In the south of today's Iraq lay the city-state of Lagash, an important center of Sumerian culture. During recent excavations, archaeologists not only discovered numerous evidences of ceramic workshops, but also the remains of a canteen kitchen and a kind of tavern. Already 4700 years ago people met at this semi-covered public place to eat together.
The first Sumerian cities and city-states developed in southern Mesopotamia around 6000 years ago. The fertile area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and the nearby coast of the Persian Gulf created the best conditions for the rise of this early civilization. One of the important city-states was the Lagash conurbation, composed of the three cities of Girsu, Nigin and Lagash. It had its heyday in the third millennium BC.
Center of Sumerian civilization
"Covering more than 450 hectares, Lagash was one of the largest settlement areas in southern Iraq at the time," explains University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Holly Pittman. “This place was of great political, economic and religious importance. It was also a center of population with good access to fertile land and enough labor for productive crafts.” US scientists and archaeologists from the British Museum in London have been researching the Sumerian sites in southern Iraq since the 1930s. In 1953, during excavations at the so-called Tell al-Hiba, a stone inscription was discovered that identified the ruins found there as the remains of Lagash.
Since 2019, Pittman and her team, together with colleagues from the University of Pisa, have been conducting a new phase of excavations at Lagash. Archaeologists use state-of-the-art technologies, including drone aerial and thermal imaging, magnetometers, and microstratigraphic sampling and sediment cores. In this way they receive information about the different settlement layers of old Lagash without destroying the relics. "It's not like it used to be, when archaeologists dug down the big mounds to find temples," explains Pittman's colleague Zaid Alrawi. "We use our techniques and then, based on scientific priorities, look at which areas to look at more closely."
A tavern and several ceramic workshops
During the last excavation season in 2022, the team made some interesting finds. In a neighborhood of Lagash, just 50 centimeters below the surface, they discovered the remains of a large "tavern" - a kind of public canteen or tavern with long stone benches, a sort of refrigerator, an oven and numerous storage containers, some of which still contained the remains of food. "It was a public dining room from around 2700 BC," reports Pittman. "Part of this canteen was outdoors, part formed the kitchen area."
In a southern part of Lagash - a rather simple working and residential area - the archaeologists had already found the first indications of workshops for clay and ceramic processing in recent years. These include potsherds, ashes and six large kilns with an oval combustion chamber lined with fired bricks. In 2022, five more such kilns were added, as well as workshops in which the individual processing steps of vessel manufacture were preserved. They testify that this district must have been an important center of ceramic production.
"We found two rectangular pits that appear to represent different stages of pottery production," explains Pittman. “One contained pure red clay, which is ideally malleable and is still used in this form today. The second pit contains coarse yellow-greenish sand that was probably used for tempering.” Near the kilns, archaeologists discovered the remains of a multi-room dwelling with a kitchen, which still contained food bowls and clay stoppers for jars, as well as a grinding stone. A few rooms down, the team came across some sort of toilet room.
These finds give valuable insights into the everyday life of the ordinary people of Lagash. The team hopes to learn more about life and work at these early Sumerian sites from future digs. "While we carry out our excavations, we feel our way closer and closer to the history and living environment of the past," says Alrawi.
Source: University of Pennsylvania, Lagash Project