Terqa

Terqa is the name of a city of the III {{E}} and II {{E}} thousand-year-old before J. - C. discovered on the site of Such Ashara, on Right Bank of the Means Euphrate in Syria, to approximately 80 km in the north of the border with the Iraq.

History of the archeological site

A first survey carried out in 1923 by a team of archeologists French had already revealed the importance of this city of the Mésopotamie to the Bronze Age. It is not however which in 1975 qu ' a true programme of excavations under the direction of professors G started. and Mr. Buccellati of the University of California to Los Angeles (UCLA). Since 1987 a French team directed by professor O. Rouault continues this research. It is, at the present time, the only important site which informs us over this obscure period.

The site, now occupied by a village, is difficult to excavate, but in free spaces for research, it delivered part of its walls, a temple, administrative buildings and districts of dwelling.

History of the city

In the still unoccupied parts of Such Ashara, the excavations revealed the vestiges of ramparts of thousand-year-old IIIe. One thinks that Terqa was then under the domination of its powerful neighbor Mari, until the destruction of this one by the king Hammurabi of Babylon. One updated to a vast built-up area correspondent at this period, as well as many texts and documents. After the fall of Husband, Terqa becomes the political and economic center almost Means-Euphrate until the end of the Bronze Age, like capital of the kingdom of Khana, which will be finally subjected by the Mitanni ens.

Vestiges of Such Ashara contemporaries of this period: houses, a temple, some workshops, and many files, are of great importance and inform us about a " age somber" who reigned then on the remainder of the Syrian mesopotamy. Later, during the age of iron, it seems that the city knows one crisis period and of abandonment.

With, Terqa, which is called from now on Sirqu, is again described like a regional political center in royal inscriptions Assyrie. Then it is integrated into the Assyrian empire. Only a Stele of Basalt comprising a Wedge-shaped inscription as some tombs informs us over this time. The wedge-shaped shelves which were found there, especially of legal type (contracts of house and land acquisitions), made it possible to reconstitute the dynasty of the sovereigns of the time.

The archeology of Terqa brings a new lighting on the relations between the men and the urban companies and the natural environment of the Steppe around the valley of Euphrate. Through the history of Terqa, one perceives the structure and the evolution of the company and the culture local, his original character and his reports/ratios, of resistance or assimilation, with great civilizations of the time, like Sumer, Babylon and Assyrie.

The discovery of a nail of Clove, plant which pushed formerly only in the archipelago Indonesia N of the Moluques, among remainders calcined on the ground of a burnt kitchen of Terqa suggests that the trade between the Middle East and the Southeast Asia, with like probable intermediary the Indian world, could have started as of this time.

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