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- CHICAGO (UPI) - University
of Chicago and Syrian archeologists said Tuesday they have found a settlement
in northeastern Syria that challenges conventional notions of when and
where civilization began, the university announced Tuesday.
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- Historians have long held that civilization grew in Mesopotamia
- in cities like Ur and Uruk in southern Iraq -- and spread but the new
findings indicate civilization developed independently at Tell Hamoukar.
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- McGuire Gibson, a professor at the U of C's Oriental
Institute and co-director of the joint expedition with the Syrian Directorate
General of Antiquities, said the find indicates civilization began about
6,000 years ago, earlier than the 3500 to 3100 B.C. usually cited.
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- The findings were presented this week at the International
Conference on Archeology of the Ancient Near East in Copenhagen.
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- "We need to reconsider our ideas about the beginnings
of civilization, pushing the time further back," Gibson said. "This
would mean that the development of kingdoms or early states occurred before
writing was invented and before the appearance of several other criteria
that we think of as marking civilization."
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- Tell Hamoukar covered about 500 acres, the size of some
of the largest of the ancient Middle East cities although Gibson concedes
the entire area was likely not inhabited at the same time during the area's
first occupation between 4000 and 3700 B.C.
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- "Most probably there was a village or a couple of
villages that shifted location through those 300 years," Gibson said.
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- The next occupation began around 3700 and continued to
3500 B.C. and was a well-organized prosperous town of about 30 acres that
may have been enclosed by a defensive wall measuring 10-feet high. A 13-foot
section of the wall was found.
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- Food apparently was prepared on an institutional scale
in igloo-shaped ovens and bits of pottery indicate wheat, barley, oats
and animal bones were cooked.
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- Gibson marveled at the craftsmanship of the pottery,
noting some was as "thin as the shell of an ostrich egg."
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- The team also found seals, ranging from simple cross-hatching
to elaborate animal portrayals in a kind of precursor to hieroglyphics,
as well as eye idols - bone figurines with large eyes - included in burials
that may have had religious significance and wells for water.
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- "Seals are prime evidence of some kind of system
of accounting or responsibility," Gibson told the Chicago Tribune.
"The accounting system is tied to some sort of administrative system.
You have a hierarchy of authority, two or three levels of people in which
somebody with authority is there to check on the work of subordinates."
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- Unlike Ur and Uruk, Tell Hamoukar did not sit along a
river, but rather along an established caravan route running through the
Tigris and Euphrates river regions to the Mediterranean.
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- The site is now dominated by the modern village of Hamoukar,
population 750. The Oriental Institute said the largest population in the
area was 10,000 to 20,000 people around 2400 B.C.
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- The dig will continue this summer in hopes of finding
temples and palaces.
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