Tell Halaf - Discovery and Excavation

Discovery and Excavation

The site is located near the city of Ra's al-'Ayn in the fertile valley of the Khabur River (Nahr al-Khabur), close to the modern border with Turkey. The name Tell Halaf is a local Aramaic placename}, tell meaning "hill", and Tell Halaf meaning "made of former city"; what its original inhabitants called their settlement is not known. It was discovered in 1899 by Baron Max von Oppenheim, a German diplomat, while he was surveying the area to build the Baghdad Railway. At the time, Syria was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. He returned to excavate the site from 1911 to 1913 and then again 1929, now under French stewardship following the creation of modern Syria. Oppenheim took many of the artifacts found to Berlin. In 2006, new Syro-German excavations have started under the direction of Lutz Martin (Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin), Abd al-Masih Bagdo (Directorate of Antiquities Hassake), Jörg Becker (University of Halle) and Mirko Novák (University of Bern).

Von Oppenheim founded the Tell Halaf museum in Berlin to house his discoveries from the site. The museum was wrecked in a massive aerial bombardment in World War II, and many of the irreplaceable artifacts were damaged or destroyed, in what is considered one of the worst losses to have occurred in Near Eastern archaeology. However, eighty cubic meters of basalt fragments were later rescued and stored away in the Pergamon Museum. In 2001, a restoration project commenced in Germany that has made some headway in reconstructing many of the damaged artifacts. This project has now been completed.