438 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 9 



even on the larger military maps, is today a common term in numerous 

 technical publications and not a stranger to the lay reader. A recent 

 popular history of Assyria, published in Germany, has introduced the 

 designation "Tepe Gawra culture" for one of the significant stages of 

 prehistoric Mesopotamia. Such a rapid rise to prominence has to be 

 well founded. The reason indeed is not far to seek. To put it in a 

 single sentence, Gawra furnishes the longest continuous record of 

 superimposed occupations known to science. What is more, the latest 

 of these settlements was abandoned 3,500 years ago, and only the first 

 six building levels, counting from the top, date from after 3000 B. C. 

 The rest, more than 90 feet out of a total height of 104 feet of occupa- 

 tional deposits, witness for us the fourth and fifth millennia B. C, 

 periods that are little known or entirely unknown except for the testi- 

 mony of this mound. No other site can be said to duplicate, or even 

 approach, this notable record. Ancient Nineveh was settled probably 

 as early as Gawra and attained to its greatest fame in Assyrian times 

 when the latter mound was already a long-abandoned tell ; but Nineveh 

 suffered from lengthy periods of desertion, so that her testimony is 

 not continuous. Famed Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, started out 

 long after Gawra, as did all the other sites in the south, even though 

 it was to remain inhabited down to the first millennium B. C. More- 

 over, the testimony of Uruk has to be pieced together from the remains 

 of several distinct areas ; it is not neatly stratified in a single layered 

 deposit as is Gawra. Here alone is the record unified and uninter- 

 rupted. Of the approximately 7,000 years which separate the end 

 of the neolithic age from our own times, Gawra covers tlie first 3,500 — 

 a cultural contribution wholly without parallel.^ 



Today we can estimate the significance of the mound as a whole, 

 although one more season is required before the expedition to Tepe 

 Gawra will have completed its original task. That the results can 

 be viewed at this time in their correct perspective is due primarily 

 to the work of the past season, which served to close the gap between 

 the lowest strata, reached in a trial trench in the spring of 1937, and 

 the upper levels, whose systematic removal from the top dowjn 

 has been going on since 1931 (pi. 2). We are thus in a position 

 not only to survey the entire contents of the site, with special 

 emphasis on the accessions of the past season, but to sense as well 

 their far-reaching cultural implications. But, before such a sum- 

 mary review is attempted, it is in order to recall the outstanding 

 results of the previous campaigns. 



The three uppermost levels contained material remains of the 

 Hurrians, a leading factor in the extremely complicated history of 

 the second millennium B. C. It is fairly characteristic of the im- 



» See Smithsonian Ann. Rep. for 1933, pp. 415-427, 1934. 



