Amid Roar of Iran-Iraq Air War, Archeologists Excavate Assyrian Burial Chamber

The Iraqi warplanes roar in low from the eastern horizon, returning to their air base at Mosul as Sudanese laborers, who recently made an important discovery at this ancient excavation site, work quietly under the hot morning sun.

The daily patrols of the Soviet-made fighters and the heavy security on the highways of northern Iraq are a constant reminder that the 7 1/2-year-old war with Iran is not so far away from this archeological dig, which transports a visitor back nearly 28 centuries.

The Middle East is a collection of modern states in ancient lands. The contrast is no more striking than here, 20 miles south of Mosul, where in April a handful of contract laborers working under a young Sudanese archeologist, Mohammed Ashger, stumbled onto the burial chamber of an Assyrian queen.

In the queen’s day, Iraq was simply known as the land of two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which drain the mountain basins of Turkey and Iran to form the great fertile valley of Mesopotamia. The Assyrians established an empire that encompassed much of that valley.

4 Great Cities

Nimrud was one of the empire’s four great cities and had reached its peak in the 9th Century BC, when King Assurnasirpal II reigned and made war on just about everyone else in the region.

The Assyrians placed an emphasis on torture, and some of the inscriptions on the palace walls here still radiate the cold-blooded nature of their ancient war ethic:

“I built a pillar over against his city gate, and I flayed all the chief men . . . and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes . . . and I cut off the limbs of the officers.”

As Ashger explains, in the first week of April he sent his work crew to scrape the clay from the floor of one of the chamber areas and the men uncovered the top of a vaulted brickwork.

‘Important Treasure’

“I knew this must be a tomb,” Ashger said as he pulled back the corrugated covering, revealing the entrance to the underground crypt.

Most of the major excavation work in other parts of Nimrud was done in the early part of the century by British archeologists but had since been neglected. For 19 days in April, Ashger said, his men dug gingerly into the tomb, which over the centuries had filled with mud and clay that seeped in with the rainfall. Still, the queen’s chamber remained relatively well preserved.

“We found a very important treasure here,” he said.

Ashger descended by ladder into the darkened cell, a cube of six-foot dimensions, with clay-brick walls inscribed with cuneiform writing. He pointed to the place where his men had unearthed the first clue to the tomb, a crescent-shaped golden earring adorned with a dozen tiny bells.

Golden Pomegranate

Soon more gold pieces sparkled from the clay: necklaces, earrings, flakes of gilding and a finely crafted pin with the shapes of a woman and a hawk. The most impressive treasures, Ashger said, were a golden pomegranate the size of an egg and several similar smaller items.

Dozens of gold pieces and finely carved alabaster jewelry have been removed from the tomb and shipped to Baghdad, where the Iraqi government announced last month that they will eventually go on display.

Ashger pointed to an alcove in the western wall of the tomb where the queen’s ceramic casket was found intact. In the bottom of the casket lay her leg bones, a piece of hip and the skull, cradled on a circular resting plate.

“We do not know her name,” Ashger said, “but she was very important.”