Tell Khaiber and the Castle of the Sealand Kings

By Mary Shepperson

 

The mysterious Sealand Dynasty ruled over an expanse of southern Babylonia for almost three centuries (ca. 1730-1460 BCE). They sound rather fantastical and they remain highly enigmatic; previously the Sealand kings were known only from a small number of texts, mostly written about them by other rulers. These depict rebellious local leaders who rose up to seize an area of the marshy southern alluvium around the head of the Persian Gulf, as the grip of the once-mighty First Dynasty of Babylon loosened. The Sealand kingdom grew to encompass several of the great ancient cities of southern Babylonia, including Ur.

Evidence on the ground for the existence of the Sealand state eluded archaeologists until very recently, when a British-Iraqi team began excavations in 2013 at the site of Tell Khaiber. The Ur Region Archaeology Project, in partnership with the University of Manchester and Iraq’s State Board for Antiquities and Heritage, completed the fifth and final season of excavation at Tell Khaiber this spring. The results show it to be the first Sealand settlement to be identified archaeologically.

 

Drone photo of the Tell Khaiber building. The walls show up as paler lines due to salt rising to the surface above the mudbrick. All photos courtesy of Mary Shepperson.

 

Location map for Tell Khaiber.

 

Tell Khaiber lies close to the modern city of Nasiriyah and the ancient city of Ur in Iraq’s Dhi Qar province. At ground level the site is not much to look at; just a slight rise in the unrelentingly flat brown alluvium of southern Iraq. Aerial images, however, showed the faint outline of a monumental building. It was these traces that initiated the field project, which was one of the very first international missions to return to southern Iraq in the post-Saddam era.

From the outset it was clear that the Tell Khaiber building had a highly unusual plan but it took five seasons of surface scraping to fully reveal the layout. It was a large rectangular structure, covering around 4,400 m2, divided into two parts; an earlier smaller building to which a much larger extension had been later added on the northeast side.

The extension was filled with small densely-packed rooms, apparently to provide cramped accommodation and cooking facilities for a large number of people. The original part of the building housed a courtyard, formal reception suite and administrative offices.

 

Digging out a tree bowl in the main courtyard.

 

Marking the wall lines with flags after surface scraping.

 

The end of one of the sub-floor vaults.

 

The ground plan of the Tell Khaiber building.

 

Most strikingly, instead of the shallow buttresses common to the façades of Bronze Age monumental buildings, the Tell Khaiber building was ringed with close-set, projecting towers. These were built against a substantial outer mudbrick wall, around 3.5m thick, through which there was just a single entrance in the northeast side. The impression is of heavy fortification, probably sufficient to make the Tell Khaiber building more or less impregnable to anything but extreme force or a long siege. Outside of these massive defences, only a small scatter of housing could be identified.

Much of what we know about Tell Khaiber, including its connection to the Sealand dynasty, comes from an archive of cuneiform tablets that was excavated from a suite of rooms in the original southwestern wing of the building. More than 150 tablets and tablet fragments were recovered, scattered and often broken, mixed within the room fills.

 

Photographing a tablet in situ.

 

A tablet fresh from the ground.

 

A tablet after conservation.

 

Tablets laid out on the dining table at the Ur dig house.

 

I was lucky enough to excavate over half of these tablets and it was certainly not an easy task. All of the tablets were unbaked, meaning they were slightly soft; a bit like a slab of chocolate or a bar of soap. Consequently, there was great scope for adding my own contributions or deletions to the text with the pointy end of a trowel as I tried to find them in the mudbrick collapse. Once exposed, the tablets had to be removed quickly before they were split apart by huge fast-growing salt crystals. Many of the tablets needed a lot of attention from our brilliant conservator, and not all survived without the addition of a big trowel-shaped mark.

The conserved tablets are being analysed by Professor Eleanor Robson of University College London. Most importantly, they give us a date for the use of our building; the few which are dated were written in the reign of the splendidly named Ayadaragalama (‘Skilful son of the stag’), the eighth king of the Sealand, who ruled around 1500BC. The tablets represent the first assemblage of Sealand texts recovered from a secure archaeological context.

Most of the texts are written in Akkadian and vary from tiny memos to huge ledgers the size of an iPad. The vast majority of them deal with admin, mostly of an agricultural nature; grain collection, flour storage and goods transfers, the latter often to “the palace”. The palace in question was most likely in the great city of Ur nineteen kilometres to the southeast.

The texts allow us to put some names to Sealand period Tell Khaiber. They include details of hundreds of individuals, sometimes listing their job. Among the farmers and labourers we find many other occupations such as a musician, a cook, a bird-catcher and four “palace ladies” who have their own tailor. One tablet lists three “workers who have behaved dishonestly”, presumably noted down for future punishment.

Several of the tablets are school texts, produced by trainee scribes. They’re written in Sumerian, a language more or less out of use by this time, and they consist mostly of standardised lists of obscure words for metals or stones or animals. One tablet was simply rows of the same big wedge shape practiced over and over again. It’s highly significant that scribal training was going on in the public building because school texts have only ever been found in domestic houses. Tell Khaiber is the only known Mesopotamian public building where they kept their training in-house.

So what can we say about this Sealand public building? My view is that it acted somewhat like a medieval castle; as well as its administrative functions, the building was also a fortified refuge inside which the small population of Tell Khaiber could retreat when threatened. This explains the elaborate fortifications, but also why the building does not seem to fit the usual models of temple, palace or fort. It had to contain most of the population and all of the vital functions of the town inside the protective walls, hence we find scribal training, reception rooms, accommodation blocks, cooking areas, an administrative wing and storage rooms all in one building. With such big walls and only a single entrance the building could have been defended with just a small body of soldiers. Significantly, the tablets list two groups of ten “royal auxiliary troops” drawing rations.

 

Dan Calderbank, working with the first excavated Sealand pot assemblage.

 

The Tell Khaiber site dogs, John and Steve.

 

Sieving under pressure.

 

The Tell Khaiber building suggests the Sealand state was a kingdom that had to go to considerable lengths to defend itself, most probably from its Babylonian neighbours. In response they built a castle.

 

Mary Shepperson is currently a research associate at the University of Liverpool. She has excavated extensively in Iraq and was the Senior Archaeologist on the Tell Khaiber excavations.

 

Work at Tell Khaiber was made possible through the generous funding of Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza at the Augustus Foundation. The project has also been supported by Kirintec, SKA International Group, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, the FCO and many others. Many thanks go to our colleagues at the SBAH and the Iraq Museum.