Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
3.
The Azman archaeological site, Syria, August 28th 2024.
The Azman archaeological site was located some twenty-five kilometers from the Euphrates, near a tributary of the latter. The origins of the ruins of the site, which had been discovered by remote satellite sensing in the late 1970’s, were still not yet cleared out. For sure, its most surficial remains were of the Hellenistic period. Some of them were without doubt built under Roman rule, but often, they stood on older foundations.
One theory said it was the location of a lost ancient city, referred to in Ancient accounts as Leontopolis. Other said that Leontopolis was merely another name of ancient Callinicum, located at today’s Raqqa. Anyway, the ruins exposed in the Azman site were less spectacular than others in the country, such as for instance those in Palmyra. The tributary of the Euphrates, along which the ruins are located, is thought to have been originally a main course of the stream. Shifting of the main river bed and changes of climate after the Roman era had drastically reduced the importance of the city. War and invasions had enhanced its decline, climate and earthquakes had done the rest : nearly leveling it! Above the ground level, there were hardly two stones left upon each other.
The curious thing was, that the Hellenist and Roman city must have been built upon an earlier town, of which streets had literally been roofed by the more recent ones. Reconstruction showed that this had been the consequence of a rising river- and groundwater table, that once had forced to raise the city’s terrain. This had sometimes been done by elevating the terrain with soil material, or by adding new floor levels at the buildings, or, the most extreme and ingenious solution, particularly for the time, by vaulting the original streets. Later, the water level must have fallen again, making the covered street levels accessible again. These covered early streets had revealed a mixture of pre-Hellenistic artefacts and a Hellenistic-Roman use as catacombs, burial places and, judging from wall paintings, also as taverns and brothels. A real place of parallel underground life, amidst the resting places of the death.
As a result, the Azman site was a dangerous place to access. There were still many unmapped cavities and covered streets, and often, the vaulting had been weakened during time. Anyone making a wrong step could unexpectedly fall meters deep into a cavity, or, while being in a covered street, the ceiling suddenly could come down.
Earthquakes had of course been an agent that had weakened the roofs, but recently, the place had been shelled and bombed during civil war fire exchanges, with unknown impacts, on one hand inflicting damages and, maybe, on the other hand, possibly revealing unknown cavities.
The manuscript I had found, had mentioned something curious about a ‘Temple of Jupiter’ in Leontopolis! If it would be true, new light could have been shed on one of the mysteries of the region. Providing it was true, since relying on a Latin text, presumably translated from Arab, itself a transcript of a Greek account referring to an original source… in Latin, could have been very speculative! What made it at least worthwhile to investigate was, that the manuscript mentioned the existence of a ‘Temple of Jupiter’, on the highest spot of the town. Actually, during our excavations, we had become aware that foundations of the building at the highest point were remnants a temple, and we had presumed, from scarce founds, it could have been dedicated to Jupiter, but we had never been sure about it. This was the first written source ever that seemed to confirm our hypothesis.
Alya knew that, while the area had been disputed between the Mahdists and Bashim’s mercenaries, the former had used the temple site as a spotting point to oversee the region. So, their adversaries had send a Mig to bomb the place, and the bombing had revealed a new cavity. It was well known that the alleged Temple of Jupiter had a basement with the floor at the original pre-Roman level. But initially, there had been no indications for the existence of an even deeper level, and no one had expected it, because the temple stood at the city’s highest point, and adding one level should have been sufficient to keep the temple floor dry at the time of the rising groundwater.
After her militia had taken the area under control, Alya had paid a brief visit to the site, she told me. She had seen the entrance to the deeper cavity, but due to lack of material, she had not descended into it, and, at the first sight, there only seemed to be rubble inside. But having learned from my manuscript, she suddenly had got interested to have a closer look, together with me.
“Help me with the ladder, will you Lox?” she had loaded a ladder on the roof of the vehicle. We entered the site, of which still parts of the fences stood up, as well as signs ‘No Trespassing’ in English, French and Arab, with a reference to Syrian law on archaeological sites. Other danger signs warned for cavities and collapses.
We knew our way on the site, but still behaved carefully, aware against surprises and avoiding remnants of unused of unexploded ammunition. Alya was convinced there were likely no mines or boobytraps left, but nevertheless, she suspected the Mahdists of having had plans to blow up the site and having made preparations to it!
Alya was prepared for everything. She had taken with an AK-47, since, she stated, no one can be trusted. And she had shown me, the magazine was loaded. Although the site looked abandoned, we could draw unwanted attention, she had warned me.
Arrived at the Temple of Jupiter, we descended into the basement, which was easily accessible. There, I saw the damage. The wall at the backside had caved in, and behind it awaited a deeper black dark cavity. We shone into it with our torches. It was some four meters deep, and all we could see was rubble. By lack of a bomb crater, it seemed most likely that vibrations from an explosion had made the wall collapse into the cavity. But was the rubble below just coming from the collapsed wall, or was there more?
We would find out soon. Together, we lowered the ladder. Once inside, we inspected the damage. I figured, the mass of debris was inaccessible, but Alya thought different.
“There could be a passage! Maybe there!” she indicated with her torch.
“Alya, that’s impossible!”
“Listen, Lox, in my training, and sadly also in practice, I have learned that piles of debris, caused by bombing, or earthquakes, may be piled up in such a way, that one may crawl right through it!”
“You probably mean collapsed concrete slabs!? This is stone rubble!”
“Yes, but it is has largely collapsed as slabs! Less easy than concrete slabs, but worthwhile to try! Here, I go to have a look, hold my rifle and cover me, for in case…!”
She handed over her AK-47.
“How does this thing work!?”
“It is loaded but not chambered! Cock it with this handle, release safety, here, put your right hand on the pistol grip, left hand on hand grip here, butt against your shoulder, finger on the trigger, pull trigger! Bang! Hey, Lox, did you never handle an assault rifle?”
“Sure, in the army, I…”
“Basically, they all work the same! Careful, and don’t hurt yourself!” and she slipped into the little hole she had called a passage.
Some five minutes later, she was back.
“I made it through, Lox!” she shouted! “I even think I found something special, there!”
“Something special?”
“I hope you are not too claustrophobic, Lox!” she said “but you should go through that passage! it is really worthwhile!”
The ‘passage’ she had taken, still looked hardly passible to me. Its ‘entrance’ was at floor level, just a wider gap between two massive pieces of rubble in a heap of piled up stones that looked all but stable. I shone into it with my torch. I could not see the end. Just debris
“I have been through it, and it is feasible!” Alya said, noticing my doubts. “As long as no earthquake will incidentally occur, or someone will be bombing us, that heap will not move!”
“I hope so!” I replied “What’s behind it!?”
“Wait and see, Lox! I want you there for your expert opinion! Give my rifle back! I don’t leave it behind here, I can carry it with me!”
The prospect of having to go through that little rabbit hole kept me anxious.
“But… just tell me what you have seen there…!?”
“Doctor Loxuru! No guts, no glory, remember!? I want you to go there and see it with your own eyes! This insignificant pile of debris could be the only obstacle between you and eternal fame as an archaeologist! Would you allow destiny deny you that chance for yourself!? I know you better! I give you two options! Are either you go in, first, at gunpoint, or I go in first, and you follow! And if you don’t, this will end our cooperation forever, you find your way out of this war zone on your own, and I never want to see you again! It’s up to you!?”
“All right, Alya! I will follow you! Promised”
“Good, Lox, I am sorry I have to do it like this! I just want to save you from the biggest disappointment of a career for having missed a once in a lifetime find! At the other side, you will be thankful to me that I forced you to do this!”
She went down on her knees and entered the passage again.
“Just mind, there is an S-duct that may be confusing!” was her last advice.
“Careful!” I said “Dust can block the mechanism of your rifle!”
“Don’t worry!” she said, “I know how to handle it! We had to crawl through such narrow passages with this canon, during training! It is certainly no longer than ten meters!”
So I followed her, in one of these moments I wondered why I had not become a bank clerk instead of an archaeologist!
The inside of the passage looked all but safe. My body could hardly pass through it, and every moment, I feared I would make a block of stone move, that would bring down the whole mass above me, or that would entrap me. Or getting stuck in a section too narrow for my body! My only relief was, that I could see Alya crawling ahead of me. But at a certain point, it looked like a dead end, and briefly fearing I had lost myself into a maze of rubble, I saw there was the S-duct, a very cramped one. So, I tried that one, turned on my side, crawling bent like a snake, dangerously scratching along the sides of the passage. There was hardly room to move…
Finally I made it, almost exhausted from the effort, my heart bouncing wildly, my knees hurting,….
“You see, Lox! It’s a piece of cake!”, Alya said.
I spotted again some irony, about the anguish I had displayed.
“For you, perhaps!?”
“I had to overcome my fear also, for such narrow ducts! Now, look, there!”
We had entered a room, the same height as where we came from. The walls and the floor were bare stone surface. But when I turned left, where Alya pointed her torch at, there was a structure… no doubt some sarcophagus.
It was a stone sarcophagus indeed. The debris from the collapse had broken the stone cover. Suddenly my worry of being in this claustrophobic place was over, when I watched the content.
There was a skeleton inside. Behind the skull lay a yellow metal tiara, which the body must have worn once. Judging from the style of what was left of the clothing, some brownish rags and metal shoulder buttons, and of the tiara, this could have been a woman.
“Well, what do you think, Lox!?” Alya asked, clearly exited, while further exanimating inscriptions on a slab of stone that had been inside the sarcophagus.
“I think, it could have been a woman, a woman with some social status at least!” I said, half guessing.
“Sure, it is a woman’s skeleton! That is obvious from the shape of the pelvis bones! But not just one with a high social status! Here, these inscriptions! They are partly erased, but still!”
“Are you suggesting it is…”
“I am quiet convinced Lox, say, for ninety percent! Imagine! It is her! We found her!”
(to be continued)
The Azman archaeological site, Syria, August 28th 2024.
The Azman archaeological site was located some twenty-five kilometers from the Euphrates, near a tributary of the latter. The origins of the ruins of the site, which had been discovered by remote satellite sensing in the late 1970’s, were still not yet cleared out. For sure, its most surficial remains were of the Hellenistic period. Some of them were without doubt built under Roman rule, but often, they stood on older foundations.
One theory said it was the location of a lost ancient city, referred to in Ancient accounts as Leontopolis. Other said that Leontopolis was merely another name of ancient Callinicum, located at today’s Raqqa. Anyway, the ruins exposed in the Azman site were less spectacular than others in the country, such as for instance those in Palmyra. The tributary of the Euphrates, along which the ruins are located, is thought to have been originally a main course of the stream. Shifting of the main river bed and changes of climate after the Roman era had drastically reduced the importance of the city. War and invasions had enhanced its decline, climate and earthquakes had done the rest : nearly leveling it! Above the ground level, there were hardly two stones left upon each other.
The curious thing was, that the Hellenist and Roman city must have been built upon an earlier town, of which streets had literally been roofed by the more recent ones. Reconstruction showed that this had been the consequence of a rising river- and groundwater table, that once had forced to raise the city’s terrain. This had sometimes been done by elevating the terrain with soil material, or by adding new floor levels at the buildings, or, the most extreme and ingenious solution, particularly for the time, by vaulting the original streets. Later, the water level must have fallen again, making the covered street levels accessible again. These covered early streets had revealed a mixture of pre-Hellenistic artefacts and a Hellenistic-Roman use as catacombs, burial places and, judging from wall paintings, also as taverns and brothels. A real place of parallel underground life, amidst the resting places of the death.
As a result, the Azman site was a dangerous place to access. There were still many unmapped cavities and covered streets, and often, the vaulting had been weakened during time. Anyone making a wrong step could unexpectedly fall meters deep into a cavity, or, while being in a covered street, the ceiling suddenly could come down.
Earthquakes had of course been an agent that had weakened the roofs, but recently, the place had been shelled and bombed during civil war fire exchanges, with unknown impacts, on one hand inflicting damages and, maybe, on the other hand, possibly revealing unknown cavities.
The manuscript I had found, had mentioned something curious about a ‘Temple of Jupiter’ in Leontopolis! If it would be true, new light could have been shed on one of the mysteries of the region. Providing it was true, since relying on a Latin text, presumably translated from Arab, itself a transcript of a Greek account referring to an original source… in Latin, could have been very speculative! What made it at least worthwhile to investigate was, that the manuscript mentioned the existence of a ‘Temple of Jupiter’, on the highest spot of the town. Actually, during our excavations, we had become aware that foundations of the building at the highest point were remnants a temple, and we had presumed, from scarce founds, it could have been dedicated to Jupiter, but we had never been sure about it. This was the first written source ever that seemed to confirm our hypothesis.
Alya knew that, while the area had been disputed between the Mahdists and Bashim’s mercenaries, the former had used the temple site as a spotting point to oversee the region. So, their adversaries had send a Mig to bomb the place, and the bombing had revealed a new cavity. It was well known that the alleged Temple of Jupiter had a basement with the floor at the original pre-Roman level. But initially, there had been no indications for the existence of an even deeper level, and no one had expected it, because the temple stood at the city’s highest point, and adding one level should have been sufficient to keep the temple floor dry at the time of the rising groundwater.
After her militia had taken the area under control, Alya had paid a brief visit to the site, she told me. She had seen the entrance to the deeper cavity, but due to lack of material, she had not descended into it, and, at the first sight, there only seemed to be rubble inside. But having learned from my manuscript, she suddenly had got interested to have a closer look, together with me.
“Help me with the ladder, will you Lox?” she had loaded a ladder on the roof of the vehicle. We entered the site, of which still parts of the fences stood up, as well as signs ‘No Trespassing’ in English, French and Arab, with a reference to Syrian law on archaeological sites. Other danger signs warned for cavities and collapses.
We knew our way on the site, but still behaved carefully, aware against surprises and avoiding remnants of unused of unexploded ammunition. Alya was convinced there were likely no mines or boobytraps left, but nevertheless, she suspected the Mahdists of having had plans to blow up the site and having made preparations to it!
Alya was prepared for everything. She had taken with an AK-47, since, she stated, no one can be trusted. And she had shown me, the magazine was loaded. Although the site looked abandoned, we could draw unwanted attention, she had warned me.
Arrived at the Temple of Jupiter, we descended into the basement, which was easily accessible. There, I saw the damage. The wall at the backside had caved in, and behind it awaited a deeper black dark cavity. We shone into it with our torches. It was some four meters deep, and all we could see was rubble. By lack of a bomb crater, it seemed most likely that vibrations from an explosion had made the wall collapse into the cavity. But was the rubble below just coming from the collapsed wall, or was there more?
We would find out soon. Together, we lowered the ladder. Once inside, we inspected the damage. I figured, the mass of debris was inaccessible, but Alya thought different.
“There could be a passage! Maybe there!” she indicated with her torch.
“Alya, that’s impossible!”
“Listen, Lox, in my training, and sadly also in practice, I have learned that piles of debris, caused by bombing, or earthquakes, may be piled up in such a way, that one may crawl right through it!”
“You probably mean collapsed concrete slabs!? This is stone rubble!”
“Yes, but it is has largely collapsed as slabs! Less easy than concrete slabs, but worthwhile to try! Here, I go to have a look, hold my rifle and cover me, for in case…!”
She handed over her AK-47.
“How does this thing work!?”
“It is loaded but not chambered! Cock it with this handle, release safety, here, put your right hand on the pistol grip, left hand on hand grip here, butt against your shoulder, finger on the trigger, pull trigger! Bang! Hey, Lox, did you never handle an assault rifle?”
“Sure, in the army, I…”
“Basically, they all work the same! Careful, and don’t hurt yourself!” and she slipped into the little hole she had called a passage.
Some five minutes later, she was back.
“I made it through, Lox!” she shouted! “I even think I found something special, there!”
“Something special?”
“I hope you are not too claustrophobic, Lox!” she said “but you should go through that passage! it is really worthwhile!”
The ‘passage’ she had taken, still looked hardly passible to me. Its ‘entrance’ was at floor level, just a wider gap between two massive pieces of rubble in a heap of piled up stones that looked all but stable. I shone into it with my torch. I could not see the end. Just debris
“I have been through it, and it is feasible!” Alya said, noticing my doubts. “As long as no earthquake will incidentally occur, or someone will be bombing us, that heap will not move!”
“I hope so!” I replied “What’s behind it!?”
“Wait and see, Lox! I want you there for your expert opinion! Give my rifle back! I don’t leave it behind here, I can carry it with me!”
The prospect of having to go through that little rabbit hole kept me anxious.
“But… just tell me what you have seen there…!?”
“Doctor Loxuru! No guts, no glory, remember!? I want you to go there and see it with your own eyes! This insignificant pile of debris could be the only obstacle between you and eternal fame as an archaeologist! Would you allow destiny deny you that chance for yourself!? I know you better! I give you two options! Are either you go in, first, at gunpoint, or I go in first, and you follow! And if you don’t, this will end our cooperation forever, you find your way out of this war zone on your own, and I never want to see you again! It’s up to you!?”
“All right, Alya! I will follow you! Promised”
“Good, Lox, I am sorry I have to do it like this! I just want to save you from the biggest disappointment of a career for having missed a once in a lifetime find! At the other side, you will be thankful to me that I forced you to do this!”
She went down on her knees and entered the passage again.
“Just mind, there is an S-duct that may be confusing!” was her last advice.
“Careful!” I said “Dust can block the mechanism of your rifle!”
“Don’t worry!” she said, “I know how to handle it! We had to crawl through such narrow passages with this canon, during training! It is certainly no longer than ten meters!”
So I followed her, in one of these moments I wondered why I had not become a bank clerk instead of an archaeologist!
The inside of the passage looked all but safe. My body could hardly pass through it, and every moment, I feared I would make a block of stone move, that would bring down the whole mass above me, or that would entrap me. Or getting stuck in a section too narrow for my body! My only relief was, that I could see Alya crawling ahead of me. But at a certain point, it looked like a dead end, and briefly fearing I had lost myself into a maze of rubble, I saw there was the S-duct, a very cramped one. So, I tried that one, turned on my side, crawling bent like a snake, dangerously scratching along the sides of the passage. There was hardly room to move…
Finally I made it, almost exhausted from the effort, my heart bouncing wildly, my knees hurting,….
“You see, Lox! It’s a piece of cake!”, Alya said.
I spotted again some irony, about the anguish I had displayed.
“For you, perhaps!?”
“I had to overcome my fear also, for such narrow ducts! Now, look, there!”
We had entered a room, the same height as where we came from. The walls and the floor were bare stone surface. But when I turned left, where Alya pointed her torch at, there was a structure… no doubt some sarcophagus.
It was a stone sarcophagus indeed. The debris from the collapse had broken the stone cover. Suddenly my worry of being in this claustrophobic place was over, when I watched the content.
There was a skeleton inside. Behind the skull lay a yellow metal tiara, which the body must have worn once. Judging from the style of what was left of the clothing, some brownish rags and metal shoulder buttons, and of the tiara, this could have been a woman.
“Well, what do you think, Lox!?” Alya asked, clearly exited, while further exanimating inscriptions on a slab of stone that had been inside the sarcophagus.
“I think, it could have been a woman, a woman with some social status at least!” I said, half guessing.
“Sure, it is a woman’s skeleton! That is obvious from the shape of the pelvis bones! But not just one with a high social status! Here, these inscriptions! They are partly erased, but still!”
“Are you suggesting it is…”
“I am quiet convinced Lox, say, for ninety percent! Imagine! It is her! We found her!”
(to be continued)
bloxbuster.
