The Archaeology of the Khanuqa Gap on the Euphrates: Saved by the Syrian Civil War?

The paper below was delivered at a workshop entitled "Archaeology as Salvage Operation in the Middle East Ethics, Politics and Methods" at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London on Saturday 10th December 2016.

In late 2009 I was approached by Dr Michel al-Maqdissi, Director of Excavations at the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) in Damascus and asked to consider starting a new excavation in the east of Syria. He explained that the DGAM had recently lost a legal case, which they had taken to the highest court in the land, against the construction of a new dam on the River Euphrates. Leaving aside the environmental implications of such a project in a country that was then in the midst of a drought,[1] the place chosen for this dam and an accompanying hydro-electric power station was a pinch point above the city of Deir ez Zor. A brief glance at Google Earth is sufficient to see that the Euphrates meanders across a wide and shallow valley through most of Syria, but between Raqqa and Deir ez Zor the river turns almost due south into a narrow defile and this provides the most obvious place for the construction of a dam. Naturally this narrowing of the great river means that it has always been a strategic point and, as the DGAM argued in their legal case, meant that the environs of the Khanuqa Gap (as the pinch point is called) were exceptionally important in archaeological terms. The DGAM had sanctioned various survey expeditions and two major archaeological excavations were ongoing; one at the Bronze Age site of Tell Qubr Abu al-‘Atiq[2] on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, just above the point where the valley narrows, which was directed by Juan Louis Montero Fenollós of the University of A Coruña, and another at the Romano-Byzantine city of Halabiyeh on the western bank of the river, directed by Sylvie Blétry of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, following on from earlier French exploration at the site led by Jean Lauffray.[3]

Obviously these restrictions meant that we had to rely on a fairly straightforward methodology of opening test trenches in different sectors across the castle and plans were made to conduct a survey of the walls, which constituted the only remaining standing architecture. Unlike Halabiyeh and Tell Qubr Abu al-‘Atiq, which are both threatened with at least partial inundation by rising water levels, at Zalabiyeh the threat is due to the unstable nature of the cliff on which the site stands. The changing meander of the Euphrates has washed away at least half of the castle over the centuries, although comparing a photograph taken by Gertrude Bell in 1905 with a picture taken in the spring of 2010 showed us that, in the twentieth century at least, the rate of erosion was relatively slow. The sandy, silty make up of the cliff is interspersed with gypsum rocks which are prone to erosion and dissolve relatively quickly when in prolonged contact with water. Given this situation it was acknowledged that the exact effect of the dam construction on Zalabiyeh was unpredictable with estimates ranging from a continued slow erosion of the site, through to a rapid and complete collapse of the remains of the fortress into the water as the cliff was fatally compromised due to the washing away of silty soil and the dissolving of gypsum rocks. Given this uncertainty it was agreed that as much excavation should take place as possible before the dam was constructed as the uncertainty of the future meant that it was highly unlikely that the site would ever be accessible for future excavation – even if the cliff remained standing, it was likely to be judged as too unstable to access in the future.

This long preamble has been necessary because that hole, discovered on the first morning of work, brought home to me more than any other event just what the DGAM was up against in trying to protect the sites of the Khanuqa Gap. Whereas we were limited in our movement and created a serious headache for our mukhabharat (secret police) minder on the day I took my students on a field trip to Dura Europos without him, we were nowhere near as constrained as the French team. They were not even allowed to cross to our side of the river due to the coincidence that they had been working at Halabiyeh on the day the Israeli jets had flown over and had witnessed the bombing. In the mind of many Syrian security officers this made them complicit in the bombing and they had been treated with suspicion ever since. In contrast the Russian engineers, who were quartered in the same hotel as the archaeological teams – we were not trusted to rent houses in the villages near our sites as was normal practice in Syria – appeared to be free to travel wherever they wanted without undue security limitations. This all underlined the struggle that the DGAM had been engaged in to gain permission to have any teams present in the region at all.

It was at this stage that it became clear that there was a further problem to be dealt with; in 2009 it had been discovered that the regional director of the DGAM for the mouhafazat (governorate) of Deir ez Zor and his counterpart in the neighbouring governorate of Raqqa had been plundering the stores of their respective museums and selling artefacts on the black market. This deception had become apparent when, greed overcoming prudence, poorly made replicas were used to replace some of the more valuable objects on display in the public galleries. As a result of this corruption, the entire senior management of both mouhafaza had been dismissed and/or tried and very junior members of staff, heavily infiltrated by security agents, had been promoted to senior positions. In Deir ez Zor this meant that there was nobody on the ground with the depth of experience or even the archaeological knowhow to continue the fight to preserve the Khanuqa Gap; the defence was being conducted from the headquarters of the DGAM in Damascus, but their intervention had only a limited effect on the ground in Deir ez Zor. Their only power was that they granted excavation permits and the local authorities had to uphold those licences.

In the spring of 2011 I received a message from the DGAM asking me to postpone my return to Syria due to “civil unrest”. At the time I was told that this was only a minor disturbance and probably everything would be fine by the summer. I was also told that other excavations, largely in the west of the country, were going ahead but that the east was considered too sensitive to host foreigners at this time. The implication was that proximity to Iraq and the Syrian oilfields, not to mention the shadow of Operation Orchard, meant that foreigners were not welcome in Deir ez Zor. What this communication did not say (and probably was not in a position to comment on) was whether the Russian engineers were continuing their surveys at this time.

Of course what happened next is now widely known and, with Deir ez Zor swiftly being overrun by Jihadists – although the government have maintained an enclave within the city throughout the civil war – it soon became apparent that not only was any archaeological work out of the question, so was any work on the dam. Which leads to the next point; whilst all the sites in the Khanuqa Gap have been at risk of looting throughout this period, in the case of Zalabiyeh at least, this was an issue before and even during the excavation and the situation does not appear to have escalated over the last few years. The relative proximity of much more high-status sites such as Dura Europos and Mari means that they have been badly affected by industrial scale looting, but the Khanuqa Gap housed sites that, for the most part, were only of interest to specialists; therein lay both the significance of the region and the reason why it was so difficult to mobilise widespread public support against the dam project in the first place. Of course the fact that the dam has not gone ahead means that no site is now at imminent risk of inundation and the cliff at Zalabiyeh faces its usual challenge of natural erosion, but as our photographic evidence suggested, this is progressing at a very slow rate. In short the Syrian civil war has offered a stay of execution not only for the archaeological sites, but also for the local Sunni tribes who inhabit the fertile lands in the narrow river valley at this point and who have farmed the silt-enriched soil for generations and who will loose their land to the rising water.

In this case the war has caused a temporary lifting of the threat to the region and, within the constraints of fighting, enabled the villagers to continue to live on their ancestral lands. Now the question is what will happen when the war finally comes to an end. Until last year that seemed a relatively hopeful situation; in the aftermath of a war it seemed that there would be far more pressing infrastructure projects to prioritise than the building of a dam in the remote eastern region of the country. Now however the picture has changed; with the influence of Russia growing every day there is no reason now to think that the engineers will not be back on the ground as soon as it is safe to return to Deir ez Zor. In debt to his Russian allies Assad is likely to promote their interests more assiduously than ever before and this could spell disaster for the archaeology of the Khanuqa Gap. Whilst archaeologists struggle to raise money for excavation and, perhaps more crucially, have to await the outcome of permit applications that need to be signed off by the security services as well as the DGAM, the Russians are already on the ground controlling the situation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they are already limiting the access of DGAM staff to some archaeological sites in Syria and the picture looks increasingly disturbing as the conflict continues.

Therefore, in the case of the Khanuqa Gap at least, it seems that the Syrian civil war has provided a stay of execution for the archaeological sites and for the landowners of the region. For the first few years of the conflict it seemed that the war might in this context lead to a positive outcome, with the dam project being delayed perhaps indefinitely whilst more urgent infrastructure regeneration was undertaken. The advent of active Russian participation in the situation means that the outlook is now much less positive as there is no reason to now think that the dam project will not be pursued again as soon as the Assad regime and their Russian allies secure the country. There is also strong reason to fear that West European powers will be viewed with suspicion and limited in their access to sensitive regions of the country leading to little optimism that UK, French or Spanish archaeologists will be welcomed back to their sites with open arms in a post-war Syria. In this case ironically the end of the war could spell the end for the archaeological sites of the Khanuqa Gap.

This paper should end by pointing out that across the Middle East the geopolitics of water is an increasingly salient issue when considering future causes of conflict. The construction of dams is at the heart of this issue and therefore it seems likely that the ethics of salvage in relation to dam construction is an issue with which those of us working in the region will have to grapple for some years to come.

[3] See Sylvie Blétry, ‘Trois années de recherches à Zénobia-Halabiyé (Syrie), ville forteresse proto-byzantine sur le limes oriental’, Semitica et Classica 3 (2010), pp.249-264, Lauffray, J., Halabiyya-Zenobia place forte du limes oriental et la haute-mésopotamie au VIe siècle, vol. 1 (1983), vol.2 (1991) Paul Geuthner, Paris

[4] I had formerly directed an excavation at the Monastery of Mar Elian esh-Sharqi, Qaryatayn, Syria and lived in the country for many years with a residence permit so was registered with the Syrian security services.