 | Neo-Babylonian Housing | NH | The excavation area abbreviation NH refers to the better-preserved Neo-Babyloninan Housing immediately southwest of area AH (though at one point Legrain mistakenly listed it as North Harbour). Woolley excavated in area NH for a short time in season 9 and again for an even shorter time ("a few days at the end of the season" according to field reports) in season 12. He did not dig below the level of Neo-Babylonian housing as his goal was to expose the layout of a portion of the Neo-Babylonian town. Across much of the site, the Neo-Babylonian domestic remains were badly preserved and even here there were only the stubs of walls and some evidence of later, Persian, occupation. The houses used no baked brick and they were close to the surface, thus they had often disappeared almost completely. Nonetheless, Woolley recovered outlines of two streets and seven houses along with a number of late artifacts, including two pots filled with tablets dating from the reign of Nabopolassar up to that of Alexander the Great.
Neo-Babylonian houses were much more spacious in ground plan than Old Babylonian and were typically built with a saw-toothed outer plan that Woolley had difficulty explaining. The streets were much more linear than earlier layouts and this implies developments in centralized town planning. Woolley attributed this entire domestic quarter, which he believed had been built on ground cleared of all other remains, to the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
Despite the fact that there were many artifacts recovered here and there were many graves excavated, there are only four field notecards extant and only cursory publication. When reporting graves, Woolley listed only house number, not room. Even the house numbers were assigned late, as evidenced by publication in UE9, which discusses House A and B while its map numbers 1-7. Houses 6 and 7 were certainly dug in 1931 when Woolley intended to extend area AH, but he changed his mind and only later went back to uncover the outlines of a few more houses south of these in the final season, including House 1, dug in 1934. | (none) |
