The modern city of al-Iss—Greek Chalkis and Arabic Qinnasrin—lies southwest of Aleppo in Syria and, during the Roman period, dominated large tracts of the fertile plain into which the river Qoueiq empties. The publication under review represents the output and final report of a field project conducted at Chalkis under the direction of Marie-Odile Rousset. Profiting from the expertise of an earlier project at nearby Hadir Qinnasrin, the project began in 2008 but was interrupted by the outbreak of the Syrian War in 2011. Therefore, the book summarizes the results of three years of fieldwork, more of which were planned to follow; the authors were obliged to accept the unfortunate circumstances that truncated the project and the consequent incompleteness of its documentation. Although the project was left unfinished, the publication will unfortunately constitute the final word on several of the aspects covered therein, given that the archaeological site is suffering as a result of the ongoing expansion of the modern settlement and particularly as a result of the military fortification of its tell and hilltop during the course of the winter of 2014–15.
Prior to the project’s commencement, although Chalkis is mentioned in numerous ancient written sources, the site’s archaeology remained poorly understood, and the relative obscurity of the city’s topography provided ample scope for thought-provoking—albeit speculative—historical reconstructions. For René Mouterde and Antoine Poidebard in 1945, for instance, the city was an outpost of the Roman Empire and the central node in a wide-spanning early defense system against threats from the steppes, their “limes de Chalkis.”[1] For Donald Whitcomb in 1998, an alleged military camp at the gates of Chalkis represented the basis for the foundation of Hadir ‘the camp’ Qinnasrin and physical proof of that which written sources describe as the model early Islamic city.[2] Fieldwork in adjacent regions has since disproven both theories.
Before the project in question here commenced, the site was known to consist of a tell, a Byzantine city to the north, with a city wall dated to AD 550/1, and a natural hill, often called Jebel al-Iss or Nabi Iss. The publication’s key contribution is its provision of hitherto lacking information on this important town, with its long and complex history, beyond this general framework. To assemble detailed evidence for the city’s topography and diachronic evolution, the team executed several steps: (1) a study of the available maps as well as of aerial and satellite imagery; (2) a geodetic survey with the aim of establishing a detailed topographic map; (3) a geomagnetic survey in three available areas, on the tell (8 ha), north of the modern and ancient city (22.2 ha), and on the top of Jebel al-Iss (13.5 ha); (4) a study of the architectural fragments reused in the modern village; (5) a survey of the surface pottery in 117 fields distributed throughout the entire site and often located close to visible archaeological remains; and (6) three soundings that were opened but left unfinished in 2011, when further seasons were planned and the documentation had been left incomplete. The team additionally inspected two modern building sites located west and east of the Byzantine city in detail, and profited from the 2010 visit of Jean-Claude Bessac, a specialist on quarries and stonemasonry.
The publication under review presents the results of this fieldwork in 20 chapters, grouped into three parts. Following a brief introduction that relates the history of archaeological research in the region and of the French mission, Part 1 presents the written testimonia on Chalkis; Part 2 describes the archaeological remains as studied through surface observation, geomagnetic survey, and excavation; and Part 3 summarizes the pottery found in the survey, followed by a synthesis presented in both English and Arabic (it should be noted here that the pagination from front to back in the Arabic section is awkward). The book, as many archaeological publications necessarily are, is a more or less consistent collection of specialist reports, and the structure of the book may seem additive. Nevertheless, the editor has remarkably achieved tying these contributions together through the introduction and summary. The book is thoroughly copy-edited, and it is openly available online. The digital version allows several of the images that necessarily ended up small in the printed version to be viewed in higher resolution—for instance, the topographical map on p. 104—in addition to facilitating convenient bookmarking—as with the map detailing the outline of all fields visited in the pottery survey on p. 105, which I found myself consulting frequently while reading the book.
Rather than simply iterating the order in which the book’s chapters are presented, in the following, I shall highlight the results in relation to the site’s chronology, as does Marie-Odile Rousset’s summary at the end of the book. Prior to the discussion proper, it is worth noting that in addition to several fields close to the river Qoueiq, Tell Zaytan, located 5 km north of Qinnasrin, was also included in the pottery survey. As was the case with earlier surveys,[3] pottery from the Bronze Age (p. 351) and the Persian and Hellenistic periods (pp. 371–373) was found there.
The pre- and early history of Chalkis/Qinnasrin presumably lies, for the most part, hidden within the tell, which rises 34 m above the plain and remains wholly unexcavated. The pottery survey conducted across the tell’s top surface yielded only a handful of sherds from the pre-Hellenistic period (p. 351), a situation already reported by earlier surveys (p. 438). Large-scale circular features, detected using magnetometry (p. 109, fig. 10f), may indicate early structures. However, an important settlement comprising some 35 ha, surrounded by a massive fortification wall and occupied during a relatively brief period during the transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age, was identified on Jebel al-Iss and studied. The settlement was detected by means of observation and geomagnetics (pp. 134–159), and the report publishes the surface pottery, presented according to typology and complemented by a catalogue (pp. 351–362). Several small finds are also reported (pp. 363–369). The settlement was associated with an extensive necropolis on the northern flanks of the Jebel (pp. 148–157), which has been partly destroyed by a modern quarry, as well as on the southern flanks, which had already been destroyed by quarrying activity in antiquity (pp. 265–267). The name of the Bronze Age settlement remains to be discovered.
A stele of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III, recounting his western conquests in 738 BC, mentions “Qinasrina of the steppe,” and the equation of Qinnasrin with Chalkis is clear from the trilingual Res Gestae of the Sassanian king Shapur regarding the campaign of AD 253: the settlement bears the name Chalkis in the Greek and Qinnasrin in the Parthian version. No traces of this Iron Age settlement—not a single sherd—have been detected. We are thus confronted with the puzzling situation whereby we possess archaeological traces of a major yet unnamed Bronze Age settlement and the name of a relatively important Iron Age settlement that has hitherto yielded no archaeological traces (pp. 438–439).
Evidence for the Hellenistic period remains scant, and only a scattering of sherds attests to the possible extent of the settlement on the tell and its southwestern perimeter (see maps on pp. 417 and 440). Evidence suggests that the tell was first fortified during this period and that the two different orientations of the walls detected in the geomagnetic survey on the tell may be related to its Hellenistic and Roman occupations (p. 440). Might this suggest a destruction toward the end of the Hellenistic period (not considered by the authors)? Sandrine Élaigne’s chapter on the Hellenistic and Roman pottery selects and presents six different survey areas (pp. 317–390, here without catalogue) that yielded relatively homogenous samples. Regarding the Roman period, Jean Aliquot (pp. 21–28) demonstrates that a series of coins bearing the inscription “Flavia Chalkis” must be attributed to Chalkis/Qinnasrin rather than to one of several other Syrian cities of the same name. He vigorously outlines the implications of this attribution for our knowledge of regional history, as this constitutes a further argument in favor of the annexation of the numerous small client kingdoms (Commagene, Emesa, etc.) at a certain date between AD 72 and 75 under the command of M. Ulpius Traianus (the later emperor). New evidence for the organization of the Roman town derives from a survey of the dislocated architectural members (pp. 300–350, summarized on p. 443), quarries (pp. 255–275), and pagan tombs, often decorated with a nefesh, one of them with a well-preserved funeral relief (pp. 277–296). However, one of the most important new discoveries came from a chance find: during the final days of the 2010 season, the team had the opportunity to document the remains of a Roman city wall exposed by a new irrigation channel east of the tell (pp. 167–171). Further parts of this fortification, which may date to the 3rd century AD as suggested by its masonry technique, have been traced in satellite images. The interpretations of these images, however, are more equivocal than may initially appear (plan on p. 442), and other interpretations are possible.
The construction of the surviving circuit wall in AD 550/1 reduced the city area, which had previously been only partly built, to 78 ha. Nevertheless, Chalkis’ importance as a strategic point and regional center peaked at this time, and it is this phase that is best documented. Textual sources are presented in two contributions by Gatier and Rousset and are used to create a colorful image of the processes involved in the town’s Christianization during the mid-4th century AD and the more and less extreme forms of monasticism that emerged in the region (pp. 41–55). From an archaeological perspective, aside from quarries (pp. 255–275), Christian tombs decorated with crosses (pp. 277–290), caves (pp. 154, 450–51), pottery (pp. 391–394), and architectural remains (esp. pp. 330–336), it is again the geomagnetic survey that offers the fullest sense of the town’s organization, with a large central-plan church on the tell and an industrial quarter in its northern suburb (pp. 107–109, 123–133). A sounding placed in this district revealed a series of combustion sites used to produce either primary glass or plant ashes that could be used in the production of glass as well as soap (pp. 174–188). At the end of the Byzantine period, large ditches were dug around the city to improve its defenses. The book’s final summary addresses these ditches as part of the defense system of AD 550 (p. 448), and, in the sounding, they clearly postdate the artisanal installations (pp. 182–184, 187).
Life at Qinnasrin continued well into the Islamic period for some 350 years until the city was finally deserted during the Arab–Byzantine wars in the second half of the 10th century AD. In the publication, this period is elucidated through a discussion of the historical sources (Rousset pp. 55–60) in addition to the pottery survey (pp. 395–399). An Umayyad bathhouse with ornamental mosaics into which a warrior’s burial was dug in the 10th century was additionally excavated in the northern part of the town (pp. 189–217; study of the human remains pp. 233, 236–238). Another sounding was placed at the corner of a monumental gate system on Jebel al-Iss (pp. 245–253) and revealed the new, extensive fortification on the hilltop that reused the Bronze Age fortifications.
After the 10th century AD, Qinnasrin was settled only sporadically on a small scale and used mainly for temporary military encampment and as a pillage ground. A small section of a large burial ground was excavated above the Umayyad bathhouse, comprising seven inhumations (p. 205, study of the human remains pp. 219–243), and a series of inscribed tombstones of the 12th century AD (pp. 71–98) comes from the same wider area.
In summary, this final publication of three years of fieldwork (2008–2010), written by experts of their respective subjects, constitutes a groundbreaking contribution to our knowledge of Chalkis/Qinnasrin. The project implemented several contemporary survey methods and was able to conduct excavations on a limited scale. Despite the project’s inevitable termination in 2011, the authors have managed to produce a preliminary yet informed sketch of Chalkis’ long urban history from the Middle Bronze Age to the present day.
Notes
[1] R. Mouterde and A. Poidebard, Le Limes de Chalcis. Organisation de la steppe en Haute Syrie romaine. Documents aériens et épigraphiques, Bibliothèque archéologique et historique 38 (Paris 1945).
[2] See for example D. S. Whitcomb, “Discovering a New City in Syria: Hadir Qinnasrin 1998,” The Oriental Institute. News & Notes 163, 1999, 1–5.
[3] P. Kenrick, “Fine Wares of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” in: J. Matthers (ed.), The River Qoueiq, Northern Syria, and Its Catchment. Studies Arising from the Tell Rifa’at Survey 1977–79, BAR Int. Ser. 98 (Oxford 1981) 451f.