Mallowan began his archaeological career digging with Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur. He worked at Ur for six seasons. Most unexpectedly, at the conclusion of their fifth season, a young woman showed up at Ur to visit the Woolleys. It was none other than the famous novelist, Agatha Christie. In what has every appearance of being a set up, the Woolley’s asked Mallowan to accompany Christie back to Baghdad and show her some sites along the way. Henceforth the two embarked on a whirlwind motorcar tour. They stopped at Nippur with its jagged ziggurat rising eerily over the ruins of Sumer’s most holy city; they walked through the old walled city of Nejef and clambered over the ruins of a nearby Ummayad castle. The grand tour ended when their car became stuck fast in the sand after Mallowan instructed the driver to take them to lake so they could go for a swim. It had been a foolish idea Mallowan would later admit. They were a long ways from nowhere and were facing the prospect of a very long wait. But Agatha never spoke a word of reproach.

They were saved when an old, Model T rumbled into view, loaded to the gunnels with 14 passengers. Together, they were able to bodily lift the car back onto the road. Mallowan and Christie continued on their way to Baghdad and never looked back. “I don’t think I guessed,” Mallowan would later recall, “that the short journey to Baghdad would lead to a longer union which was destined to last for the best part of fifty years.”¹Mallowan 1977, 44 They were married that same year.

Nineveh

Mallowan did not want to return to Ur with Agatha, for although Sir Leonard Woolley and his wife were brilliant and accomplished individuals, they were difficult to live and work with, and Mallowan did not want to begin married life with that kind of stress. Thus when the old Assyriologist and epigrapher, Campbell Thompson, offered Mallowan a job at Nineveh, he jumped at the opportunity. Thompson’s only prerequisites were that he be able to slog through mud and sand, ride a horse, and attend Campbell’s favorite cinema without making too many stupid or inane remarks. Mallowan passed the exam having assured Thompson that he was “a competent equestrian.” In fact, Mallowan had only ridden a horse twice in his life. He promised himself that he would do some riding before the dig commenced, but never managed to do so. Thus when he showed up in Mosul with Agatha, he was dismayed to discover that Campbell, being a man of utmost thrift, “was bent on buying the cheapest animal possible and found for the sum of three pounds a little pony that no one else would touch because it bucked, and this was allotted to me.” Mallowan clung to the neck of the animal as it scrambled up the steep slope of Nebi Yunis for the first time. Watching with amusement, the Arab men clapped upon his approach, startling the animal, and setting it off a-bucking.

The green uplands of northern Mesopotamia presented a striking contrast to the flat dusty plains of Sumer. The triangle formed by the Iraqi cities of Erbil, Kirkuk, and Mosul formed the core of the Assyrian empire. Assyria was a creature of the Tigris. The ancient name of this river, Idiglat, means “arrow.” It is a fitting name for the fast-flowing Tigris which cuts a deep and straight path towards the Persian Gulf. In contrast, the Puratta means “the river which flows gently down,” an equally fitting name for the Euphrates, which meanders through all of Syria before turning south.²Mallowan 1977, 68 A riverine culture, Assyria was influenced by its proximity to the Zagros. The mountains brought moisture and provided good grazing, but they were also full of hostile tribes who looked upon the farmers of the plains as rich targets.

Home to Sennacherib’s “palace without rival” Nineveh was once a vast and sprawling city. The river Khosr divided the city into a northern and southern district. Both districts have a major tell: Kuyunjik in the north and Nebi Yunis in the south. It was in the Assyrian levels of Kuyunjik that Henry Layard discovered the giant stone bull-men and beautifully carved wall reliefs which once graced Sennacherib’s palace and are now on exhibit in the British Museum. But long before the Assyrians, the region was home to cities and civilizations of which almost nothing was known when Mallowan showed up there, ready to dig the deepest hole archaeology has ever known.

Campbell Thompson

Campbell was an altogether different sort of man from Woolley. An epigrapher by training, he was, in the words of Mallowan, more of a “tablet hunter” than an archaeologist. An easygoing and jolly man, and a good sportsman, he was known to go fowling in the evening with an old shotgun with a dented barrel and would sometimes wrestle with the local Arab men on the dig. Accustomed to taking long rides on horseback, he discovered the massive dam and waterworks constructed by Sennacherib at a considerable distance north of Nineveh. Mallowan fondly recalls the time he spent working with the old scholar.

The Probe

The upper “historic” levels of the mound had been subject to centuries of pillaging and were therefore poorly preserved. The Assyrian level, which was the earliest of these historic levels, was approximately 14 feet down. Everything below it, 72 feet in total, belonged to what Mallowan classified as the “prehistoric” strata of the tell.

Nineveh V

The uppermost of the prehistoric levels, designated Nineveh V, was 12 feet thick. It contained the remnants of mudbrick houses filled with sand. Mallowan thought that the city must have laid abandoned for some time until it was eventually covered with blowing sand. The pottery from this level was of a distinctive type: light colored, thin walled, and well fired. The earliest examples could be either painted or “stippled”—like someone took a pointed stick and tattooed designs on the side of the vessel. The painted vessels disappear early in the Ninevite V period whereas the stippled designs continued and grew more intricate.³Roaf 1988

Mallowan dated the Ninevite V pottery to c. 3000 BC since he thought the earliest painted examples were derived from Jemdet Nasr Ware.⁴Mallowan 1977, 81 Perhaps some examples do go back this early, but broadly speaking, Ninevite V in the north was contemporary with the Early Dynastic in the south. Indeed, the thin walled, light colored goblets with corrugated sides (see above) bear a striking resemblance to the caliciform goblets of northern Syria which certainly date much later.

Nineveh IV

As Mallowan dug through Nineveh V, he encountered another stratum, Nineveh IV, approximately 21 feet deep, that produced a large number of beveled-rim bowls, polychrome jars, and clay sealings which clearly belonged to the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods.

Nineveh III

Nineveh III produced handmade painted Ubaid pottery and many clay “sickles” such as are often found in the Ubaid levels of cities in Mesopotamia. The sickles could not have been nearly as efficient for harvesting grain as those made with flint. But for people living on the flat alluvial plains of Sumer, they were better than nothing.

Nineveh II

Nineveh II produced another type of pottery, which Mallowan considered to be the finest ever produced in Mesopotamia, known as Halaf Ware, after its type site in northern Syria. Mallowan was the first to find this pottery in a chronological sequence, beneath the Ubaid. Interposed between the two levels, Mallowan encountered approximately three feet “of alternating mud and riverine sand” which he thought might have corresponded to a flood level like that which he and Woolley discovered at Ur.

Nineveh I

The earliest pottery found at the site were rough shards which Mallowan dated to the Hassuna horizon, a period which he thought must go back to “at least 6000 BC.”⁵Mallowan

Chronology

Thus Mallowan assigned a span of approximately 3000 years to the prehistoric levels of Nineveh. There have been no significant revisions to these dates except the period of Ninevite V production is now generally thought to have continued until the middle of the 3rd millennium BC.

Since the chronology proposed by Mallowan is considerably higher than the ones proposed here, it is worth considering whether 3000 or more years are required for 72 feet of debris to accumulate in the prehistoric levels of Nineveh.

Working from the known to the unknown, Nineveh V and IV are comprised of 33 feet of debris and represent a period of approximately 1000 years (c. 3500 BC to 2500 BC according to the conventional chronology). This means that the rate of accumulation in the mound was approximately 3.3 feet per century. This is, I think, a conservative estimate. In all likelihood, a fair portion of the Early Dynastic strata was probably denuded by erosion after the city was abandoned (such as occurred at Uruk). But even if we go with this inflated number, the 39 feet of debris which comprise Nineveh III-I cannot add up to much more than another 1000 years, and quite possibly much less since the houses constructed during the Neolithic period were the mudbrick equivalents to igloos. They had constantly to be rebuilt. As a result, the neolithic strata of a city must have accumulated at a much faster rate than the strata of later periods.

These sorts of calculations are very rough, and one must take into account the stratification of other sites as well, but it seems to me that the prehistoric levels at Nineveh do not require more than a couple millennia, and probably much less!