THE PRE-SARGONIC PERIOD

The north-east corner of Upper Mesopotamia, where the river Tigris runs from north-west to south-east, constitutes the region usually designated as Assyria. The narrow valley of the Tigris river and those of its tributaries are studded on both banks with ruin mounds covering major and minor Assyrian towns several of which served as royal residences. The knowledge about some of the cities buried under these mounds was never lost. That the mound of Nimrūd, on the east bank, close to the point where the Greater Zab flows into the Tigris, was the town of Kalakh mentioned in Genesis X. II was told by the natives to a British representative of the East India Company who explored the site in 1820. They even knew that the country to which this town had once belonged was named ‘al-Assur’. In much the same way, the natives of Mosul were well aware that the huge ruin mound across the river from their city covered Nineveh, the metropolis to which, according to the Book of Jonah, this prophet had been sent and where he died. Small wonder then that these sites attracted the curiosity not only of Bible scholars but of all those interested in the ancient world, and that excavations were undertaken which filled the museums of Europe’s capitals with Assyrian antiquities.

Only at a much later time archaeologists turned their attention from the Neo-Assyrian to the Old and pre-Assyrian levels of the two ruin mounds which, by their size and the importance of their buildings stood out among all the others, namely that of the royal city of Ashur, today Qal‘at Sherqāt, and Nineveh the most important mound of which is known today as Koyunçik, the smaller one as Nabi Yūnis. At Ashur archaeological evidence precedes by only a few centuries the period in which Mesopotamia and Assyria belonged to the Old Akkadian Empire. As was pointed out by the excavator of Ashur, the extensive earth