T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 405

To Hogarth. E.C.1911 2. established that they are Hittite:- though of what .... Heaven only knows. It is usual that the pottery of the mound should be entirely different from that of the low part of the site? We ... have found no "palace" pottery up on top, and none of the top stuff down below. It is evident that the Roman foundations go down to prehistoric (flints,etc.) in the N.E. cut. There is libu beside them (Hittite) to within · feet of the grass on the top, and non-Roman pottery. The undisturbed part of this top is feet would be full of little Hittite things, but no building can have escaped destruction. The N. half of the mound is different: we will continue there the next two months: we have found a quite decent wall of large squaz stones, some are the "lions pedestal of which we sent a govt of drawing to Kenyon: also a Hittite "altar" with good linear inscrip- tion. These two sculptures had been lifted 4 feet above their first level (if they were in the building with the wall), ... care enough to avoid harming them in the slightest. There were heavy walls (but shallow) about at this level, and these we cer- tainlqr to get at the other better wall beneath. I fancy they may have b.t.n a later palace or temple (perhaps even Sargon's if the thrown-out bricks came from this part) and that the good well be- neath is earlier: next its foundations were found two pieces of the bare pottery with thin burnished lines of which the only other level was - 4 metres in the stair-pit. This must put them far back beyond the ... "palace" of the great stairs. The style of ... the lion ...cidal is not .... of the sculptures on the lower ground. Thompson half hopes that this idea may be correct and that there may be tablets and things in the building. It's wall- stones the' have been carried away by the later men. There does not seem to have been any Arab occupation of the site of any importance: but a long Byzantine one, following closely on the Roman, and coming down after 1000 A.D. The remains o.f ...... after's etc. belong to this last period. I don't think the Roman-Hellenist was much of a place. Has Thompson told you .... the arm & shoulder are the ones that fit? I have got 9 fragments all told on the block, which is pretty all there except the hand of the back man. A other scrap of the great head has turned up: but it must be somewhere about: if we had a piece of body I think it would go on to the gravefaced legs. The two basalt reliefs (the monstrous lion, double-headed, and the slab of bull-legged & lion headed people fighting) in the wall-line trench are the best we have found on the site: first class work, as different as day from night compared with the childish. Those despised horses (180 now in my stable) are proving inter- esting: and fellow with them are some little humans of the style of the ruder, high-nosed bronzes, and a number of females grasp- ing their brests. They are all Hittite, I fancy, but what they are all doing I don't .now.