Iron Age Pottery in Northern Mesopotamia, Northern Syria and South-Eastern Anatolia: Papers Presented at the Meetings of the International "table ronde" at Heidelberg...

Headnote

Iron Age Pottery in Northern Mesopotamia, Northern Syria and South-Eastern Anatolia: Papers Presented at the Meetings of the International "table ronde" at Heidelberg (1995) and Nieborow (1997) and Other Contributions, edited by Arnulf Hausleiter and Andrzej Reiche. Altertumskunde des Vorderen Orients, Band 10. Minster: Ugarit- Verlag, 1999. xii + 491 pp., 196 figures, 24 tables.

Book Reviews

This book reflects the remarkable progress in the study of Iron Age pottery in northern Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and southeastern Anatolia. The editors invited pottery experts, the majority of them European, to two workshops, one in Heidelberg (1995) and one in Nieborow (1997), to exchange mostly unpublished information with one another. The result of the workshops is published in this volume. Most authors wrote their papers in English although this is not their mother language, and they are to be congratulated for sharing their research with a wider audience not fluent in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, or Polish.

The volume encompasses 16 contributions, divided into three parts, with pottery from the "Heartland of Assyria," from the Khabur valley, and from the "Euphrates and to the West." The first article, by Stephen Lumsden, discusses pottery finds from the University of California, Berkeley, excavations at Nineveh. Lumsden gives a brief summary of a single mid-seventh-century context, the MG22 area. Although not from a palatial context, the assemblage represents the pottery repertoire of an elite neighborhood in Nineveh.

Neo-Assyrian pottery from Nimrud is analyzed in Arnulf Hausleiter's contribution. He includes earlier finds from the British expedition (1949-1963 and 1989) but concentrates mainly on the new finds from the excavations of the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology (1974 and 1976). This expedition worked in the center of the citadel, in the North-West Palace and its surroundings. Most of the unpublished material was excavated in the "Central Building," south of the North-West Palace. The author dates the pottery to the end of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh century B.C.E.

Claudia Schmidt's study of the pottery from the KarTukulti-Ninurta expedition of Renee Dittmann in 1986 and 1989 is one of the few articles not in English. She presents ceramics from the Middle Assyrian through the Post-Assyrian periods, including even some Parthian and Medieval vessels. Of particular importance are...