The Iron Age Settlement at ‘Ain Dara, Syria

Description

The great temple of ‘Ain Dara, overlooking the ‘Afrin Valley from the summit of a steep-sided tell, is one of the most impressive monuments of the north Syrian Iron Age. In a program of excavation extending over more than three decades, expeditions sponsored by the Syrian Department of Antiquities and Museums have completely exposed the temple’s ground plan and recovered a major corpus of associated sculptures. This rich archaeological harvest, however, poses important questions to which excavation in the temple itself has suggested only incomplete answers, or none at all. The research presented in this survey and excavation report is the product of a project undertaken in the early 1980s to provide a context for the temple by investigating the settlement that surrounded it, offering a contribution to our understanding of an obscure phase in the archaeology of northern Syria and southern Anatolia.