Abstract
THE joint expedition of the American School of Oriental Studies and the University of Pennsylvania, in continuing the excavation of the mound site of Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia, upon which it has been engaged now for several seasons, has uncovered some remarkable remains of a monumental character in the level of stratification now being explored. This level is the thirteenth from the surface in the series of some twenty strata of deposits of which preliminary exploration showed the mound to be composed before virgin soil was reached. Its culture is that of the ‘painted pottery’ people, of which evidence has been found wide-spread over early western Asia and the ancient East, from southern Russia to China, and dated at approximately 4000 B.C. and later. In a recent report from Prof. E. A. Speiser, field director of the expedition, according to a communication circulated by Science Service, Washington, it is stated that the expedition has discovered the acropolis of the city. It consists of a northern temple, eastern shrine and central temple, which with other buildings surround an open square, or court, paved with gravel covered with stamped clay. In the central temple, all the rooms show traces of a purple-red paint. The buildings are of an imposing character, and being the earliest known of their kind, carry back the practice of monumental architectural art to a much earlier phase of civilization than had hitherto been thought, while Tepe Gawra is shown to be the centre of an organized civic life, on a scale and of a kind for which hitherto there had been no evidence in connexion with the presumedly primitive people of the stone age to whom the painted pottery had been ascribed.
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Earliest Monumental Remains in Iraq. Nature 139, 580 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139580a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139580a0