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In early second-millennium Terqa,
cloves were discovered stored in a vessel
in a kitchen area (ancient and modero
specimens, right).
The
trade route for
the spice would have extended from
Indonesia, its natural
TERQA
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habitat, to the
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Euphrates valley.
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period of political ascendancy of
Mari. Dagan is mentioned promi–
nently and regularly in the Mari
texts from the Old Babylonian peri–
od as the main god of Terqa. There
is also sorne indication that the
Zimri-Lim dynasty of Mari may
have originated in Terqa.
At any rate, most of our current
information for this period comes
from Mari, and then only for the OId
Babylonian period, rather than from
excavations at Terqa. The royal
archives of Mari contain more than
200 letters that had originated in
Terqa and were sent to Mari where
they were stored in the royal palace.
They deal with a number of items of
the greatest interest, sorne of them
quite picturesque and intriguing,
and provide a lively account of what
seems to have been the most impor–
tant provincial capital and religious
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center of the kingdom. During the
excavations in 1982, parts of two
large buildfngs were uncovered,
framed nicely by a street on one side
and a narrower alley between the
two of them. They have a tor tured
architectural history--quite inter–
esting because it shows palpably how
these early urbanites coped with the
problem of limited space within the
confines of the city even at a time
when the overall population pressure
was much less than it is today. Yet
here they were, trying to make the
most of narrow spaces, with odd cor–
ners, small rooms, tight alleyways.
You can appreciate this as you
fi rst look down at the current exca–
vations and then raise your eyes
and look beyond into the wide open
spaces of the surround ing desert.
Being closely hemmed in by each
other, almost living on top of each
other- was this a psycho-urban
need of man from the beginning?
Certainly, they liked the cloistered
feel ing of a bustling town, and paid
high prices for every square foot of
it as seen from the cuneiform
tablets found at Terqa.
From the tablets strewn on top
of the ftoors, j ust below the brick–
fall that lay underneatb the higher
strata, we can now begin to piece
together a fair slice of Terqan bis–
tory during the last phases of its
life as a provincial capital. It is no
smaJI feat to piece together such
sequences from stratigraphic bits
and pieces.
Capital of the Lower Khabur Basin
The period best documented archaeo–
logically for Terqa corresponds to the
century and a half or more that fol–
lowed the destruction of Mari by
Hammurabi of Babylon about 1760
B.C . It is generally assumed that Ter–
qa became the capital of the region at
that t ime. T his is the most likely
Early in tbe Terqa excavations a
remaining part of tbe massive
tbird-millennium B.C. city wall, far
left, was cleared to reveal its
s tructure. In a middle-class bouse
from a store room were tablets about
4,000 years old (center photos show
them
in situ
and after removal).
Among them is a document recording
purchase of about 1
O
acres of land.
When participants in a contract could
not write, their signatures were
affixed in various ways. One solution,
below, was to press the hem of one's
garment into the moist clay.