TELL HALAF By Baron Max von Oppenheim
The first detailed account of the finds on a prehistoric site near Has el Ain in Northern Mesopotamia is given in Baron Max von Oppenheim's Tell Halaf : a New" Culture in Oldest MesoPotamia (Putnam, x21s.), with an abundance of photo- graphs and coloured plates of the early painted pottery. It is an important book and, like the recent report on the_ British Museum diggings at Tal Arpachiyah near Nineveh, reminds us once again of the infinite possibilities that await the excavator in the Middle East. Baron von Oppenheim heard by chance. in 1879, when he was prospecting for the Bagdad railway, that natives had uncovered stone statues on a lonely hill and had covered them up again for fear of evil spirits. He -soon found sculptures of great antiquity and in later Years he has set on foot a thorough examination of the site, which will be continued by the institution that he has established in Berlin. `On Tell Halaf, about 3000 B.C., stood a city of a pre-Sumerian people, whose powerful sculptures and gay, painted pottery are akin to those found on early "Hittite" sites to the west and at earliest Susa far to the east. German scholars call this people Subasacan, and the name may serve for the aboriginals of the Middle East who were later to be dominated by Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites and Assyrians. Their art, at any rate, is impressive ; their great basalt statues of deities, sometimes human, sometimes monstrous, and their sculptured reliefs of ritual and hunting scenes are truly remarkable. In Assyrian days Tell Halaf was the Gozan to which some of the Israelites were ailed. Baron von Oppenheim is well served by his translater, Mr. Gerald Wheeler, and Professor Herzfeld's technical appendix on the sculpture is noteworthy.
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