One astonishing accomplishment in this
respect is illustrated by two photographs in the report. The first shows a
stairway of mud brick, approaching the north east entrance to Temple 7.
Included in it are two distinct occupations of the building, which are marked
“a” and “b”. The floor in the foreground and the three bottom steps belong to
the first occupation. The floor of the second occupation has been cut away, showing
the corresponding wall face, slightly over hanging that of the first.
Delougaz recognised that this overhang was caused by successive replasterings of the walls during the second occupation. He had already observed locally that, in any important mud brick buildings in use at the present day, the plaster deteriorates rapidly and the walls are therefore conscientiously replastered each year, usually in the autumn before the winter rains.
He accordingly realised that, if the number
of replasterings could be counted, a corresponding number of years could
probably be attributed to the occupation period concerned. This, as can be seen
in the second picture, he was actually able to do, and approximately sixteen
years could be estimated as the duration of occupation No. 2 in the seventh Sin
Temple.
Sixteen years corresponded
Having seen that these sixteen years corresponded to a rise of seventy five centimeters in the floor level, he was able to correlate this with the total accumulation of debris in each of the temples: and since these, by the character of the objects found in them, could already be attributed to the successive phases of the Early Dynastic period.
It became possible, allowing a fairly wide margin of error, to estimate the length of the Early Dynastic period for the first time on archaeological evidence. The ingenuity and exemplary care with which this experiment was conducted may, it is hoped, in itself serve to refute any general imputation of ineptitude in the “methodism” of Near Eastern excavators.
During the years that this work was in
progress at Khafaje I myself had been working with another gang of Sherqati
workmen at the headquarters site, Tell Asmar.
Like Delougaz, I had found a small Sumerian
temple and traced back its architecture through all three phases of the Early
Dynastic period to an original, very small chapel, about contemporary with Sin
I. One of these temples had three separate shrines; and it was beneath the
pavement of one that I found the cache of twenty one Sumerian statues,
including the so called “cult statues” of the God Abu and his consort, which
have today become familiar in books on Sumerian sculpture.
travel for beauty 