Nagar, Syria

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Coordinates: 36°40′2″N, 41°3′30″E Nagar was an ancient pre-Akkadian and Akkadian city on the Khabur River in northeastern Syria which is now represented by the mound named Tell Brak. At 40m in height, one of the tallest archaeological mounds in the Middle East, and about a kilometer long, it forms the remains of one of the largest urban sites in northern Mesopotamia. The site sometimes referred to as Brak/Nagar was excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan in the 1930s and reopened by David and Joan Oates, 1976–93. A small settlement existed at the site as early as 6000 BCE (Oates), and materials from the late Neolithic Halaf culture and the succeeding Ubaid culture are found. Earlier stages at the Nagar site reveal a city that developed from the early 4th millennium BCE contemporaneously with better known cities of southern Mesopotamia, such as Uruk; among extensive Uruk materials found at Brak/Nagar is a standard text for educated scribes (the "Standard Professions" text, known from Urukl IV), part of the standardized education taught in the 3rd millennium BCE over a wide area of Syria and Mesopotamia. Later, in its 2nd millennium strata, the site provides the most extensive and best-dated Mitanni material yet known.

A house of ca 3700 BCE would have had a long narrow courtyard with a domed oven, large enough for a gathering that would have tightly packed the space. Skeletal remains show that the city was a source for donkey-onager mules used for drawing wheeled carts before the introduction of the horse, about 2300 BCE [1]. Most famous of the pre-Akkadian features is the 4th millennium "Eye Temple", which was excavated in 1937–38. The temple, built ca 3500–3300 BCE, was named for the hundreds of small alabaster "eye idol" figurines, which were incorporated into the mortar with which the mudbrick temple was constructed. The building's surfaces were richly decorated with clay cones, copper panels and gold work, in a style comparable to contemporary temples of Sumer.

3rd millennium cuneiform texts identify Nagar as the major point of contact between the cities of the Levant (and routes into the Taurus Mountains of eastern Anatolia) and those of northern Mesopotamia. Nagar's burned-out temple, destroyed about 2400 BCE (and rediscovered in 1998) was the earliest of its kind north of central Mesopotamia.

In the 3rd millennium, Nagar lay at the edge of the Akkadian cultural sphere, in a region of imperially-organized dry farming. The palace-stronghold of Naram-Sin of the 22nd century BCE, built at a time when Nagar was a northern administrative center of the Akkadian Empire, was more of a depot for the storage of collected tribute and agricultural produce than a residential seat. The excavators do not credit the Akkadians with political control of the city, and the political significance of cuneiform administrative documents in Akkadian retrieved from the palace (Milano 1991) are open to interpretation. Brak/Nagar's active commercial and cultural interchanges with the city of Ebla are recorded in the Ebla texts, if the city may be identified with the Brakigo of Ebla texts. To the west along the plain, the nearby city of Urkesh preserved cultural independence (Bucellati).

In the 2nd millennium, the somewhat smaller occupied area of the site contained a monumental Late Bronze Age palace and temple of Mitanni date (about 1500–1360 BCE) within a sequence of domestic occupation dating from ca 1700 to 1200 BCE.

Following the Oates' team, the director of the dig was Roger Matthews. In 1998, Geoff Emberling, who had dug with the Matthews team became Co-Field Director (1998-2004) with Helen McDonald, the longtime registrar and draftsperson at Brak. Augusta McMahon took over as Field Director in the spring of 2006. A regional survey of Brak is supervised by Henry Wright of the University of Michigan.

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