Hirbemerdon Tepe and the Upper Tigris Valley during the Early 2nd Millennium: A first assessment of the local pottery horizon

Surveys and excavations undertaken in recent years in the Upper Tigris river valley, in the Diyarbakır province, have produced evidence of a local Middle Bronze Age culture; this is characterised by small and medium-sized settlements with large, multifunctional buildings and the presence of a typical ceramic assemblage, named Red Brown Wash Ware, which appears to be distinct from the other contemporaneous ceramic traditions. The material culture of the first half of the 2nd millennium BC is known only through a limited number of publications, mostly preliminary reports. The excavations of Üçtepe and Giricano and the new data available from Ziyaret Tepe, Kenan Tepe, Kavuşan Höyük, and Hirbemerdon Tepe, now begin to fill this documentary gap. The 2005-2007 excavations at Hirbermerdon Tepe, on the right bank of Tigris river, yielded a conspicuous amount of pottery and artefacts dating back to the first part of the 2nd millennium BC, a period still not yet completely known in the region. Providing a new set of stratified data, Hirbemerdon Tepe offers an important contribution to defining the cultural profile of the Upper Tigris valley area in playing an important, yet poorly defined role within the archaeological and historical scenario of the Near East. The aim of this paper is to investigate some issues related to the ceramic production and cultural development in the Upper Tigris during the end of 3rd and the beginning of 2nd millennium BC and frame them in the regional context. Starting from a detailed analysis of the Hirbemerdon Tepe corpus and the characteristics of the Upper Tigris pottery tradition, central issues concerning pottery technology and morphology, regional links, and chronology will be treated. The data are compared with those from other sites and regions in order to illuminate the relationship between the Red Brown Wash Ware culture and its neighbours. Although the published repertoire suggest a date range between the 19th and 17th centuries as the main phase of production, there are few but clear evidence that allow us to predate it: we could consider the possibility that the rise of the local Middle Bronze Age culture has to be dated to the passage between the 3rd and the 2nd millennium. In conclusion, the social and cultural value of the pottery homogeneity within the Tigris valley will be underlined and interpreted.