Babylonian Encounters in the Upper Diyala River Valley: Contextualizing the Results of Regional Survey and the 2016–2017 Excavations at Khani Masi

Abstract

Kassite Babylonia counts among the great powers of the Late Bronze Age Near East. Its kings exchanged diplomatic letters with the pharaohs of Egypt and held their own against their Assyrian and Elamite neighbors. Babylonia's internal workings, however, remain understood in their outlines only, as do its elite's expansionary ambitions, the degrees to which they may have been realized, and the nature of ensuing imperial encounters. This is especially the case for the region to the northeast, where the Mesopotamian lowlands meet the Zagros piedmonts in the Diyala River valley and where a series of corridors of movement intersect to form a strategic highland-lowland borderland. In this paper, we present critical new results of regional survey in the Upper Diyala plains of northeast Iraq and excavations at the Late Bronze Age site of Khani Masi. Not only do our data and analyses expand considerably the known extent of Babylonia's cultural sphere, but also the monumental character of Khani Masi and its wider settlement context prompt a fundamental rethinking of the nature and chronology of Babylonian presence in this transitional landscape. As such, this paper contributes an important new case study to the field of archaeological empire and borderland studies. 1 introduction Kassite Babylonia (ca. 1550-1150 B.C.E.) was one of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age, an international age in which the expansive polities of 1 We would like to thank the General Directorate of Antiquities of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the Garmian Department of Antiquities for allowing us to work in this important area and for their ongoing support. In particular we must thank Abwbakr Osman Zainadin (Mala Awat), Director General of Antiquities and Heritage for the Kurdistan Region, and Shwkr Muhammed Haydar, Director of Antiquities and Heritage for Garmian. In Garmian, we owe a special debt of gratitude to Salah Muhammad Samin, Deputy Director of the Museum, and our representatives during fieldwork, Nawzad Latif, Ahmed Ismail, Jamal Muhamed, Sawat Hambden, Muhamad Ali, and Awat Baban. We thank Jakob Lauinger for reading and commenting on parts of this manuscript.

Phytolith evidence for the pastoral origins of multi-cropping in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq)

“…The presence of millet at Khani Masi may also provide the earliest evidence to-date for regional cereal multi-cropping in Mesopotamia. That is, in addition to the winter cereals, wheat and barley, which are attested in both the micro- and macro-botanical records at the site 51 , 54 , we also now have robust micro-botanical evidence for summer grains. Although the presence of a plant is not enough to prove it was cultivated 92 , the discovery of a non-native, east Asian domesticate outside its environmental niche and within a dung-rich context strongly suggests that it may have been cultivated as a forage crop.…”

“…Khani Masi is composed of more than a dozen mounds clustered along a relict levee above the Diyala/Sirwan River. From 2014 to 2019, the Sirwan Regional Project (SRP) initiated a program of archaeological investigations focusing on large-scale excavation of a sprawling low mound (SRP 46), which measures c. 5 ha in area and was occupied exclusively during the mid- to late-second millennium BCE 51 – 54 . At this time, Khani Masi appears to have close cultural and economic ties to Kassite Babylonia, centered in southern Mesopotamia.…”

“…Excavations have revealed a sequence of major construction episodes, with the earliest phases dated to around 1450 BCE and subsequent building phases during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. Settlement at SRP 46 ended following the abandonment of an extensive baked mudbrick building complex around 1100 BCE, and there is no evidence that this part of the site was ever reoccupied 51 .…”

Integrating Satellite, UAV, and Ground-Based Remote Sensing in Archaeology: An Exploration of Pre-Modern Land Use in Northeastern Iraq

“…From 2012 to 2019, the Sirwan Regional Project (SRP) undertook a series of multiscalar archaeological investigations in the area of the upper Diyala/Sirwan between the Hamrin Basin and the Darbandikhan dam in the modern Kurdish province of Garmian. The project documented hundreds of archaeological sites and land use features through a regional survey effort, as well as undertaking both test and large-scale excavations at numerous sites, helping to reconstruct the area's long history of human occupation [29,[38][39][40][41][42][43]. This paper builds on the initial results of the SRP through a systematic remote sensing survey of pre-modern land use in the Upper Diyala/Sirwan region, as well as offering a comparison of land use in the study area within broader trends occurring across the ancient, semi-arid Southwest Asia.…”

“…The continuous nature of occupation is particularly well-illustrated at Khani Masi (SRP046), where no clear edge of occupation was detected within 250 m of the site mound. The "off-site" magnetometry survey from Khani Masi (SRP046) was published in Glatz et al [40]. This finding challenges the accepted notion, or definition, of what a site is in Mesopotamian archaeology.…”