Forgotten Kingdom

“In the seven season for which we were at work in the Hatay,” writes C. Leonard Woolley, “we dug on four different sites, and as a result we obtained a more or less continuous history of the district from the early part of the fourth millennium before Christ to the time of Alexander the Great, the end of the fourth century B.C.” A Forgotten Kingdom is the record of those excavations, describing how the expedition worked, what it discovered, and what the discoveries revealed. Sir Leonards’s excavations in northwest Syria, new Antioch, were undertaken to trace the relations between the civilization of Greece and of the East, and in particular to fine out whether such relations existed between the earliest European civilization, that of Crete, and the old cultural centers such as the Mesopotamian and the Hittite. The expedition began by excavating the two small mounds Tell esh Sheikh and Tabara, and then arcaded to the major sites of al Mina and Atchana- the ancient town of Alalakh. In the seventeen levels of Alalakh, they uncovered rich stores of evidence with important bearings on our knowledge of Crete, Cyprus, and the great empires of Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt. Sir Leonard describes their findings with skill and clarity, revealing at the same time the archaeological and historical significance of the discoveries and the methods by which a brilliant archaeologist reconstructs the life of ancient peoples.