Image: Augusta McMahon/Tell Brak Project
Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one of the smaller mounds ringing the ancient city of Nagar, where she has excavated for a quarter century. Oates had just arrived to begin her latest season at the site, and this blemish on her cherished landscape annoyed her. Two young men on her team volunteered to investigate the damage. They returned, shaken. Jumping into the trench, one of them had come face-to-face with a skull. “Everywhere we looked, there were human bones,” one recalls. “There were an enormous number of dead people.”
More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates’s team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.
The dual finds make Brak a unique window into the time when humans first began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, organize warfare on a mass scale. The conventional wisdom holds that urban living began nearly 1,000 years later and nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast in the so-called cradle of civilization once known as Sumer, located in today’s Iraq. When civilization arrived in this northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain, the story goes, it was bestowed by the Sumerians from fabled cities like Ur, Uruk, Eridu. But this hulking mound in a remote corner of Syria (tell means “hill”) offers a radical new view of just how, where, and why our globalized lifestyle may have gotten its start.
Like hundreds of other mounds in this region, Brak was built up over millennia as homeowners knocked down their decaying mud-brick houses and erected new structures on top of the remains. This tell towers over all others in the region, rising about 130 feet above the plain. The site contains a mini–mountain range of eroded hills and valleys covering more than 120 acres, surrounded by a sprawl of smaller mounds circling the central core like satellites. People lived here for at least 3,000 years, and probably much longer. Brak was abandoned around 1200 B.C. during the chaotic time when the Hittite empire collapsed and the Bronze Age ended.
The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in the conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.
“There was a big party of people feasting,” says Oates matter-of-factly, passing cookies around the table during afternoon tea in Brak’s cramped mud-brick dining hall.
At first glance, Oates seems an unlikely figure to revolutionize our understanding of the ancient world. She spent most of her middle years raising three children while assisting her husband, David, who directed excavations in Iraq and Syria for several decades. A self-described “dutiful wife,” Oates says she was left to draw potsherds—“the boring stuff.” These bits of broken pottery are both the bane and the backbone of Middle Eastern archaeology, providing crucial data on how, when, and who lived in a particular place. They are also as ubiquitous as sand on a beach. As I approach the campsite at Brak, nestled in a small hollow within the massive hill, my taxi’s tires crunch with the sound of ancient pot pieces being pulverized.
Oates quickly emerged as an expert not only in identifying the many varieties of potsherds but also in interpreting them with remarkable precision. “When it comes to a mastery of pottery, there is no equal to Joan in Syria,” says New York University archaeologist Rita Wright. “She’s a very powerful and informed archaeologist with enormous experience.”
And as a Western woman excavating in Iraq during the 1950s, the woman then named Joan Lines was a pioneer. At the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, she dug under the direction of Max Mallowan, the British archaeologist married to mystery writer Agatha Christie. Christie, who spent much of her time writing in the quiet of the Iraq countryside, took the young Joan under her wing, and the two would troll the souks for bargains, practicing their Arabic. At Nimrud, Joan also met David Oates. “The most important things in my life have all seemed to be just a series of coincidences,” she says in a rare private reflection. “Falling on my feet, as it were.”
