Recovering Assur From the German Excavations of 1903-1914 to today’s Assur Project in Berlin

By: Friedhelm Pedde

Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1914, the German excavation in Assur in Northern Iraq ended. Despite this, German research on Assur was only beginning.

Assur, the great Assyrian capital, was only one of more than a dozen sites in the Near East in which the Germans had begun archaeological activities. The excavations at Assur and elsewhere had everything to do with Germany’s self-image.

At the end of the 19th century Germany saw itself as a nation running behind the rest of Europe: the final unification of the many small German states came only in 1871. At that point Germans compared themselves with other European colonial powers, and the desire quickly arose to acquire the same outward trappings as England and France had done before; on the one hand, colonies, and on the other, to fill its museums with prestige objects from distant lands. German political and economic interests and a political alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany in the Near East were Part of this “Great Game.” Moreover, the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, after a visit in Lebanon was thrilled by archaeology, and supported the activities with his personal fortune. Thus, in 1899, the Berlin museums and the German Oriental Society under the direction of Robert Koldewey started work in Babylon. Four years later, in 1903, Koldewey’s young assistant Walter Andrae started excavations in Assur. These lasted until 1914 and ran twelve months a year without interruption.

Perched on the western bank of the Tigris River just about the confluence with the Lesser Zab River, Assur was settled at least since the late Early Dynastic period (about 2500 B.C.). In the beginning of the second millennium, the Old Assyrian period, Assur became the capital of a first Assyrian state and was an important town with a widespread trading network reaching from Iran and Babylonia to Anatolia, trading in metals and textiles. Assur’s location enabled the town to control the trade routes in all directions. In the second half of the second millennium Assur became the capital of the Middle Assyrian Empire. Though in the 9th century the mighty Neo-Assyrian kings had moved to other towns and built their residences in nearby Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh, Assur still was the religious center of Assyria: the temple of the national god Ashur remained in this town. Some Assyrian kings even returned to Assur after their death, and were buried in the so-called Old Palace, the palace of the forefathers.

Walter Andrae and his team dug systematically and set new standards in archaeology. In contrast to former excavations in the Middle East they worked with a grid system and learned to excavate mud bricks. Their finds included found a double city wall, official buildings such as temples for the gods Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Anu, Adad, Nabu and the goddess Ishtar, palaces and residential areas, tombs and graves, and thousands of objects. One hundred years ago, the excavators were first of all architects, interested mostly in excavating buildings and city plans on a large scale. They were also only a small group of scientists supervising between 180-200 workmen daily. These are the reasons why such large areas could be opened but the sheer scale of work limited its documentation.Like other excavators of the era, they kept a surprising number of different notebooks, for first observations and impressions and for describing results. In most of these they described the architecture, in others they noted many thousands of measuring points for the different walls and levels. In the evenings the archaeologists wrote a “find diary” in which all objects got a find number and were documented, sometimes with sketches, along with find spots and photo numbers. But there were even more series of notebooks, like the “grave books,” in which all information of the graves and tombs was recorded, or books for special kinds of objects like stone or metal finds. They also made accurate architectural drawings on paperboard and printed photos of the excavations and finds. The complexity of recording systems and documentation rivalled that of the site itself.

When the excavation of Assur was finished in 1914, the finds were divided between the Ottoman Empire and Germany. The Ottoman Empire’s portion went to Istanbul and is now exhibited in the Archaeological Museum. Germany’s was heading for Berlin on a steam boat when the First World War broke out. The ship, like 70 others from Germany and Austria, set course for Lisbon, in neutral Portugal. But two years later Portugal also declared war on Germany and seized the ships and the Assur finds as war booty. After the war the finds were exhibited in the museum of Porto in Northern Portugal, until in 1926 they were returned to Germany and brought to the Vorderasiatisches Museum in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin. This, however, was not the end of their travails.In 1939 the Second World War broke out, and the museum was heavily damaged by bombing. Fortunately the Assur finds were not destroyed. Then in 1945 the Soviet Red Army took many objects to the Soviet Union. The finds were not given back to East Germany until 1958. In all these years communist East Germany had to rebuild the damaged museum and to reopen the Assur exhibition, but there was always a shortage of money and scientists to work on the material on a big scale. Moreover, the German Oriental Society was based in West Germany, and the Vorderasiatisches Museum in the East, and it was difficult for the Eastern and Western colleagues to cooperate.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the reunification of Germany took place in October 1990. This did not only change the life for millions of Germans but also for the archaeological community. Suddenly colleagues from East and West could work together. At that time most of the archaeological publications on the Assur project were books about the architecture and cuneiform texts. But now preparations were quickly made for an extensive archaeological project on the entirety of the excavation results: the Assur Project.

The project began in 1997 under the direction of Johannes Renger and was based in the Pergamonmuseum. Part of the work was a database with more than 44,000 entries, new drawings of the architecture and new drawings, and photographs and restoration of the objects. Approximately 30 scientists worked on the architecture of the temples and the palace, tombs and graves, orthostats and obelisks, stone sculpture, knob tiles, pottery, alabaster vessels, terracotta figurines, jewellery, seals and sealings, lamps, coins as well as objects of ivory, bone, stone and metal. The work on 4000 cuneiform tablets and stone inscriptions has revealed texts on the royal rule, civil law, trade, administration and daily life, as well as about religion and literature. Even private libraries were reconstructed.

After 17 years of work, 33 books have been published, two more are forthcoming, and another 16 are in preparation, not to mention countless articles. Moreover there is a second Assur project in Heidelberg under direction of Stefan Maul, which will publish another 20 volumes of cuneiform texts. And last but not least, short excavations in the 1980s and 1990s were undertaking under the direction of Reinhard Dittmann and Peter Miglus. Their final reports will come in the next future as well.

The high number of the publications shows the potential of old excavations, even if the documentation is not very good. But the large number of finds offer amazing opportunities and should encourage us to work with the old collections in the museums, which bear unexpected treasures.

Friedhelm Pedde is coordinator of the Assur Project. He lives in Berlin.

For further reading:

Joachim Marzahn – Beate Salje (eds.), Wiedererstehendes Assur. 100 Jahre deutsche Ausgrabungen in Assyrien (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern 2003).<t/d>

Ana Cristina Martins, Oriental antiquities and international conflicts. A Portuguese episode during the 1st World War, in: J.M. Córdoba et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Madrid 2006, Vol. II (Madrid: UA Ediciones 2008), pp. 515-522.

Friedhelm Pedde, The Assur-Project. An old excavation newly analyzed, in: J.M. Córdoba et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Madrid 2006,Vol. II (Madrid: UA Ediciones 2008), pp. 743-752

Charlotte Trümpler (ed.), Das Grosse Spiel. Archäologie und Politik zur Zeit des Kolonialismus (1860 – 1940) (Essen – Köln: DuMont 2010)

Friedhelm Pedde, The Assyrian heartland. 2. Assur, in: D.T. Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Vol. II (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2012), pp. 853-855.

Friedhelm Pedde, Working on old Near Eastern excavations, in: M.G. Micale – D. Nadali (eds.), How Do We Want the Past to Be? On Methods and Instruments of Visualizing the Ancient Reality (Piscataway: Gorgias Press), in press.