1985 Excavations at Tell Leilan, Syria

The 1985 season of excavations at Tell Leilan, north-eastern Syria, revised our knowledge of the city's role in Mesopotamian cultural, political, and developmental history of the mid-third and early second millennium B. C. The Acropolis Period I Building Level 2 (19th century) temple plan was completed and established as the earliest historic period example of the Assyrian "long-room" temple. Portions of another major building on the Acropolis, perhaps the same temple's anterooms, with a secondarily deposited royal cuneiform archive, were also retrieved. Two hundred square meters of another public building, probably a palace, containing the in situ remains of another royal archive of the 18th century, were recovered from the eastern Lower Town. The occupational history of an area at the northeastern city wall was defined, thereby raising new questions concerning the growth of the mid-third millennium city and its subsequent history. The assemblages of cuneiform tablets from the Acropolis and the Lower Town establish the identification of Tell Leilan as the long-sought Šubat Enlil. Cylinder seal impressions associated with the archives provide a touchstone for chronological, functional, and stylistic analyses of Old Babylonian glyptic.