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6,000-Year-Old City Found in Syria
Tuesday May 23 12:35 PM ET
Scientists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute found a protective city wall under a huge mound in northeastern Syria known as Tell Hamoukar. The wall and other evidence indicated a complex government at an early date... [I]deas behind cities may have predated the Sumerians, said McGuire Gibson of the Oriental Institute. Among the features indicating the site was a full-blown city, not just a town: thin, porcelain-like pieces of pottery, indicating a sophisticated manufacturing technique, and huge cooking ovens, big enough to feed large numbers of people. There also were stamps to make impressions in wet clay - like primitive hieroglyphics - used to make tokens that served as records for trade transactions. The stamps were in the shapes of animals, including bears, dogs, rabbits, fish and birds.
Discovery Challenges Urban Theory
May 23, 2000
The discovery of a 6,000-year-old city in Syria is challenging long-held beliefs about the beginning and spread of urban civilization. Archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute uncovered the settlement last year while excavating a huge mound known as Tell Hamoukar. A protective city wall and artifacts indicate a complex government was in place as early as 4,000 B.C. Scholars had long believed the development of cities began in Sumeria in southern Mesopotamia and then spread north around 3500-3100 B.C... But the Hamoukar settlement apparently developed independently at the same time as its southern neighbors, researchers said.
'Oldest city' unearthed?
by Sally Suddock
July 3, 2000 08:40 CDT
The Independent newspaper, based in London, said archaeologists believe that the city, called Hamoukar, may date as far back as 6,000 BC... Hamoukar, between the legendary Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, spreads over 750 acres and the population may have reached 25,000 people in the ancient period when the region was known as Mesopotamia. Dr Mouhammed Maktash, director of the Syrian-American joint excavation... told the UK newspaper that "one of the most astonishing finds has been of double-walled living quarters to encourage air flow, suggesting the inhabitants had designed their own air-conditioning system to combat summer temperatures of more than 40 degrees Centigrade." ...Textbooks and historians have theorized that is was the Sumerians who established the oldest known "modern" civilizations of the Babylonian and Mesopotamian era, at about 3500 BC. Hamoukar is thought to have predated the birth of the Sumerian civilization by 2500 to 3000 years.

Catal Huyuk in Turkey was abandoned by 5600 BC.