Mureybet

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Along the middle Euphrates in Syria, the site of Mureybet was occupied from the 12th to the 8th millennium BCE. It is one of the earliest known agriculture-based settlements, the domestication of plants, one of the forces that brought about the Neolithic Revolution, was traced in successive strata, making of Mureybet one of the reference sites for the progress of the Neolithic in the Ancient Near East.

In 1971, Jacques Cauvin began the excavation at Mureybet, identifying four main archeological levels,beginning with the pre-pottery, pre-agricultural culture of the Late Natufian. Cauvin discovered that the people of Mureybet at the earliest levels lived in round houses made of limestone bricks, with a clay mortar. In later strata, houses were rectangular. The village evolved from the exploitation of wild plants to the cultivation of cereals: primitive einkorn wheat has been found at Mureybet, and the villagers began to grow peas and barley.

The work on the site was urgent, cut short in 1993 by the filling of the reservoir, Lake Assad.

Artifacts from the Mureybet site, including corpulent figurines of a goddess, are held at the National Museum of Antiquities, Damascus, among the most important artifacts that have been found are counting tokens, comparable to tokens from many Near Eastern sites. The token system was the earliest system employing concrete signs for transmitting information, predating writing by millennia.

[edit] External links

• "Les carnets d'Archéologie:
• "Les Mureybetains" (in French, illustrated)