The Archaeological Museum will be closed from Tuesday 1 September up to and including Monday 14 September due to the current excavation season.
Assyria's Hidden Kings
For more than 100 years, research assumed that the rulers of the ancient Assyrian Empire in the Near East were completely listed in a king list – a prestigious text preserved in multiple exemplars on clay tablets. Assyriologists from the universities of Münster and Yale have now demonstrated that there were three additional kings. “Since the discovery of the king list in the early 20th century, no one has questioned the order,” explains Dr Alexander Johannes Edmonds from the Institute for Near Eastern Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Münster. Together with his colleague Professor Eckart Frahm from Yale, Alexander Johannes Edmonds has, through a new analysis of cuneiform texts from the 10th and 8th centuries BC, found evidence of three hitherto unknown Assyrian kings. Previously, it was assumed that there was largely an undisputed father-son succession.
Explorations at an Height of 5,000 Metres
Led by museum director Prof. Achim Lichtenberger from the Institute of Classical and Christian Archaeology, a team of archaeologists, glaciologists and mountaineers spent two weeks exploring Mount Ararat. Their aim was to determine whether the ice on Turkey’s highest mountain preserves a unique archive of climate and cultural history. The experts used a combination of ground-penetrating radar and active seismic techniques to map the thickness and subsurface composition of the ice. During the next expedition, an ice core is to be extracted from Mount Ararat for the first time.
“This opens up a new source of information for archaeology,” says project leader Lichtenberger. “Until now, we have had to rely on what lies in the ground. The ice, on the other hand, could preserve a continuous chronicle of human activity – layer by layer, spanning millennia.” The mountain lies at a crossroads of ancient civilisations. Whilst comparable studies have already been carried out in the Mediterranean region and the Alps, the Middle East has so far remained unexplored in this regard.