TWH – “Their corpses will reach the base of Heaven” so said Ningirsu, the patron god of city god of Girsu and god of the thunder and rainstorms of the spring in Mesopotamian religion, in a promise to the Sumerian king Eannatum about the result of his battle against the city of Umma. Today, a burial mound may commemorate such battles.
Archaeologist, Anne Porter, wrote in “Antiquity” about excavations in Tell Banat which took place from 1988 to 1999. Located in the Aleppo Governate of Syria Tell Banat measured 22 m (72.2 ft.) and had a diameter of 100 m (328.1 ft). Ritual burial practices may have helped to drive its architecture.
A “Tell” is “an ancient mound in the Middle East composed of remains of successive settlements.”
Now submerged under the waters of the Tishreen Dam located on the Euphrates River about 40 miles (90 kilometers) east of Aleppo, Tell Banat may confirm descriptions of burials found in ancient Mesopotamian texts. Those texts report that people would have piled up the war dead, sometimes from both sides. Those piles of the dead would give a form to that structure.
Covered with gypsum, Tell Banat glistened in the sunlight. That glistening earned the Tell its name in English, “The White Monument.” Over the centuries, the Tell changed. It had three phases. In two of those phases, it incorporated rituals involving the dead.
Tell Barri in northeastern Syria. [Photo Credit: Zoeperkoe CC BY-SA 3.0]
The first phase of construction: Phase C
The earliest phase of the White Mountain (Phase C) consisted of a “tall, smooth-surfaced mound.” The people who built it covered it with pale gypsum. Unfortunately, archaeologists were unable to examine this mound before the dam flooded the area. As a result, no one knows when people built it.
The second phase of construction: Phase B
Phase B built over Phase C. Phase B consisted of “a series of small, loose, stone-and-earth tumuli,” artificial mounds like those over a grave.
Archaeologists have dated Phase B to 2700 to 2450 B.C.E. They examined four tumuli. In each tumulus, they found fragments of ceramics and pellets as well as animal and human bones.
Phase B builders had encased the tumuli in a gypsum “exoskeleton” to prevent erosion. Rammed earth bands gave the gypsum a rippled, corrugated effect. That effect differed from the smooth finish of Phase C.
On its lower southern flank, people had carved out a rectangular pit. It measured 2.9 m by 1.5 m (9.5 ft by 4.9 ft). In that pit, someone had placed bones from two bodies. They had arranged those bones in two layers.
In the lower layer, they had placed a thigh bone, a partial jaw, and skull bone. In the upper layer, they had placed parts of a jaw, a thighbone, an outer calf bone, and an upper arm bone. Five layers of white and waterlogged plaster covered these layers.
Surrounding this pit, people had placed a dense collection of material. This collection included beads and ceramics. It also included fragments of bones from animals and three humans. People had placed this material directly on the corrugated surface of Phase B.
Porter argued that these repeating layers of waterlogged plaster suggested a regular ritual. In this ritual, a priest would seal the pit with plaster and pour a liquid over it. In Mesopotamia, the pouring of liquid offerings formed a standard part of funerary practices.
Tishrin Dam (October Dam) [Public Domain]
The third phase of construction: Phase A
Phase A construction occurred from 2450 to 2300 B.C.E. Phase A was built over Phase B. This latest phase had the shape of a step pyramid. Each ascending layer would have been smaller than the one beneath it. Platforms and slopes alternated as the structure grew skywards. Builders covered this step pyramid-like structure with gypsum, giving it a white appearance.
This phase had no tumuli. The builders had placed human bones directly in the horizontal platforms. No covering or demarcation separated the bones from the soil. No one had carved out a coffin, a burial chamber, or a burial pit. The bone deposit sites, however, appeared to be in discreet groupings.
Archaeologists found that 18 out of 22 bone deposit sites contained fragmented human bones. About half of all bone deposits in Phase A contained at least two people.
Quadrants differ in the bone deposit sites that they contain. In the northwest quadrant, archaeologists examined seven bone deposit sites. Five out of these seven bone deposit sites contained horse bones. Six out of those seven bone depositories contained two people. In four out of those six sites, one was an adult and the other a teenager.
In the southwest quadrant, two out of ten of the bone deposit sites contained an adult and a teenager. Another two bone deposit sites contained the bones of a single individual. One of those two single-person bone deposit sites also contained two rings and a model wagon. Only one out of ten sites contained horse bones. Nine out of the ten sites contained pellets.
Interpretation of the findings
Porter argued that bones from horses, human adults, and human teenagers, suggested a relationship. War-wagons may have linked horses, adults, and teenagers.
In Mesopotamia at this time, horses mainly pulled wagons. At that time, the axles of wagons were unable to pivot, which limited their ability to turn. Images of Mesopotamian war wagons have a counter-intuitive arrangement. The driver stood in the rear of the wagon, rather than in the front. Further back, beyond the driver, stood a second figure on a running board. Porter suggested that the second figure could act as a counterbalance to the front of the wagon. If they jumped on the running board, that jolt could have caused the front of the wagon to tilt upwards. That would have made the wagon easier to turn.
This arrangement would imply that the driver would have had a boss-worker relationship to the second figure, “the jumper.” The driver would have had to tell the jumper when to jump. It would also imply that the second figure had acrobatic agility and a sense of balance. The jumper may have been an “entry-level” position.
Other deposits that mixed human and horse remains show highly developed muscles in the lower limbs of humans. The texts of Ebla include the word “HUBki,” a term associated with both acrobats and horsemen. The second figure could have been some type of HUBki.
Only Phases A and B contained pellets. Other burials from this period have no pellets. Porter et al present two possible theories. First, in the ancient world, slingshots made an effective weapon. Slingshots hurled those pellets outward as projectiles. Unlike most weapons, anyone, even children, could have made pellets easily. Generally in Tell Banat, pellets and horse bones did not co-occur in the same bone deposit site. This would indicate separate bone deposit sites for the Mesopotamian “infantry” and “cavalry.”
Alternatively, the builders of Tell Banat herded animals. Herders used slingshots to drive predators away from their flocks.
Tell Banat may have been the world’s oldest war memorial. Live Science reports that Porter said, “We do not know whether they were the victors or the losers of that battle. We do know that they [the people from Tell Banat] took the bodies of the dead from some other place, perhaps long after the event, and interred them in a huge mound that was visible for miles around.”
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