Seger Grant Report: Tell Umm el-Marra, Syria
Aerial view of Tell Umm el-Marra.
With funds from the Joe D. Seger Excavation Grant, several hundred line drawing illustrations were prepared for the final report on the Early Bronze Age (third millennium BCE) excavations at Tell Umm el-Marra, Syria. The excavation project was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam.
Umm el-Marra was probably the site of ancient Tuba, capital of a kingdom in the Jabbul plain between Aleppo and the Euphrates valley in northern Syria. In the Early Bronze Age occupation, the earliest at the site, the excavations exposed a complex with ten monumental elite tombs. These included well-preserved mausoleums with luxury artifacts of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. Also of particular interest were installations containing the skeletons of equids and other animals, indicative of sacrificial rituals and interments accompanying the main tombs. It is likely that the equids were the donkey x onager hybrids referred to as kungas in Early Bronze Age texts, highly valued and associated with royalty. The Umm el-Marra equids constitute the first archaeological attestation of these special animals. Given these results, the Umm el-Marra necropolis provides a highly unusual and large body of information on ancient Syrian elite mortuary practices and beliefs, including ancestor veneration and animal sacrifice.
Tomb 1, Skeletons B and C.
Among the illustrations produced with the assistance of the Seger Grant were architectural plans of the tombs (see Chapter 2 fig. 75), the equid installations (see Chapter 2 fig. 89), and architecture outside the tomb area (see Chapter 2 fig. 201). Plates of pottery drawings were produced for each Early Bronze occupation phase (see Chapter 3 fig. 2) and for pottery from the tombs (see Chapter 3 fig. 36). Further, drawings of non-ceramic finds were produced (see Chapter 4 fig. 179 and fig. 221).
