Archaeologists have discovered a temple in northern Syria that could be the oldest in the Middle East, Syria's official news agency reported Saturday. The discovery of the Neolithic temple, dating to the ninth century B.C., was made by a joint Syrian-French archaeological team at Jaadet al-Maghara on the Euphrates river some 450 kilometers north of Damascus, the agency said. It did not say when the temple was unearthed. Objects made of stone and bone instruments were found in the large temple, whose walls bore geometric designs and a drawing of a bull's head in vivid red, black and white colors - further evidence that bulls where worshipped in that period, the report said. The agency quoted Syria's minister of culture, Riyad Neisan Agha, as saying that "this is a unique discovery that could lead to re-reading culture."
"9th century B.C." sounds kind of recent — iron age, rather than Neolithic. Maybe 9th millenium? That would make it contemporaneous with the first wall of Jericho or maybe a little older. The bull cult was common in the Mediterranean prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, around 1500 B.C., and probably lasted in one form or the other into the Christian era.
The article's from AP, though you'd expect JPost, where they live in the middle of archeological sites, to notice that the writer's either having problems with the number of zeros on dates or he's not real sure what the Neolithic might have been. |
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