Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 23, 1995                   TAG: 9511280049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-18   EDITION: HOLIDAY 
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER McDOUGALL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA                                LENGTH: Medium

ANCIENT SYRIAN CITY, RELEGATED TO MYTH, IS A REALITY

The mystery of the Hurrians, a people said to have ruled a rich Middle Eastern kingdom before they and their city disappeared, stumped even Agatha Christie.

The mystery novelist and her husband, British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, were among centuries of sleuths who failed to find evidence that the culture really existed some 4,000 years ago.

Now, however, UCLA archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati believes he has found Urkesh, the home of the Hurrians.

After eight years of excavations, Buccellati and his colleagues believe the modern Syrian town of Tell Mozan, 400 miles northeast of Damascus, is the site.

And they have scraps of art and household goods that produce a portrait of the lost people, whose culture had some similarities to the better known Sumerians.

``The Hurrians now have names, faces. We know what they looked like - we know that they lived!'' said Buccellati, who presented his findings Monday to a Philadelphia meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the nation's major scholarly organization for Near East archaeology.

``Their art is very realistic, so you can actually see what these people looked like,'' Buccellati said. ``The crown prince has a very distinctive face - and it's not very attractive, either.''

Rudy Dornaman, director of the American Schools of Oriental Research and an expert in Syrian archaeology, called Buccellati's find ``a tremendous step forward.''

``For the first time, we can compare art, language and cultures of wholly different ancient Syrians,'' he said.

Legend had it that Urkesh straddled a trade route into the Syrian mountains. Merchants poured gold and silver into the city, and lush valleys provided agricultural plenty.

But then the culture vanished, and for centuries the Hurrians lived only in footnotes and folklore. A single reference appears in the Old Testament, and another was pressed into a clay tablet belonging to Pharaoh Amenemhet IV, Egypt's ruler in 2000 B.C.

Eventually, some believed the city was purely mythological.

Buccellati got a clue where to start digging from two bronze lions, carried out of Syria and sold to the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

On the base of the statuettes was an inscription in a lost language, since identified as Hurrian, a language with possible links to modern Georgian.

It was deciphered to read ``Urkesh'' with the name of a king who built a temple in the city.

Buccellati and his team traced the lions in 1987 to the small town of Tell Mozan, whose residents occasionally dig up artifacts, and began excavating.

Decades earlier, Christie and her husband explored the same area on a hunch. They dug for two days before giving up the site as a dud.

While the Hurrians and Sumerians had secular kings and worshiped gods of nature, such as earth and thunder, one unique Hurrian feature was the relative independence of women, who apparently enjoyed an unusual right for the period of owning farms and storehouses.

So what happened to the Hurrians?

``We still don't know,'' Buccellati said. His best guess is the water table became too depleted to sustain the population.