A bakery rises from Syria’s ancient past

Story and Photos by Geoff Emberling

Was the bread for priests, princes or a private householder? The answer will shed new light on the dawn of Mesopotamian civilization at Nagar 4,500 years ago

The author (left) and Humaidi Abed in the excavation of the bakery complex in 1998.

I met Humaidi Abed (fig. 1) in 1992 when I traveled to northeastern Syria to work as a junior excavator at Tell Brak, a mound (tell in Arabic; Brak is the name of the town today) that contains the remains of Nagar, one of the oldest capital cities of ancient Mesopotamia.

When I arrived at the site, the director of the excavation, Prof. David Oates of Cambridge University, put me in charge of a group of 40 local workmen. Among the challenges I faced in that first season were learning Arabic on the job and learning how to identify the mud bricks used by ancient Mesopotamians for building their palaces, temples and houses. Failing to find the bricks meant the irrevocable destruction of ancient architecture, so the stakes were high.

Humaidi was by far the best excavator among the Syrians who have been working with Oates since the excavation of Nagar began in 1976, and he is without doubt the most dignified person I have ever met. That first season Humaidi worked in the same area of the site that I did. I struggled to control the work in my trench—it always seemed to be a mixture of loud conversations on topics that I could only guess at and workers sleeping in the shade because I had not learned to balance the work speed of the picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. Humaidi’s trench, in stark contrast, was all purposeful activity and little chatter. I’m sure I seemed pitiful to Humaidi then, but in 1998 I took over as field director at the site, and he and I became close friends, excavating together a bakery built in about 2400 BC, more than 2,000 years after Nagar was founded.

Ancient Nagar

What remains of the city of Nagar is a mound over 140 feet high and 160 acres in area, once home to as many as 20,000 people. The mound contains layers of houses, temples, palaces, the occasional statue or hoard of gold and silver jewelry, lost or discarded artifacts, and trash—all buried for thousands of years and only recovered in the 20th century.

A dust storm about to sweep over the dig house and camp in 2000, a very dry year.

The site is one of the tallest archaeological mounds in the Middle East, suggesting that it was an important place over a long period of time. The city’s location is puzzling, though. Nagar was in the Syrian Jazira (“Island”) between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, one of Syria’s richest agricultural areas. But since today it is right at the edge of this zone, Brak receives barely enough rain to grow wheat and barley, the major crops of antiquity. To make matters worse, the nearest source of water is the Wadi Jaghjagh, over a mile away.

It’s not so much the average yearly rainfall that makes life difficult for farmers at Tell Brak, though—it’s the variation in rainfall from year to year. Some years, the land around the site is beautiful and green in the springtime, when we usually carry out our excavations. In other years, the landscape is arid and dry, and our feet sink into the dust as we walk over the surface of the mound. In the dry years, farming is impossible without deep wells and diesel pumps, and enormous dust storms appear and quickly blow over us, blacking out the sun and blowing over the tents in our camp. Studies of the ancient climate suggest that by about 4000 BC it had settled into a pattern similar to what we see today.

Why would a settlement with such apparent disadvantages have prospered over millennia? To begin with, it must have had a significant role in trade, both locally and over long distances. The agricultural zone grades into arid steppe to the south of the site, an area that was very likely inhabited by nomads; thus the city would have provided a marketplace for exchange of the wool and dairy products produced by nomads for goods manufactured in the city.

Brak also sits on long-lasting routes that connected the resource-poor cities of Sumer and Akkad (in modern-day southern Iraq) with the timber, copper, silver and precious stones of the mountains to the north. The people living at Brak would probably have participated in this trade.

Finally, in ancient times the population must have had access to a plentiful water source. The ancient name of the site, Nagar, indicates as much—the word means “flowing water,” so it seems reasonable to assume that it was founded on or near springs that are no longer visible.

The prominence of Tell Brak on the landscape attracted archaeological attention in the 1930s, when the British archaeologist Max Mallowan became one of the first to work in the region. He dug with hundreds of workmen, a scale rarely seen in modern projects, and excavated several large buildings in just three seasons of work. The largest was the “palace” (more likely a fortified storehouse) of Naram-Sin (2254-2218 BC), the ruler of the Akkadian empire centered on the city of Agade, who used a base at Nagar to control much of northern Mesopotamia.

Mallowan also excavated a series of temples that we now know date as early as 3600 BC. Among his finds were many small stone objects, including thousands of so-called “eye idols” found in one of the building levels, which gave the buildings their name: the Eye Temple. He suggested that the idols were offerings brought to an eye god, but since no such deity is mentioned in historical records of later times, it remains difficult to confirm his suggestion.

Mallowan’s wife was Agatha Christie, and she wrote an account of their work at Brak under the title Come, Tell Me How You Live. Her novel Murder in Mesopotamia takes place on an excavation in southern Iraq at the site of Ur. Ur was excavated by Leonard Woolley, well known in the 1930s for his discovery of the exceptionally rich “Royal Tombs of Ur.” Mallowan was Woolley’s assistant at Ur for a number of years, and one year Agatha came to work there. Woolley’s wife was a demanding woman and not well liked, so she became the murder victim in the book.

The Kingdom of Nagar in Ancient Texts

During the middle of the third millennium BC, Mesopotamia was ruled by small states interacting in shifting alliances and trade relations as well as frequent military conflicts. The rulers of these states built many palaces during this period, and royal inscriptions document the emergence of kings whose authority was independent in some ways from the temples that may have dominated earlier Mesopotamian political life.

Some scholars have seen this shift as the rise of “secular kingship” from an earlier “theocracy,” but across the varied landscape of languages, cultures and traditions of rule during this period, such a statement vastly oversimplifies the changes that were taking place. Perhaps it is enough to say that the large elite families were able to put the temples in their service rather than the other way around, and in so doing, were able to reduce the competition for power within the states.

Yet temples continued to be important in social and economic relations of this period. They were probably the centers of scribal learning in which Sumerian texts were written. Temples also owned large quantities of land, commanded large labor forces, redistributed many products to a variety of dependents and employed trading agents to acquire distant raw materials.

All the known cuneiform texts we have recovered so far were written for the temples and palaces. We have no comparable direct records of the activities of large, wealthy families, although texts make it clear that such families did exist and that they employed large numbers of laborers.

Scribes designated palaces, temples and families all by the Sumerian word E (house/household), usually with a qualifying term: the palace is the “big house,” the temple is the “diety’s house,” and other households are specified as belonging to an official or a family. We don’t yet know what proportion of people in Mesopotamian cities belonged to one of these large households since our knowledge comes mostly from texts, and the texts don’t specify how many people they are not mentioning.

A photo of the excavation area taken from a camera attached to a kite. The latest ancient occupation of the area was by Roman colonists, who built a village and fortification a bit northeast of the main tell. A. Poidebard of France investigated the Roman fortification in 1930. Mallowan began excavations at Brak in 1937-38.

While we have not yet found a large archive of cuneiform texts of this period from ancient Nagar, texts from other Syrian cities like Ebla, Mari and Nabada mention the site. These texts make it clear that Nagar was one of the most powerful Mesopotamian capitals during that era. A prince of Nagar married a princess of Ebla, and cuneiform texts tell us that she brought with her to Nagar a rich dowry including textiles, gold jewelry (including a plaque in the shape of a leaf), small cosmetic containers and 42 large jars of wine for the wedding celebration.

Another text tells of a peace treaty in which the king of Nagar swore in a temple of the god Dagan at the neutral city of Tuttul, to end a war against the king of Ebla.

New Excavations in the Kingdom of Nagar

Few physical remains of the days when Nagar was at the peak of its power have survived at Brak. One reason is that armies of the Akkadian empire (whose capital has still not been definitively located but is thought to have been near Baghdad) conquered Nagar around 2300 BC. The Akkadian kings built a series of large administrative and storage buildings, three of which have been excavated, together comprising about 5 percent of the total area of the city.

The Akkadian rulers may have built these structures on top of palaces or other important buildings, destroying them or making them practically inaccessible to excavation. Building on top of earlier buildings was a common practice in crowded ancient cities. The symbolism of overtopping the edifices of earlier regimes was a powerful message of conquest.

In 1998, the Brak project began excavating a new area of the site and found burned remains of a large building that proved to belong to the pre-Akkadian kingdom.

The building forms a coherent architectural unit organized around two courtyards, an outer one and an inner.

The residents baked large quantities of flat bread in rooms around the outer courtyard. Piles of burned wheat and barley in two nearby rooms showed that these were storerooms. A third storeroom was empty at the time of the fire. They used a fourth room to grind the grain into flour; it still contained large storage jars. Another room contained seven bread ovens of a type still used in the area. In this type of oven, now called a tannur, fuel is burned within the oven, and flat bread is quickly baked on its rounded top surface.

An inch-wide seal impression. The drawing of its rolled-out design shows a ‘contest scene’ involving stylized lions and goats.

The inner courtyard was more domestic in character, with a small kitchen, a small storage room and a reception room lined with benches. Although this room would occasionally have been used to receive guests, at the time of the final fire, it was a storeroom for clean grain—piles of extremely pure wheat and barley stood next to piles of grain with a significant chaff content, so it seems the people gave the grain a final clean-up in this area.

Throughout the building we have recovered lumps of cleaned and sifted clay. On one side, these lumps preserve the form of what they were used to seal: jars, bags, baskets or door locks (pegs driven into the wall and door, with string tying the pegs together). On the other side, the clay received the impression from a carved cylinder that was rolled over them. The designs of these “cylinder seals” are stylistically identifiable to regions and periods within Mesopotamian history and often depict scenes of mythological significance. We have recovered over 200 of the clay “seal impressions” or “sealings” in the structure but have found none of the stone cylinder seals, themselves, only the evidence of how people used them. We found six caches of door sealings that residents or bulders had buried under doorways during a renovation. These finds suggest that the clay sealings were considered to have a kind of ritual protective significance.

Three of the most common designs were used to seal doors, so we assume that people who worked and lived in the building owned these seals. Most of the other 35 designs have been found only on portable container seal impressions, and so were owned by people who sent shipments of grain, oil or other products to the bakery building.

What does the bakery tell us about early Mesopotamian cities? First, it is significant that the seven ovens and two storerooms indicate production of much more bread than the 20 or so people who lived and worked in the bakery could have eaten. Cuneiform texts often cite bread as a form of rations for laborers in palaces, temples and elite households, so it is likely that this bakery was part of one of these organizations.

We have looked for a physical continuation of the bakery complex that might show it was physically part of a palace or temple, but it seems so far to have been an independent structure.

If the bakery was a self-contained house, we are confronted with what appears to be the use of cylinder seals outside the direct control of a temple or a palace. That would mean that not just large institutions but also private families adopted the use of cylinder seals for their own use.

Our work is not finished—we can’t yet say whether the building is a temple, palace or private household. Identifying the building will alter our interpretation of the artifacts within it.

A 5-inch-wide door sealing was found in three fragments. The center shows the impression of the door peg. The outside surface bears impressions of the cylinder seals. To mark clay seals and locks, residents rolled stone cylinders engraved with distinctive designs over clay. The designs bore images ranging from geometric patterns to mythological subjects.

If it’s a palace, we will have found the seat of power of a major capital city; palaces from Ebla, Mari, and Nabada have been partially excavated and show interesting differences in display and use of space.

If it’s a temple, it may allow us to address and understand an apparent anomaly between the huge temples of southern cities and what seem to be small shrines in the north.

In some ways, though, it will be most interesting if it turns out to be a large private household. There have been massive debates in the field about the extent to which such households dominated the economy of Mesopotamian cities. Some scholars say there was no market, no free enterprise and no entrepreneurship because palace, temple and elite households controlled the economy entirely. So far, such arguments have been based almost entirely on texts, and there have been few good remains of private households to rebut them. It would be important, therefore, to have an excavated example of a private household, particularly one that retained evidence of how it functioned within the larger economy.

To resolve such questions will require a continuation of our excavation, which we hope will be possible in the years to come.