bundle of blades, the largest 0-22 m long with an indecipherable inscription, were found on the floor. There is no evidence for roofing and the possibility that the building may have been partly or completely open to the sky must be kept in mind. The building was destroyed by fire, which frequently preserves fragments of roof beams if these have been present. The building, like its predecessors, was carefully sealed in in the Ur III period and this, together with its orientation, its position, and the scatter of important objects found on the terrace outside the building, suggest it too had a



THE CONSTRUCTION INFERIEURE AT TELLO. A REASSESSMENT 75

religious significance. The finds included pieces of the Stele of the Vultures, copper bulls' heads and a standard with a loop at one end, in total 3 70 m long. The base of this standard appears to have been inserted into a socket and one remembers the cone-shaped so-called door socket in the east corner of room A.

The Maison des Fruits is associated with a number of foundation tablets, all of which refer to the Ab-girsu or store-house, and Heuzey has suggested that this was the contemporary name for the Maison. It seems possible that it also has some characteristics in common with another enigmatic building, the earlier Riemchen- gebdude in the Eanna precinct at Uruk, which was sunk into a section of the Steinstift temple (Heinrich 1982: p. 72). The excavators of this building interpreted it as a place where sacred objects were ritually disposed of after the Steinstift temple went out of use. Both buildings are rectangular, with other rooms "nesting" inside an enclosure wall; both have corners oriented to the cardinal points; both may have been unroofed; both are closely associated with earlier shrines and with rich finds; both were burnt and then carefully filled in. In spite of these superficial similarities, it is impossible to tell if these buildings also had an identity of function, or indeed, what that function might have been. The Riemchengebdude is much larger, 18 m x 20 m, and as its name indicates was built of Riemchen bricks, thus placing it earlier even than the Construction Inferieure, which, like the Maison des Fruits, was built of plano-convex bricks. More importantly, the excavators of the Riemchengebdude say that both the building and its contents, which were laid out on mats in the insulating corridor and in the central room, were deliberately destroyed by fire. The doors were then blocked and the building filled in. There is no evidence for such a ritual in the case of the Maison and it should be noted that the majority of the finds here came from outside the building, on the surrounding terrace. It may be possible to query some of the deductions of the excavators at Uruk, but this discrepancy would seem to discredit too close a comparison being drawn between the two buildings.

With the admittedly indifferent evidence available, it has proved possible to reconstruct the phases in the building of the Construction Infirieure with some degree of certainty. The Maison des Fruits remains something of a mystery, but such monu- ments, which were obviously of considerable importance to their builders, should not be allowed to fall into a 19th century limbo because the standards to which the excavators worked were very different from our own. The canon of religious architecture in Mesopotamia in the early third millenium was varied and complex and we should not artificially restrict it beyond the tight constraints already imposed by the twin accidents of survival and recovery.

Acknowledgements My warmest thanks are due to Jane Moon Killick and Dr. Dominique Collon for

help in preparing this paper.

Bibliography Delougaz, Pinhas, 1940. The temple Oval at Khafaje, Chicago. Frankfort, Henri, 1939. Sculpture of the third millenium from Tell Asmar and Khafaje, Chicago. Hansen, D. P. and Dales, G. F., 1962. The temple of Inanna, Queen of Heaven at Nippur, Archaeology

15, pp. 76-79.



76 HARRIET CRAWFORD

Heinrich, Ernst, 1982. Tempel und Heiligtumer im alten Mesopotamien, Berlin. Heuzey, Uon, 1900. Une villa chaldeenne vers l'an 4000 avant notre ere, Paris. Parrot, A., 1948. Tello, Paris. de Sarzec, E., 1884-1912. Decouvertes en Chaldee, Paris. Tunca, 0., 1984. Recherches sur l'architecture religieuse protodynastique en Me'sopotamie, 2 volumes, Akkadica,

Supplement 2, Leuven.



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The Construction Inférieure at Tello. A Reassessment