Tell Mozan - The Epigraphic Finds of the Sixth Season
Lucio Milano
MONOGRAPHIC JOURNALS OF THE NEAR EAST
SYRO-MESOPOTAMIAN STUDIES 5/1 (July 1991)
A publication of IIMAS - The International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies
1. Introduction - G. Buccellati and M. Kelly-Buccellati
1.1 The sixth season of excavations at Tell Mozan
We present in this fascicle a brief preliminary report on the sixth season of excavations at Tell Mozan, in which pride of place is given to the single most important find of that season - two cuneiform tablets of the latter part of the third millennium. As the second in our sequence of official excavation reports, this monograph deals first with the broader background of the sixth season as a whole; it also takes up is some detail the issue of the general archaeological and specific stratigraphic context in which the tablets are situated.
Excavations at Tell Mozan are made possible through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation, the S. H. Kress Foundation, the Martin Foundation, Neutrogena Corporation, and various private donors. The Mozan Archaeological Project is under the overall sponsorship of IIMAS - The International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies, with the collaboration of the University of California, Los Angeles; California State University, Los Angeles; and the University of Rome.
As always, we benefitted fully from the invaluable assistance of our hosts and colleagues in the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, both in Damascus and in Hassaka. We wish in particular to acknowledge the warm spirit of collegiality with which we were received by Dr. Ali Abu-Assaf, the new Director General. It was in fact a great pleasure for us that during our first season in Mozan since his taking the leadership of the Directorate General, he was able to accompany the Minister of Culture of the Syrian Arab Republic, Dr. Najah Attar, on a visit to the site, together with the Governor of the Province of Hassaka, Mr. Muhammad Mustafa Miro, and with Dr. Adnan Bounni, Director of Excavations.
We are always mindful of the fact that if we have been able to a make a strong commitment to a long term and ambitious program of archaeological work in Syria it is due in large measure to the unqualified support that we have received over the years from the Syrian authorities, who have been unfailing in both providing every possible assistance in a11 practical needs and showing at the same time the greatest interest in our intellectual concerns. The official visit of the Minister and the Director General was in this respect especially symbolic coming as it did upon completion of our new Expedition House, which will allow us to implement a much more effective program of excavation and laboratory research over the coming years.
3. Philological presentation - L. Milano
3.1 Introduction
The two Old Akkadian cuneiform tablets presented in this article are the first epigraphical documents found in a well-stratified context at Tell Mozan since the beginning of the archaeological excavations at the site in 1984. In spite of their being fragmentary and rather poor in content, the two documents are of the greatest significance, especially considering the very limited amount of textual material dating back to the 3rd millennium B.C., coming from the Upper Khabur region.
In fact, information about this area during the Sargonic and Ur III periods is necessarily based more on archaeological than on written sources. The only available written records from this region are a few Old Akkadian cuneiform inscriptions (on bricks, bullae and clay tablets) from Tell Brak and Chagar Bazar, recovered in the course of regular excavations, and some other documents coming from private dealers, whose origin is still a matter of discussion.
The small group of Old Akkadian inscriptions recovered during Mallowan's excavations at Brak has been increased recently by new and interesting epigraphical finds from the same site, consisting mainly of economic and administrative texts.
The documents bought on the antiquities market would be extremely important, were it not for the lack of data about their archaeological context, common to all of them. They are the seal of Daguna (written in Akkadian), and the famous Hurrian text with the dedication of a temple to the god Nergal by the king of Urkish, Tish-atal (Ti-is'-a-ral en-dan Ur-kes'-ki). The provenance of the lion sculptures on which the inscription was engraved is unknown, but Tell Mozan has been suggested recently as the best candidate. If the Tish-atal inscription dates to the Ur III period, as generally accepted, it would be slightly later than the other important text mentioning a king of Urkish, the so called "Samarra tablet," probably belonging to the end of the Sargonic period or to the beginning of the Gutean period.
These being the limits of our sources, the new Old Akkadian texts from Mozan add some important elements to the reconstruction of the earliest history of the Khabur region: on the one hand they confirm the spread of the Old Akkadian writing tradition in a peripheral area of the empire; on the other hand, they raise the interesting question of the relationship between the local culture such as it is documented by the Hurrian inscriptions attested so far, and the influence of an Akkadian linguistic and cultural milieu, certainly implying an interaction of different ethnic groups.