Early Bronze Age Mortuary Complex Discovered in Syria:
An ancient, untouched Syrian tomb that wowed the archaeological world on its discovery by Johns Hopkins University researchers nearly six years ago has revealed another secret: It is not alone.
The tomb, which was filled with human and animal remains, gold and silver treasures and unbroken artifacts dating back to the third millennium B.C., is actually one of at least eight located near each other in Umm el-Marra, archaeologist Glenn Schwartz said. That northern Syrian city is believed to be the site of ancient Tuba, one of Syria's first cities and the capital of a small kingdom, said Schwartz, Whiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins.
The new tombs were identified and excavated by the Johns Hopkins team in the summers of 2002, 2004 and 2006, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dellheim Foundation of Baltimore and the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins. Given differences in ceramic objects found in the tombs, Schwartz and his team have concluded that they were built sequentially over three centuries, from about 2500 to about 2200 B.C. The tombs were built next to each other, with the complex expanding horizontally. Since they found no more than eight skeletons per tomb, the archaeologists hypothesize that these are tombs of different families or dynasties.
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