>Andrew Lawler, in an article published in the November/December 2009 issue of Archaeology Magazine, discusses the 5,000-year-old sanctuary found beneath Aleppo’s medieval citadel. The following is an excerpt taken from the abstract to article published by Archaeology:

A massive citadel built atop a 150-foot-tall hill of solid rock looms over Aleppo’s old quarter. Fortresses have risen above this northern Syrian city since Roman times. But at the heart of the citadel, amid ruins of Ottoman palaces and hidden behind high walls that date to the Crusader era, a team of German and Syrian archaeologists is clearing debris from a large pit that shows this hilltop was significant long before the Romans arrived. Here, amid clouds of dust, a battered basalt sphinx and a lion–both standing seven feet tall–guard the entrance to one of the great religious centers of ancient times, the sanctuary of the storm god Adda.

Kay Kohlmeyer, an archaeologist at Berlin’s University of Applied Sciences and the excavation codirector, has spent more than 10 years peeling away the layers of rubble that conceal the rich history of this temple. He’s found that it was first constructed by Early Bronze Age peoples, then rebuilt by a succession of cultures, including the Hittites, the Indo-European empire-builders whose domain spread from Anatolia to northern Syria in the 14th century B.C. Through the millennia, as Syrian, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian cultures mixed and blurred at this ancient crossroads, Adda was known variously as Addu, Teshup, Tarhunta, and Hadad. But as artistic styles and languages came and went, the storm god’s temple endured.

Read the abstract of the article in its entirety by visiting Archaeology Magazine online.

The abstract also contains a beautiful relief of the Storm God Adda.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Adda, Aleppo, Archaeology, Hadad, Teshup

var addthis_pub = ‘claude mariottini’;