80" SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I ID 



By drawing a parallel between this belt and the bronze plate from 

 Shirak in Yerevan Museum and another belt, found in 1905, at Gushi 

 on Lake Urmia [Rezaiyeh] together with the bronze bulls' heads 

 published by F. Sarre and A. U. Pope as Achemenid and Iranian, 

 we try to prove the Urartian origin and age of all these monuments. 

 In this category are also the remarkable bulls' heads, similar to those 

 from Toprak-Kala, on chariot poles in the British Museum, and 

 especially to the Hermitage application to a large bucket or cauldron, 

 found with a handle in the form of a siren of Urartian type. 



On the basis of the definite dating which Kuftin obtained for the 

 cemetery with cremation, the previously mentioned discovery in one 

 of the graves of a fragment of a bronze bucket acquires a new signifi- 

 cance. This gives a more precise date for the flourishing stage of 

 Koban bronze, which had perhaps been carried back too far, and in 

 which was developed the most skillful molding of bronze weapons (in 

 particular of typical axheads and flat celts with lateral projections), 

 while the territory of Lake Van, poorer in copper ore, had already 

 passed on completely to weapons of iron. 



The inventory of the village, which lies beneath the lava flow to the 

 south of the columbarium, is of an entirely different character and is 

 therefore not connected chronologically. The cultural strata consist 

 of huge layers of ashes, used by the peasants for fertilizing the fields, 

 and of large heaps of ruined mud brick. These layers yielded many 

 bones of horned cattle, stone fragments, grain pounders, obsidian 

 flakes, and sherds. There were no traces of metal or of glass, with the 

 exception of a group of beaten-copper ingots perhaps originating here. 



The pottery, quite distinct from that of the columbarium, had noth- 

 ing in common with that from South Caucasian graves of the Bronze 

 Age. It is distinguished by the combination of archaic methods of 

 modeling, without using the potter's wheel, with artistic molding and 

 a fine finish given to the vessels through the use of a slip and elaborate 

 polishing. 



The characteristic features include : hemispherical handles, a broad 

 cylindrical neck, a lid, the black shiny outer surface of the sherds with 

 a pink inner surface, and the ornamentation of the neck with a ribbon- 

 like, geometrically cut belt. 



Associated with the fragments of a vessel there were pottery frag- 

 ments, horseshoe-shaped, with a handle behind; these bear some 

 analogy to the "horned altars" from Alishar III and through them 

 with the puzzling Aegean attributes of a goddess on a double ax. 



In the absence of any systematic excavation, and because of the 

 haphazard nature of the collected material (in particular the fragment 



