There is no Dana, only Zul.
Posted on 10/17/2006 2:57:17 PM PDT by blam
French explorer's bad luck in Syria avenged at last
Tue 17 Oct 2006 11:45 AM ET
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
ALEPPO, Syria, Oct 17 (Reuters) - First the 1920s French archaeologist ran out of money to uncover the treasures he suspected hidden under a Syrian castle, and then he ran out of time to see others finish the work.
Twelve years too late for Georges Ploix de Rotrou, a German team has now revealed the full glory of the 500 square metre (5,400 sq ft) Temple of the Storm God that lay under the vast citadel in Aleppo.
Ploix de Rotrou, head of antiquities for the French authorities ruling Syria, began digging under medieval Islamic ruins at the castle in 1929 but ran out of money within a year.
He had discovered two winged creatures carved on a basalt slab dating from the Hittite period in the second millennium BC, a frustrating taster that only served to strengthen his belief he was on to something spectacular.
He died in 1994, just two years before a team from Berlin's University of Applied Sciences set out to re-excavate the site, helped by his notes.
They finished their work last week -- having found unique carvings of, among others, sparring lions, bull men, and a figure of a half man and half fish with slender hands.
A main slab shows the storm god, club in hand, mounting a chariot drawn by a muscular bull. The altar of the temple was also discovered almost intact.
Ploix de Rotrou, it turns out, had reached the outer wall of the temple that is now being covered over again -- but only with sandbags to protect it from thieves and winter.
"He was simply unlucky and did not see the rest of the carvings before running out of cash. If only he had dug a little bit further," Professor Matthias Knaut told Reuters before travelling back to Berlin.
"The carvings are kept so well, although you can see traces of a fire from the first millennium BC," he said, adding that ancient quarries matching the basalt used in the temple were recently found a few km (miles) outside Aleppo.
A research paper on how to protect the site, published by the Syrian ministry of culture and the World Monument Fund, said the temple represented the first known use of decorated stone slabs in the Near East.
HITTITES
The temple, archaeologists say, has helped shed light on the Hittites and the Luwian-Aramean kingdoms closely linked to them.
One of the slabs shows a king making an offering to the storm god, which Luwian hieroglyphs named as King Taitas of Padasatini, a previously unknown kingdom that ruled in southern Turkey and Syria, the research paper said.
Hittites were an Indo-European race who settled in Anatolia in what is now Turkey in the 18th century BC and grew 300 years later into a major military power that reached Syria and Iraq before collapsing around the 13th century BC.
They were fearsome warriors, sacking Babylon in 1595 BC, but also engaged diplomatically with pharaohs from Egypt's 18th dynasty, who ruled large parts of the Syrian coast including present-day Lebanon.
Some of this diplomatic correspondence was found among archives of the pharaoh Akhenaton, discovered in Egypt.
Professor Kay Kohlmeyer, who headed the German mission in Aleppo, said the sophistication of the Storm God temple is helping to show ancient Syria was not just a cultural backwater.
"There is nothing like these reliefs from the Hittite Empire period (1420-1200). The challenge now is to preserve the temple," he said.
Basalt is known to become weak when exposed to the sun and rain, especially if buried for a long period, Kohlmeyer said.
Many of the 7,000 archaeological sites in Syria, including the basalt Roman ruins of Busra Al-Sham in the south, have suffered from weather and vandalism.
Efforts are also under way to preserve the mediaeval Aleppo Citadel itself, but the original Hittite carving found by Ploix de Rotrou is safe. The Frenchman moved the stone to the magnificent Aleppo museum, which he built in 1926.
GGG Ping.
Padasatini, isn't that where they have the Rose Bowl Parade?
There is no Dana, only Zul.
Oooh, oooh, can we restore the Storm God as the diety of choice in the Middle East?
Almost ANYTHING would be more representive and enlightened than the god Allah as revealed to the world by the Prophet Mohammed.
The worship of a Moon God has been widespread throughout the history of the Middle East and Arabia. The Moon God went through several name changes until the name Allah was finally settled upon. And it is here, of course, where the Prophet Mohammed fantasized and militarized the pre-Islamic moon-god cult through a sweeping succession of military conquests and victories. He also made one other significant change, and that is the fictitious linkage between Judaism and Christianity, and Islam. Thus claiming that Islam is the final successor to the Abrahamic religions.
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Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
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