A 'Royal' Cemetery from Tell Umm el-Marra: Ideology and Mortuary Ritual in Early Urban Syria

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Support from the National Science Foundation will allow Dr. Glenn Schwartz to excavate an elite, possibly royal mortuary complex at Umm el-Marra, Syria, dating to the period of Syria's first urban civilization, ca. 2500-2200 BC. Previous excavation and survey work based at Umm el-Marra, located east of Aleppo in northern Syria, have revealed that the site was the predominant urban center of the Jabbul plain throughout the Bronze Age in the third and second millennia BC. Fieldwork at Umm el-Marra in 2002 and 2004 disclosed the presence of six tombs on the site's central high point containing artifacts of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli and the skeletal remains of up to eight individuals per tomb. Located nearby were installations containing the remains of sacrificed donkeys and human infants, indicating the rich (and somewhat disturbing) world of elite mortuary ritual in this period. In 2006 and 2007, Dr. Schwartz plans to conduct two excavation seasons in an area of 700 square meters in order to complete the excavation of the mortuary complex, to be followed by a year of analysis and publication. The size and spatial limits of the complex will be determined, additional tombs and installations will be excavated, and deeper excavations will permit the investigation of the origins and early history of this royal cemetery. Analysis of the human skeletal remains will provide information on the family relationships of the people buried in the tombs, addressing the question of whether these structures were the mausolea of individual dynasties, as well as supplying information on data on diet, health, and lifestyle. Through completion of the excavation of the royal cemetery, the proposed research will provide data on the ideological underpinnings of the first states in Syria, expanding our understanding of the role of ideology and religion in early urban societies, factors that have been neglected in previous research. A hypothesis proposing that the Syrian elites reinforced their authority through veneration of elite ancestors will be tested, and new data on ritual human sacrifice (implied by the tomb results) and gender and status hierarchies in early Syrian urban societies will be obtained. This research can be expected to reveal important new information on the dominant elites of early urban Syria, the bases of their power, and the emergence of Syrian urban civilization. Through such data, we will be able to better understand the different paths to civilization taken by the cultures of the ancient Near East, comparing Syrian urban societies with the better-known cases from Mesopotamia and Egypt.The broader impact of this project includes a continuing international partnership between Johns Hopkins University (USA) and the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) as well as the training of American, European, and Middle Eastern students in archaeological fieldwork. Data from the field project will be used in Schwartz's undergraduate and graduate classes, as well as in classes dealing with computer-generated architectural reconstructions at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The research will benefit the wider society by providing important new information on the origins and workings of the earliest urban civilizations, distant predecessors to our own.