Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
74. Michael Danti and John MacGinnis. Nimrud: post-conflict archaeology in the heartland of Assyria
The Mosul region is the focus of renewed activity by local and foreign teams. Archaeology there inevitably works differently now. Michael and John talk about the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program, including conservation and reconstruction work, excavation, and capacity building.
2:34Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program
3:39 Nimrud and Nineveh
8:29why those sites? Who sets the goals?
12:56exhibition and online resources
13:47conservation and reconstruction
18:08long term commitment
20:06the dig team
22:38latest results from Nimrud
31:26kudurru
34:46architectural remains
37:01inscriptions
39:34publication, research, collaboration
42:51working in Mosul region
45:52engaging communities
50:26what's next?
https://www.penn.museum/about/press-room/press-releases/preserving-assyria
https://www.penn.museum/calendar/423/the-deep-dig
Music by Ruba Hillawi
Website: http://wedgepod.org
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Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand. The starting point of this episode is a report on recent excavations at the Assyrian site of Nimrud. The grand old capital was one of the first major excavations in Iraq, being one of the targets of Layard in the mid-nineteenth century already. Perhaps surprisingly, many important questions still remain to be answered. And the old excavations themselves need to be understood. The excavations are only one component of work at the site. A lot of effort is going into conservation, reconstruction, and helping to recover the site from ISIS damage. Work at Nimrud is itself only one part of an even wider project, focusing on the sity of Mosul and its region. Our guests are highly experienced archaeologists. They explain the work of the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program, taking Nimrud as an example of post-conflict archaeology. So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guests. Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
John MacGinnis:Hello, Jon. Great to see you.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Michael Danti:Hello. My name is Michael Danti. I'm an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the program director for the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program. We're preserving and protecting Iraqi and Syrian cultural heritage impacted by recent conflicts. And we have two archaeological programs in northern Iraq at the cities of Nineveh and Nimrud.
John MacGinnis:I'm Dr John MacGinnis, a Mesopotamian archaeologist and assyriologist based in Cambridge. I'm working on Dr Danti's project at Nimrud. Previously at the British Museum co-leading the Iraq training scheme for Iraqi archeologists there.
Jon Taylor:Could you maybe tell us first a little bit about the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program, please? What is that?
Michael Danti:The Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program was
Jon Taylor:I think we're going to focus on Nimrud mostly today, founded at Penn in 2018, really as an outgrowth of my work with the American Society of Overseas Research cultural heritage initiatives. I had been monitoring cultural heritage for the State Department with a team during the conflict in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. And in 2018 with post-conflict conditions, a new project was established through State Department funding and ALEPH Foundation funding to work to assess Iraqi heritage, primarily in areas impacted by ISIS, to do emergency response and restoration projects there. And really our focus has been on the ancient city of Mosul, or old Mosul, but our project also includes two archaeological initiatives at Nimrud and Nineveh. And as you know, these two sites were heavily impacted by ISIS, where the the militants conducted performative, deliberate destructions of ancient monuments. Many of them reconstructed, but founded on the bases or foundations of ancient Neo-Assyrian structures. ISIS also conducted an extensive looting campaign across northern Iraq, and both sites were impacted as well. So IHSP starts with assessment of these heritage assets. Then we conducted in the early post-conflict period emergency response projects to mitigate ongoing destruction, and then since that time, we've been undertaking larger reconstruction and restoration projects across the region. aren't we, but we also mentioned Nineveh. I wonder, could you maybe set the scene a little bit maybe? They're fairly famous sites within the field, but could you say a few words about why Nineveh and Nimrud are important as sites and their relationship to Mosul, please?
Michael Danti:Sure. Nimrud, located on the Tigris River, is famous as the early administrative capital of the neo-Assyrian period. A capital that was founded by Ashurnasirpal in the ninth century. Famous for, of course, the excavations there also of Henry Layard in the mid-19th century. So the site has, you know, played a quintessential role in the early Neo-Assyrian state, the proto-empire period, if you will. And then it had a central role in the founding of Near Eastern archaeology through Layard's excavations there. And as we all know, also worked at Nineveh. So, Nineveh being the later capital established under Sennacherib, on what was the site of a provincial capital city. Sennacherib turned that into his imperial capital. Both sites again central for the founding of Near Eastern archaeology, the start of cuneiform studies, the British Museum's collections, and any number of other museums' collections. So many institutions have antiquities from these sites. Since the time of Layard, both sites have been fairly regularly excavated and analysed. But what's ironic about it is how little we actually know about these two sites. We have a wealth of texts. We have a wealth of artefacts. But most of the early excavations, as we know, were rather poorly documented. So there's a real opportunity in going back to these two sites now to do scientific excavation, to better understand those early excavations and to preserve and protect both sites for the Iraqi people, since they're both threatened by urban expansion and agriculture and more recently, by terrorist activity.
John MacGinnis:Can I just add one thing to that? Of the four Assyrian capitals, of course, Ashur, Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad, Nimrud really stands out. Actually, there's been a lot of work there, and it's not so easy to find new places to easily access Assyrian remains. Nineveh--the work there is extremely important, and several teams are working in Nineveh. But it's a very damaged site, and very threatened. Khorsabad, actually, is very available for work, but it didn't have the depth of occupation which Nimrud did. So of the four great Assyrian capitals, Nimrud really stands out in that it's a huge site, and although it's received huge attention in the past, as Michael said, there's also a huge amount to do there. And it's largely free of modern buildings and very easy to access.
Michael Danti:Yeah, the late Assyrian remains in most parts of the site right below the surface, whereas you have the huge overburden levels, quote, unquote, but really interesting post-imperial Assyrian occupation at Nineveh. We'd like to see more emphasis on those time periods as well. But all of these sites are now being excavated too, John, right? So it's a really interesting time for the study of the Neo-Assyrian period, where there are ... there's a large number of excavations out in the field, working really closely with the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to open access to these sites for visitors, and enhance that access; to make the sites much more approachable; to improve the visitor experience; and to preserve the sites, mainly from urban encroachment and agricultural activities at this point. But also damage mechanisms linked to climate change.
John MacGinnis:Absolutely. To follow up, it's a very exciting time. Of course, for more than two decades, it was impossible, certainly for Western archaeologists to work in central Assyria. That did have a knock-on effect, that a lot of work was done on the provincial archaeology of the Assyrian empire. But the opportunity now to come back to central Assyria and work on the great metropoles of the Assyrian empire is fantastic.
Jon Taylor:Uh-hm. You have very large, complex sites. And there's a the research agenda is partly there. There's a conservation aspect to it. You mentioned the State Board. Whose idea was it to work at these sites? Were you approached by the State Board? Is this a primarily a research question? So we started off really in our work in Mosul for the
Michael Danti:Yeah, we were. We were awarded a grant to investigate, excavate, the destroyed remains of the Mashqi Gate of Nineveh, "the gate of the watering places". It's a gate on that the western side of the city, built by Sennacherib, of course. It had been reconstructed by Tariq Madhloum, starting in 1968. Madhloum excavated the gateway, and then in the 1970s rebuilt it. And then ISIS, for whatever reason, Neo-Assyrian period, working there. And John and I early on went in working with Fadhil Mohammed at the Iraqi State knocked it all down, creating a new archaeological mound that Board in Nineveh inspections to excavate and investigate the ISIS destruction level. And we quickly found that the lower needed to be investigated. archaeological deposits at the gate had never been excavated. Really exciting. The period of Sennacherib and up till the time of the closing years of the Neo-Assyrian period. So there were still intact destruction level deposits from the 612 BC sack of Nineveh. But we found that most of the actual Sennacherib floor level down below everything was largely unexcavated. We found a chamber there that contained reused or recycled Sennacherib reliefs from Sennacherib's third campaign, which was really exciting. And it was about that time that we were thinking about what else we could be doing in terms of archaeological excavations that were more akin to traditional archaeological research. Let's say pre-ISIS type of work that many of us were doing in Syria or Iran prior to this. Where we could work with our local colleagues to do longer term research projects, but include a conservation element as well. We proposed the south mound of Nineveh, working with Professor Ali Jabouri. Ali Jabouri, who's been on your podcast, thought that Nineveh would be an excellent choice. We didn't think we would really have a shot at working at Nimrud. So we didn't ask for it. {LAUGHS} And we were told, "No, you can't have Nineveh" by Baghdad, "but instead, we would like you to work at Nimrud." And I thought they were joking. {LAUGHS} Such an amazing opportunity to work with the Iraqi SBH at such a famous site. We've been pinching ourselves ever since, haven't we, John? {LAUGHS}
John MacGinnis:Absolutely. I mean, every day, every morning, every afternoon at Nimrud, look up from working, I can't believe that we're there on site, working on this greatest of archaeological sites. Just want to pick up one thing about the Mashqi gate in Nineveh, in addition to the reliefs, which Michael mentioned, also some pretty interesting small finds. And I'll just mention two, both epigraphic. One is a Lamashtu plaque, a very finely made Lamashtu plaque. Another is tablets from the series Bit Rimki, Sumerian incantations written in Neo-Babylonian script, but from the Neo-Assyrian period, of course. Both of these are magical in aspect. So our working theory is that the Mashqi gate very likely had an office of a magician, and that makes sense controlling the forces, the magical forces, malign forces, to stop them coming into the city.
Michael Danti:That's been a real pleasure, excavating this chamber hadn't been excavated by Tariq Madhloum for whatever reason. They knew that it was there. It probably leads to a staircase or a ramp that goes up to the upper levels of the gateway. We have an exhibit opening at Penn Museum on February 8 of this year entitled"Preserving Assyria" that will be presenting our work at Mashqi gate, all of our efforts with the Iraqi SBAH and that exhibit will have photographs of these objects, similar types of objects that are in the pen collections to those that were discovered at Mashqi gate, and 3D printouts of some portions of the Sennacherib reliefs that we found there. Should be really exciting.
Jon Taylor:Hmmm. This sounds fantastic. Is there an online version or component that people can see, if we can't make it to Penn?
Michael Danti:There will be. There will also be a deep dig lecture series centred around the exhibit. So there should be quite a bit of online content. And then there'll be an online guide to the exhibit as well. So a lot of the newer technologies for presenting the ancient Middle East. And the exhibit really is focusing on these international efforts to preserve and protect heritage with local stakeholders, especially in post-conflict type modalities. So, yeah, again, we were really surprised that we would be working at Nimrud. And we started excavations in 2022, and we've been working at both sites, sort of in tandem since that time.
Jon Taylor:Wow, fantastic. On the conservation side, is the idea to be active, to prevent encroachment, to preserve what's there in the state that it's in? Or are you going to repair reconstructions, produce new reconstructions to encourage tourism? What's the balance?
Michael Danti:Both. To study both sites; come to a better understanding, especially what was going on in the 19th, early 20th century excavations. And expand out from there. We've already started that, expanding into new areas that are on the peripheries of Loftus, Layard's and Rassam's areas. Especially at Nimrud, working on some of the more difficult parts of the site. So the northern temple precinct, which was pretty poorly excavated using tunnels, you know, in the mid-19th century. And then in the archaeological nightmare, as it's been described by David Kertai, of the area south of the Northwest Palace of Nimrud, or the upper chambers area, the Shalmaneser III building area. So to work in these areas, where there are just so many questions about what was found in the 19th century and what it all means. Can we come to a better understanding of the Victorian era excavators by re-excavating their trenches? And then to preserve both of the sites. And then, once we've established the capacities, to repair the damage that the Islamic State has done to the site in knocking down some of the reconstructions. For example, the monumental entrance to the Ishtar Sharrat Niphi temple, which ISIS, bulldozed in 2015/2016. There's damage to the ziggurat. Horrible damage to the Northwest Palace that's being repaired by Iraqi SBAH in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution. And then there's the Nabu Temple, which has also been damaged. It's going to be a really long road to recovery, because there's diminished capacities. For example, to rebuild these sites, we need Assyrian-sized baked bricks, and there's really nowhere to get those. So we need to establish brick kilns, re-establish best practices and international standards and reconstructing ancient archaeological sites. And to make these reconstructions sustainable, not to damage the site to the archaeological remains below. And in establishing these reconstructions, ensuring that there's nothing that we're doing there that's going to introduce new damage mechanisms; run-off from the rooves above these reconstructions, causing erosion. Or putting Portland cement into one of the buildings that would introduce salts to the site, for example. So it's again, this could easily be for John and I, you know, easily the rest of our careers working on repairing this damage with the Iraqis, re-establishing these capacities and re-opening access to this vital cultural heritage for the Iraqi people.
John MacGinnis:That's right. One more thing on the conservation front--in addition to the architectural conservation, there is, of course, the need for artefactual conservation. We've excavated a lot of artifacts, and extremely interesting ones as well. And we have a fully-equipped conservation lab on site, which has been assembled as directed by our Dutch colleague, Ewout Koek. So all the materials coming out of the ground receive a treatment right there on site.
Michael Danti:Even with Nimrud and Nineveh, you know, the challenges are great, because there aren't accurate maps of these sites. Again, going into Nimrud, there's incredible variation from one scholar to the other in the way that they locate the temples of the ziggurat complex in the northern temple precinct. As much as 14 meters in variation between the alignments of the Ishtar Sharrat Niphi Temple and the Ninurta Temple at the ziggurat, which is really unacceptable. We're working with our colleague, Dr William Halford at the Penn Museum to create an accurate map of Nimrud with an UTM grid. Things that we take for granted in most areas when we begin archaeological work. We just don't have that in these large Neo-Assyrian sites. So it's again, you know, diminished capacities, incredible architectural and artefactual remains. But also kind of back up, and do some of the real baseline work just to get started.
Jon Taylor:Wow, that's incredible, isn't it? It's quite surprising that it's in that kind of condition. With the volume and the complexity of the work, what is the scale of the commitment that you're able to give? You know, ordinarily, an archaeological permit will be five years. Is that the case here? With the program, are you able to commit to a longer term co-operation on the site?
Michael Danti:Yeah, we've done our first three year permit. We're now on a five year permit to continue work. We want to make a long term commitment to Nimrud, especially. Easily, again, you know, the project could be decadal. There's so much that needs to be done there. The lower city's never been touched, really. And then you have Fort Shalmaneser as well that needs excavations and conservation work. There's a real opportunity for a large multi-national project. We continue to expand the project as we go. Fortunately, we have so many enthusiastic and well-trained Iraqi colleagues working with us. What also makes the project different is that it's a real collaboration. We have, you know, wonderful colleagues from the Nineveh inspections office that are there with us. And so we've been spending three months a year at Nimrud. Usually we do a month and a half in the spring, and a month and a half in the fall. John and I are able to go out to the field, you know, when the weather is really nice. {LAUGH} So, you know, it's a gorgeous place to be. And, you know, late spring and then in the fall into November. So we really feel really lucky to be out there. But again, it's also can be kind of depressing, because there's so much damage to the site. As you walk around Nimrud, you have the destroyed remains in the Northwest Palace. The ziggurat has been levelled. The Ishtar Sharrat Niphi and Nabu temples were also levelled. And even the British dig house where Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan lived was bulldozed by ISIS. So there are debris fields everywhere.
Jon Taylor:Okay, so we'll come to results in a moment. But before we get there, you touched then a little bit on the dig team. Could you say a few words about what it takes to do this kind of work at a site like Nimrud? Who's involved, and what kind of roles are they playing?
Michael Danti:Well, we have a large multi-disciplinary team of international archaeologists and experts. But also archaeologists from the Nineveh inspections office. So I've already mentioned Dr William Hafford, who's doing mapping and supervises excavations. In the Ishtar and Ninurta temples, and he has a number of people working with him. Dr John MacGinnis, who's our field epigrapher, and is working on the Adad-nirari III Palace, south of the Northwest Palace; the so called "upper chambers". And we have a range of experts: Ewout Koek leads our conservation team. And we have Grant Frame and Eckhart Frahm working on texts as well. And we continue to expand. We'll have an expanded focus on environmental archaeology in future seasons, bringing in faunal experts and ethnobotanists to work on the samples that we're collecting there. You name it, we've got it, and we need experts to work on it. We have large collections of glazed bricks, ivories. Right, John? I mean, it's a little overwhelming, sometimes in a good way, when you're working at Nimrud, because your first major level is the 614/612 destruction deposit. So there's a wealth of material there. And you know that, in combination with the architectural preservation we're working with Saleem al-Manan and David Michelmore as two of our experts for preserving the architecture and re-establishing best practices in masonry conservation. They've worked with us on a number of sites across northern Iraq that incorporate traditional mud brick and baked brick architecture. But also the use of Mosul marble architectural ornaments. So the preservation of alabaster in finger quotes, right, or "Mosul marble" is a large part of the project as well. Again, what these first three seasons, what John and I have been really doing, working with Iraqis, is to move all of our equipment in; establish a base camp at Nimrud, where we can live; and, as John mentioned, set up a conservation lab, so that we have the facilities, the housing for everyone that's needed to be working at the site long term.
Jon Taylor:Okay, then, shall we turn to the results? What have you found out from working at Nimrud? What's the news?
Michael Danti:Well, starting off with the northern temple precinct, we began our work in 2022 clearing away the debris from the ISIS destruction of the Ishtar Sharrat Niphi temple. They had knocked down the monumental entrance where Layard and Muzahim Hussein had found colossal lion sculptures. Layard found two leading into the main cella of the Ishtar temple. And Muzahim Hussein had found two at the Ishtar Gate at the eastern end of the temple. So there was a lot of modern debris that needed to be cleared away. While we were doing that, we excavated an area at the western end of the temple, and what we initially thought was part of the Ishtar temple, where ISIS had been using a front loader--a big mechanised excavator--to dig a looter hole. And we quickly found out that this was a double gateway, a gate with two sets of doors, that led to the west. One of our objectives was to link the Ishtar temple to the Ninurta temple, and remove the error in the maps; the existing maps of the temple precinct. And excavating this, we found, we knew it was there, but we found a stele, probably of Ashurnasirpal II with the god Ninurta. This had been just barely missed by the ISIS front loader, and then preserved in the post-conflict period by the Iraqi SBAH out of Nineveh inspections. Mr. Abdel Ghani was instrumental in preserving it. We excavated that and next to it, we found a marble sockle, that John determined held a statue of Shalmaneser III. Now this gateway had obviously been burned in 614/612 BC. There were charred cedar beams on the floor, ash and charcoal everywhere from the gates and the burning of the rafters above. But prior to the fire, the stele and sockle had clearly been deliberately attacked, probably by the Babylonians and Medes. There's a lot of evidence across Nimrud of this deliberate destruction during the downfall of the Neo-Assyrian empire. The floor of this gateway has inscribed limestone slabs that have Ashurnasirpal II inscriptions. There's a monumental threshold at the far west end of the gateway of Ashurnasirpal II. And on the floor we found embossed and incised bronze gate bands, à la Balawat, preserved in the burned remains of the door leaf. So very exciting finds in our first season there. John can better describe our work in the upper chambers, palace of Adad-nirari III.
John MacGinnis:I'll do that. First of all, I'll just say a little bit more about that statue of Shalmaneser III. Jon, many of the people listening to your podcast series will know about the Kebail statue of Shalmaneser III, which was broken, but very well preserved. We only had fragments, but it was clearly from exactly the same type of manufacture. Same size, same polished white limestone surface, and very small lines written across it. Actually, in 1956 Mallowan also found fragments of such statues. He thought from two different statues. So we probably have evidence of four different statues of this type, commissioned by Shalmaneser III. So I think it's pretty likely that he had these statues commissioned in every major temple of the empire. Turning to the upper chambers. So Michael mentioned earlier on that we're investigating the area immediately south of the Northwest Palace, called the"upper chambers". First investigated by Layard, very shortly afterwards by Loftus. And then a century after that, by Muzahim Mahmoud at the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. Now it's always been known that this was a palatial complex of Adad-nirari III, due to the huge inscribed door slabs in the complex. But that was about all. The room plan recovered in those three earlier operations did delineate three rooms at the northern end of the complex, but very little comprehensible beyond that. And for the last century, it's been impossible to understand what's going on there. But we've changed that. We went back and once again, we re-excavated the old areas. We geolocated them. We worked on from that point. And it's now emerging as a palace, very much in the canon of Assyrian imperial palatial architecture. That's to say, a large courtyard paved with baked bricks leading onto a throne room; a retiring room behind that; and then smaller rooms off either side. So we haven't finished our work. I think we're probably about two-thirds of the way through. We won't get the whole building because on the western side, there's a lot lost to erosion off the side of the mound. But we do have the north and the eastern sides, and the next coming season, we hope to clarify the southern side.
Michael Danti:John's really clarified the plan of the building as its abutment with the adjoining Shalmaneser building, Shalmaneser III building excavated by Loftus. We've been able to develop a fairly thorough understanding of the way that Layard and Loftus excavated, the methods that they were using. So that's really helped, particularly with understanding what Loftus was doing at the site, since, sadly, you know, his records were lost following his untimely death. So really filling in a lot of the gaps. But John has been able to substantially correct the plan of the upper chambers that was published by Layard, and long suspected by Julian Reade and and others that there were these errors in the plan. Both in Layard's recording, but also in the publication stages. So with a few weeks of excavation, in some cases, we've been able to correct the long-standing errors that volumes have been written about since the 1850s. So again, there are great rewards to going back and re-excavating these areas. Since the 2022/2023 seasons, in 2024 we excavated for three
months in both major areas:the upper chambers and then the North temple precinct. And in our 2024 seasons, in the temple precinct, we excavated the ... re-excavated the entrance to the main shrine of the Ninurta temple, so that we could accurately map it; get it onto the plan with the Ishtar Sharrat Niphi temple. So we effectively got what was, what I had said previously, was the gateway, or a gateway in the Ishtar temple. Winds up being the main gateway leading from the Ishtar temple into the Ninurta court. So it's really part of the Ninurta temple. We've jumped over a large part of the Ninurta court to the west. We've excavated the entrance to the main shrine in the Ninurta temple. And this was an area that Layard excavated where he found colossal human-headed lions leading into the entrance. And there was a baked brick facade there. We've re-excavated that. Those lions were moved in 1973 to the Mosul Museum, and sadly, were smashed to pieces by ISIS. But we have located this baked brick facade to the temple, and we found that that's actually an addition of Shalmaneser, which is new information. That part of the temple was excavated using tunnels, and in future seasons, we hope to go in and follow Layard's tunnels and more accurately excavate what Layard left behind in the Ninurta temple, and map things out more accurately. On the eastern side of the Ninurta court, in our most recent seasons, we excavated two new shrines that abut the Ishtar temple. They're clearly part of the Ninurta temple. And in one of them we found a monumental slab dais of Mosul marble. It's
absolutely huge:something on the order of 12 feet by nine and a half feet. That has an inscription, cuneiform inscription, on its top of over 120 lines. We're still working on the inscription. And it's probably inscribed below. Now, again, this area has been heavily burned. Inside this first shrine, we found cuneiform tablets, ivories, personal ornament. And, very exciting, we found a whole, but broken into pieces, kudurru of Adad-nirari III dating to 797 BC. John, you can probably describe that kudurru better than I can, but really exciting find.
John MacGinnis:Yeah, the kudurru is an amazing find. And it was very satisfying, the history of our rediscovery of it. We found one fragment, initially, from which we could identify as being the same text as a decree of Adad-nirari III awarding the province of Hindanu to his senior officer, Nergal-eresh. So that was known from Campbell Thompson's excavations of the Temple of Ishtar in Nineveh. But that version is only about half complete. But by the end of our season, we had the complete kudurru. So it's the whole thing, it's about the size of a cereal box. It's beautifully made. It has two rows of divine symbols across the top on the obverse, and then cuneiform going around the two sides. I don't think the text is well-constructed. So of course, it starts with Adad-nirari, his titles, and it then has the statement that he's awarding Hindani to Nergal-eresh. Well, that takes about a line and a half, maybe two lines. Then there's another 50 lines in which Adad-nirari repeatedly says no-one must remove the land of Hindanu from Nergal-eresh or from his descendants, or even suggests that should happen. And this is repeated four times in one form or another, and with four different formulae of divine curses. The very end of the fourth one of these sequences, it looks like it's tacked on, and actually, in the Nineveh version, that's also true. So whatever ... this will be interesting for you, Jon ... whatever the process of composition was it wasn't well thought through, to the extent that both these exemplars have this late addition. But it's interesting from another point of view. And I think it's the first time that we have a royal decree of this sort, with two exemplars. Now, one from Nimrud, one from Nineveh. The major difference between them is the one from Nineveh has a clause that if you remove this stone from the temple of Ishtar, the curses will follow and with us, it's if you remove it from the temple of Ninurta. Now I think it was pretty likely there must have been a copy in the Ashur temple in Ashur. And I would think there will also have been one in Nergal-eresh's capital city in Rasapa. That's all exciting. We understand the text fully. The cuneiform is, I'd say, 95% preserved, but we understand it all. But there's still a bit of research to do in some of the aspects which follow on from this, the curse sequences and so on. I think the most interesting thing, apart from we've already said is the divine symbols, which I know Michael is working on at the moment. Some of them are straightforward, but some of them aren't. Michael--do you
Michael Danti:Most of them are identifiable and are fairly want to say anything more about that? well-known from glyptic and other kudurru. Some of the deities represented with symbols or emblems are mentioned in the text. Some of them aren't. I think we currently have two that are not identified. They're fairly, fairly standard. Many of them are associated with oaths, legal cases. So it's not a random assortment. So hopefully we'll be able to put it all together soon for publication. The kudurru was one find that we had there inside this large shrine at the eastern end of the temple. We also have an Ashurnasirpal II door sill leading into the room. You turn to the right or the south and you're facing this large slab dais with the inscription on it. That's in an alcove sanctuary. So fairly typical Neo-Assyrian temple. There's a store room off the back of the temple excavated by my son, Nathaniel. That abuts onto the Ishtar temple. And then where the slab dais is located, the back wall, if you will, of that alcove had engaged mud brick columns. So again, really incredible architecture. It's an area that hasn't previously been excavated, but there are signs, interesting signs, that someone may have tunneled into this area, probably after Layard was working on the opposite side of the Ninurta court. There's a long, linear pattern of missing baked bricks in the floor. The floors of the courtyard of the Ninurta temple and these shrines that we're excavating are made of baked brick. They're usually two layers of brick. And someone has gone in and pulled up the upper layer of brick wall. They seem to have been digging along the walls and through the doorways, possibly looking for reliefs and colossi and other goodies for the museums of west. So it's possible, after Layard's excavations in the main part of the Ninurta temple, abutting the ziggurat, someone went back in, down into the shafts that he had dug and tunneled into this area of the Ninurta temple. Not really creating a lot of damage, but following the walls, you know someone who was savvy about looking for sculptures and texts and didn't record the results. It could have been Loftus and his records were lost. It could have been Rassam, between Layard and Loftus, or maybe Smith in the later 1870s. We simply don't know how this happened. Then we excavated another shrine at what would be the northeast corner of the Ninurta court. It has a smaller slab dais. And exciting find there was, there is a small archive of cuneiform tablets that have been partially baked by the fire that destroyed the temple. Jon--you were working on those and can better describe
John MacGinnis:Yeah, there's a couple things I want to say about the epigraphy. Thank you, Michael. To start with, the them. tablets. We've, I guess, six or seven cuneiform tablets now.
Jon Taylor:Hmm. This sounds fascinating. Is any of this Clay cuneiform tablets. Three of them are silver loans associated with either temple of Ninurta or the temple of Ishtar. One is part of a land sale, and that has an Aramaic epigraph. So that's quite interesting. We have just a small fragment, actually. I'll show it to you, Jon, next time I see you. A small fragment from what I think must be a hymn to Ninurta,. Only about eight lines and just the beginnings of eight lines. So it's quite varied, what we have in that respect.
John MacGinnis:But I think he's going to be even more interested in the monolith. So the Nimrud monolith has more than one meaning in Assyrian history. But the monolith we're talking about now is this huge rectangular slab paving the holy of holies of the sanctuary. So it's two and a half by two meters, or something like that. As Michael said, well over 100 lines of finely written cuneiform. Quite damaged on the side we have, let's call it the obverse. It could well be that the underside is also inscribed, and accessing that will be a challenge in due course. But these are truly extraordinary inscriptions. But there are two which were found before by Layard, one in the Ninurta temple, and one in the temple of Ishtar Sharrat Niphi. So again, Caleb is going to have a look at ours; document it photographically first. Then maybe he'll come out to site. And it remains a possible option in the future of re-excavating the Ninurta monolith in order to get a proper record and copy of that as well. I think these labs may give new historical information. material published in reports?
Michael Danti:It will be soon. We've got the reports ready to go. And we will be presenting it at the Penn Museum in the coming months as well. So quite a bit of online content. We're going to be putting out reports probably in Athar Rafidain with Nineveh inspections. Big joint publications, the 2022/.2023 will come out this year, and then we've got a report on 2024. What we're finding is that it is with three months of excavation at Nimrud and modern standards of how things should be published, it's a lot of work.{LAUGHS}
Jon Taylor:Yes, quite.
Michael Danti:It's a joy, but the reporting takes months and months of time afterwards too. So yeah, it's spectacular. We have the advantages now of digital photography and modern mapping. So when we go to produce a report, you don't just have the new results, but you have to go back and address everything that's been done in these same areas since the 1840s. And so you have this element of forensic archaeology where a lot of time is spent on talking about those previous excavations and how we can correct that. Plus the newer results that you have. So again, it's a lot of fun, but you really have to get down into the weeds. We're really fortunate. I think John will agree that we have wonderful synthetic work by Julian Reade and others that really predict a lot of the results that we're coming up with, where they've pulled together the, you know, the archival research at the British Museum and other institutions; looking at the diaries and letters of these early excavators; and then the vast publication record. They pulled it together. They made a lot of predictions on how the record could be corrected, and now we have the advantage of testing those hypotheses.
John MacGinnis:Yes, one of the joys of modern field archaeology is that we can be in instant contact with any colleague around the world. So as we discover things, we are able to contact colleagues and ask them for their advice or insights, suggestions. But as Michael said, of all our great colleagues and so many people have helped us and a part of this great project, but Julian really stands out. Time after time we've had some artefact or some aspect of the architecture which we're wondering about and contact Julian, and every single time, Julian has the answer, and he's written about it somewhere in the past,
Michael Danti:Yeah, we do the... yeah. We use the "call a friend" advantage a lot. Break glass for assyriologist. Also, John Curtis, when I get stumped on an object or something, we can contact John. And one of our other scholars at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Richard Zettler is working with us as well. So we have the advantage of being able to have Richard run down to the collections there at the Penn Museum. So it's, it's a, yeah, the connectivity really adds a serious advantage for what we're doing, because there has been this kind of break in assyriology in a lot of ways. I started off, I spent the first 20 years of my career working in Syria on the Bronze Age. It was Hasanlu and my work there in northwestern Iran that brought me to the Iron Age. Starting sort of in the middle of my career. And really didn't think that I would be working on the Neo-Assyrian period, because it
Jon Taylor:Well, that's perhaps a segue to the question I'd like simply wasn't an option for me. And then everything changed. to ask next. In that the Mosul region in recent years has not had an easy time of it. There's been the ISIS occupation and what it took to liberate the region from ISIS. So what's it like to work around Nimrud, Nineveh these days? How does that function?
Michael Danti:Yeah, we've talked about how awestruck we are in having the advantage to work side-by-side with our Iraqi colleagues at these incredible sites. We've been to Qaramles. We've been to Balawat. We can tour the old city of Mosul. John and I got a tour of the tunnels under Nebi Yunus from the German expedition there. So it's a real pivotal moment in assyriology, in that sense. And in post conflict recovery. But I mean, And so just to come back to the fact that our project, the Iraq it's surreal in other ways too, in that the old city of Mosul, when we first started working, it's a rubble heap. It's just widespread devastation there. Heritage Stabilization Program's main focus has been more contemporary heritage and working with local stakeholder communities to meet their expectations in the post-conflict period; working in lockstep with the larger humanitarian effort. So the excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh are really a part of that heritage recovery effort. And then there are two large excavation projects. But we've done far more in rebuilding heritage damaged in airstrikes or ISIS deliberate destructions. In the first years of IHSP, we worked in Nineveh plains to rebuild churches that had been burned, really terribly damaged by ISIS for the Christian community there. And we had a project with the Yazidi community, who were targeted for genocide by ISIS, to restore parts of the Lalish temple up near Shekhan. So again, we have a really large project portfolio, and we have the advantage of we have a large team of international experts working with us to do this. And in many ways, the archaeological projects that we're talking about, have been a more recent outgrowth of that. It's one tool, assyriology. It's one tool in our toolkit for this larger preservation effort. And so I think it's a really revolutionary time period in the field. We're talking about forensic archaeology and assyriology as this critical component of cultural heritage preservation and protection.
John MacGinnis:Just to add one small thing, Michael has mentioned a couple of times the great relations we have with the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. So answering the question, "What's it like working at Nineveh and Nimrud?" It's, course, fantastic, but that's because they enable it. They help us with all the logistical challenges. They ensure the coordination with security services and so on. So we cannot say thanks enough to all our Iraqi colleagues who enable us to work with them in northern Iraq.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, indeed. To what extent have you been able to engage the local communities with the work that you've been doing?
Michael Danti:In the early stages of IHSP, we went in to conduct cultural heritage assessments. We had already been doing that from 2014 to 2018 with ASOR CHI; working with our Iraqi colleagues on the ground during the ISIS occupation; using geospatial analysis and scraping the web for information on heritage incidents. We already had this wealth of incident reporting at ASOR CHI that's publicly available, that looked at all of the types of heritage damage there. And talking with local stakeholders about those heritage sites. We already had built up trust, and we had an ongoing dialogue with various communities. There's incredible ethnic and religious diversity, as you know, in northern Iraq. And ISIS sought to stamp out that cultural diversity and cultural memory, sadly. In 2018 it was fairly seamless. We established IHSP at Penn, and then we were able to finally go out to the field with our Iraqi colleagues and assess the situation on the ground using the ASOR CHI data set and the records of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage; determine needs with the local stakeholder communities and their expectations. Have a real dialogue. As an anthropologist, it's my training, about what they needed, what they expected, in terms of the cultural heritage restoration alongside that larger humanitarian effort. So each project that's really integral to what we're doing. Not to go in and impose what we think is important and needs to be done, but to work side-by-side with ... On one of our larger projects, for example, that's related to our work with neo-Assyrian remains, is the reconstruction of the Beit Al-Tatunji in the old city of Mosul, which was this large central courtyard house with elaborate Mosul marble facades. It had been used as a military position by ISIS and then hit by air strikes, and sadly, 90% destroyed. It had been built by the Ottoman governor of Mosul in the early part of the 19th century, and then had become the house of the Tutunji family, a wealthy family of tobacco merchants for generations. Then it became a property of the Iraqi SBAH. And they had just restored this building prior to the ISIS occupation. We determined, working with SBAH and the local community, that preserving that house was critical for preventing the destruction of that entire neighborhood in this post-conflict recovery period. To avoid, for lack of a better term, a Beirutization of the old city of Mosul. And so it was a high priority for us to do ... reconstruct that building. We had to quarry Mosul marble, find traditional stone masons who could carve that Mosul, much like Assyrian reliefs, and were experts in mounting, you know, the Mosul marble on the walls. The masons were trained on that project, working with their fathers and grandfathers at the site. That involved elaborate iron work, plaster work, what have you. The house is now complete and is being used as a local cultural centre and museum for the old city of Mosul. So related to what we're doing at Mashqi gate. The same skill sets, very similar types of architecture, working closely with the local community to reopen access to heritage assets and enhance that access. We see what we're doing at Nimrud and Nineveh in that same vein. So again, working really closely with the local community at Nimrud, we employ large numbers of people from the local community to work at the site. And again, if we have our druthers, we will rebuild the old British dig house as a visitor centre at the site, and there will be a local site museum there. And new signage at the site for tour groups. Because tour groups are already returning to Nimrud, right, Jon? I mean, there's an incredible local interest in reopening access to the site.
John MacGinnis:Yeah. So on the tour group front, that's right. Pretty much every week there's a group comes. Either it's just a small group, or sometimes larger bus loads. Also, which is really satisfying, is groups of Iraqi school children and university students coming to see their heritage.
Jon Taylor:Wow, that's fascinating. You have a couple of years left, I guess, on your existing permit. So what are your aims over the next couple of years?
Michael Danti:Continue excavating the areas in the Ninurta temple that we're in; to remove the ISIS destruction, primarily, and better understand the 19th century excavations. ISIS, when they pushed down the ziggurat, they deliberately pushed much of it onto the Ninurta temple. And so we have this massive layer of ziggurat on top of it; removing that. We are talking about a reconstruction of the ziggurat. What might be appropriate to raise its height back up? Maybe take the debris that was pushed down and put it back on top of the ziggurat. In a way that won't erode, obviously. But to restore some of it, the height of the ziggurat structure would be wonderful. Because now it really it just reminds you, every time you look at it, as to what ISIS did in 2015/16. Finish our excavations in Adad-nirari. I know John's got some very discreet objectives there. And was a very poorly known area of the site will become one of the best known parts of it, right, John?
John MacGinnis:Yeah, that's right. I should mention on doing
the Adad-nirari palace:it's very difficult at times due to the state of preservation of the mud brick. This has nothing to do with ISIS. It's just due to erosional factors. And also something which Michael hinted at earlier on, Loftus's excavation technique, which was to locate walls, and to give him credit for that, Loftus was able to find mud brick walls. But then he'd dig trenches along them, on the inner faces. He was looking for stone slabs, and by and large, there weren't any there, at least not vertical ones, wall slabs. But that makes it really difficult to excavate. So at least we understand this now, and we did, to our credit, is in our very first season, we did notice how the mud brick walls kind of had about a 20 centimetre face missing. And now we understand why. This is from where Loftus has dug in. But following that is difficult. It's very careful archaeology, but it's going well. What's really satisfying is the workmen are very good at it. So in one case where we're following really very faint bitumen plaster lines, I had to go off to actually to read one of the slabs at the Ninurta temple. And when I came back, you know, the workmen had found a new wall themselves. So that's really satisfying. I think we only need one more season in Adad-nirari. Two at the most, but I think it'll be one. And then when that's concluded, of course, we'll write it up for publication. And then we'll, for sure, start excavation in another part of the site.
Michael Danti:and at Nimrud, where they were able to produce Ashurnasirpal-sized, Shalmaneser-sized, Sennacherib-sized bricks in various shapes and sizes for their reconstruction effort. Those brick kilns in that facility were also fallen into disuse, but were also destroyed during the ISIS occupation. And so we are looking at re establishing traditional brick making and installing new kilns; state of the art kilns for baking bricks. So that we have a local source of brick for Mashqi Gate, for Nimrud and other sites in the area. Right now, if we were to get bricks for the site, they'd have to be shipped all the way from Babylon or from Kurdistan. And that's not really cost effective, or, you know, doesn't work on other levels as well. So again, coming back to capacity building, as we're excavating in these areas, we definitely have our eye on the long-term preservation and presentation of these parts of Nimrud and Nineveh. Which I think makes this a very different type of archaeology. More in line with what the Iraqis were doing in the 1990s and early 2000s with the work of Muzahim Hussein.
Jon Taylor:Yeah. Thank you both very much. It sounds like an absolutely amazing project. I really appreciate your time.
Michael Danti:Thank you. Thank you for your interest in it. Nice talking to you.
John MacGinnis:Thanks, Jon. See you soon. And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod. You can also support us in other ways: simply subscribe to the podcast; leave us a five star review on Apple Music or your favourite podcatcher; recommend us to your friends. If you want the latest podcast news, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can find all the links in the show notes and on our website at wedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope you’ll join us next time.