Rock-cut tomb found in courtyard of a house

A tomb cut into the bedrock has been discovered in the courtyard of a private home in Şanlıurfa, southeastern Turkey. The single-chamber rock tomb features reliefs with unusual iconographic motifs and is an estimated 2,300 years old.

The main relief depicts a man reclining with his left arm outstretched in “banquet pose” on the center of one wall. Two winged figures that appear to have female features are in the corners of the tomb. The interior side of the entrance door has an inscription painted in ochre, but it is faded and damaged and cannot yet be read. Archaeologists hope deciphering the inscription might narrow down the date of the tomb.

The tomb was found as part of the Cultural Inventory Project, a comprehensive initiative re-documenting previously recorded archaeological assets and identifying new ones in the Sanliurfa province. The plan is to create an updated inventory of cultural assets to monitor their condition and rescue sites that are heavily damaged or threatened. Many of the approximately 6,000 historical assets in the province are rock tombs from the Hittite (1400-1200 B.C.) and Roman periods (1st c. B.C. – 4th c. A.D.). This tomb’s reliefs are different from any of the other ones documented in the project.

Şanlıurfa is just seven miles from Göbekli Tepe, site of the most ancient temple in the world dating to the 10th millennium B.C. and an epicenter of the agricultural revolution. Şanlıurfa was founded as Edessa in the Hellenistic era (3rd century B.C.), but the site has been settled for thousands of years. Its oldest resident, Urfa Man, an 11,500-year-old limestone sculpture, is the oldest known life-sized statue in the world.

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