THE Iron Age citadel of Hasanlu was grand, with paved streets and palatial homes that rose two, sometimes three, storeys high around columned courtyards. Its people were rich, and lived off fertile lands generously irrigated by Iran’s Lake Urmia. Then they were massacred.
The town was destroyed just before 800 BC in a brutal assault. Now, finally, the remarkable story of Hasanlu is being pieced together from artefacts gathered half a century ago. These are revealing a unique snapshot of history. Here, as in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, time stopped short – only instead of capturing a natural disaster, Hasanlu captures the reality of Iron Age warfare in all its brutal detail. Yet, while everyone knows about Pompeii, few have heard of Hasanlu. That is set to change.
In 1956, a young American archaeologist called Robert Dyson travelled to Iran, seeking a site where he could study the origins of sedentary life and farming. He singled out a mound, about 500 metres in diameter and 25 metres high, that stood in a valley at the south end of Lake Urmia. Previous digs had revealed it to be entirely artificial, the result of millennia of dust, dirt and debris building up around a succession of settlements that had occupied the spot starting in 5000 or 6000 BC. It was known locally as Hasanlu.
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Dyson began by digging trenches around the base of the mound and then, in 1958, on top of it. It wasn’t long before he and his assistants discovered the charred remains of a magnificent Iron Age residence built around a courtyard. A fire had clearly destroyed the building’s wooden structure, causing the floors to collapse on top of each other and freeze its contents – and inhabitants – in time and space. The archaeologists uncovered walls, floors, staircases, everyday objects, skeletons dressed in armour and then a silver cup, adorned with two rows of small figures.
Two days later, they struck gold. “Out of the ground emerged a large bucket-shaped vessel,” Dyson wrote to the director of the Penn Museum, his funders at the University of Pennsylvania, “pressed flat by the weight of the earth, eight inches high and two feet in circumference! And shining in golden splendor as only gold can do. What a fabulous treasure – covered with mythological figures the details and composition of which are completely new to us!”
With that, everything changed. The dig went into turbo-mode, says , who worked with Dyson decades later. Huge plazas were traced and excavated, revealing the full scale of the citadel – the settlement’s inner sanctum containing public buildings and elite homes – which was about 30,000 square metres. Dozens and dozens of bodies were found, some burnt, others slain or impaled and left to die.
, now emerita at William and Mary University, Virginia, arrived in 1970. “It was a really easy site, in terms of understanding the layers,” she says. “Once you got down not even a metre, you were on top of the citadel. If you were in a building, you would start to get all the things that were on the top floor first, and then underneath you would have the ground floor. And once you’d cleared away the toppled bricks and slabs of stone, you would find all the people.”
The first trench Voigt dug turned out to be in a courtyard. “I found a little kid who was just lying on the pavement.” The child was still wearing a bronze bracelet and next to them was a spear point and an empty quiver. “The unusual thing about the site,” she says, “is all this action is going on and you can read it directly: somebody runs across the courtyard, kills the little kid, dumps their quiver because it’s out of ammunition. If you keep going, there are arrow points embedded in the wall.”
Next, Voigt moved to what had been a stable, and found more bodies – all women – on top of the stable’s collapsed roof. “They were in an elite part of the city yet none of them had any jewellery,” she says. “Maybe they had been stripped or maybe they were servants. Who knows? But they were certainly herded back there and systematically killed. It’s very vivid. Too vivid.”
Subsequent studies, led by , showed that most of these women had died from cranial trauma, their skulls smashed by a blunt instrument.
Terrible atrocities
Yet this was just one of a long list of apparent atrocities at Hasanlu. Skeletons were found with their hands grasping at their abdomens or necks. Many lacked hands. Others had no heads. In one door frame, a complete skeleton lay sandwiched between two half skeletons. Elsewhere, traces of a metal blade were found embedded inside a child’s skull. “I come from a long line of undertakers. Dead people are not scary to me,” says Voigt. “But when I dug that site I had screaming nightmares.”
In the early 1970s, the excavations were shut down by rumblings of the Iranian revolution. Back in the US, the project catapulted Dyson to academic heights. Many of his assistants and students also went on to have illustrious careers. But Hasanlu itself fell into obscurity. . “Dyson couldn’t write; he had writer’s block,” says Danti.
, stacks of notebooks, diaries, drawings, diagrams and photographs from the excavations are kept in two rooms in the Penn Museum. In the basement, behind several locked doors, are thousands of objects. Everything that didn’t go to Iran’s National Museum in Tehran is packed away here.
In recent years, Danti together with of Manhattanville College in New York and a few others have been painstakingly re-examining all this evidence in an attempt to . The invaders, they conclude, came armed with heavy spiked maces, iron swords, knives, pointed helmets and a single purpose: to wipe out a culture that had stood on that spot for centuries. They hit the lower town first, killing as they went. All around, people fled their homes and made for the higher citadel, seeking protection. But Hasanlu’s fortifications weren’t up to the task. Soldiers flooded through a breach in the wall and continued their gruesome work. Men, women and children were slain, alongside their dogs and horses. The looting was as thorough as the killing. At some point in the midst of all this, someone – probably a soldier – lit a fire.
Wooden beams and reed matting went up in an almighty blaze. As the flames spread, some soldiers continued towards the grand buildings and temples of the inner sanctum. On the third storey of a magnificent residence, three came across a treasury and caught sight of the large and delicately embossed gold bowl, as well as an equally precious goblet made of fine silver. They grabbed both and raced to get out. Greed was, literally, their downfall. Before they could reach the stairway, flames engulfed the building, which collapsed beneath them. Their bodies plummeted and were flattened under mud bricks and burning timber, where they were found, three millennia later, together with the objects of their desire.
“Dead people are not scary to me, but when I dug that site I had screaming nightmares”
All around, other houses collapsed. A group of 70 inhabitants who had sought refuge in a building across the street perished in their hideout. Elsewhere, a man and a boy hid in a grain store, which was then consumed in the blaze. When their skeletons were exhumed by Dyson’s team in the mid-20th century, they appeared to be in an embrace, with the older man holding his hands up to his mouth as though to whisper into the youth’s ear. The press dubbed them the .
In a bitter twist of irony, the flames that destroyed the mighty citadel would also save it for posterity. As the wooden frameworks gave way and the multi-storeyed buildings flattened, they quenched the fire and preserved everything inside them in tightly compacted layers of dust and crushed clay bricks. Occupants, enemy soldiers, their weapons and their jewels, the hand-painted bowls they ate from, the jars they drank wine from and the layouts of their homes and palaces – everything was entombed.
The destruction was complete. “That narrows down who could have done it,” says Danti. There were two major forces in the area at the time. The Assyrians had been a regional power for millennia and now ruled from the cities of Nimrud and Nineveh to the west of Hasanlu, but their reign was in decline. The Urartians were a smaller but growing power to the north (see “Map”). Which was to blame?
The many Assyrian objects found at Hasanlu had originally led people to believe that the city was an Assyrian ally or outpost by the time it was sacked. But Cifarelli isn’t convinced. She has been going through the Hasanlu records trying to correct what she calls “some of the problematic conclusions that have been drawn about the site in the past”. She believes the “extraordinary collection of exotic goods” points to a people “doing their own thing”. “It’s more likely that they were itinerant traders,” she says, who brought the objects back from their travels, to Assyria among other places.
In fact, a link to the Urartians looks stronger. Digs into Hasanlu’s lower level reveal that the town had experienced a lesser attack in 1100 BC. Excavating a cemetery on the outskirts of the settlement, Cifarelli found a grave dating from not long after this attack, containing a warrior with Urartian-style armour and weapons, and wearing intriguing armlets that were too small to be removed, suggesting he must have worn them since childhood. Later graves revealed the rise of a new “warrior” social class, equipped with similar armour and swords. Cifarelli suspects that in the century or so after the 1100 BC attack one or more warriors moved into Hasanlu from the north bringing their military technology with them.
It looks as though the town was preparing to defend itself during this period. As well as a growing army, the settlement had gained new fortifications around the citadel. And Danti’s research indicates where the threat came from. In 2014, he published an analysis of the skeletons found with the golden bowl. From their dress, he concluded that they were Urartians. Ironically, they even wore the same armlets Cifarelli found in the cemetery.
We know that around this time, the Urartians travelled past Hasanlu to visit one of their holy sites. “Hasanlu may have been resistant to Urartian invasions,” says Cifarelli. “It seems likely that when they didn’t capitulate, the Urartians destroyed the site. They did that in a way that was intentional and spectacular. It would have been a smoking heap of rubble that could have been seen for miles.” The scale of the attack, she says, looks like a message to surrounding villages. Danti agrees that the invaders weren’t mere thieves. “Whoever destroyed the site really had an axe to grind against the people who lived there,” he says. “It was one of these invasions that was designed to wipe out a cultural identity.”
But there is another potential motive. John Curtis of the British Museum in London points out that Hasanlu occupied a very desirable position in the middle of a fertile valley. It also seems to have been an important trade route connecting Lake Urmia to the Fertile Crescent – the birthplace of farming – in modern-day Iraq. The site was clearly important, says Curtis. It had been occupied on and off for some 5000 years, right back to the origins of agriculture, and there were fortifications. “It might have been in a position to control the trade route,” he says, “an obstacle that the Urartians had to remove. And there was probably quite a lot to plunder in the city itself.”
Whatever the motivation for the attack, it laid waste to the town. Almost three millennia later, Hasanlu is finally rising from the dust. Five years ago, a museum opened near the site to show some of its excavated artefacts. Now the . In June, the Cultural Heritage and Handicrafts Organization of Iran announced that it was putting together a dossier for UNESCO, in a bid to make Hasanlu a World Heritage Site. Cifarelli is optimistic this will bring benefits to the local economy. “And, of course, it’s an acknowledgment of the importance of the site,” she says.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The horror of Hasanlu”
