For a hundred years people have been digging at Gabala, in the north-west of Azerbaijan, and for a hundred years the city has held back one thing. Its fortifications came out of the ground, and its buildings, and the small objects of everyday life. The place where power sat did not. Gabala was the first capital of Caucasian Albania, an ancient kingdom of the eastern Caucasus. Its political importance was never in doubt. Its administrative buildings have stayed poorly understood.
This year that may have changed. As Leman Altuntaş reported for Arkeonews, a team led by Professor Qafar Jabiyev of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology has uncovered the remains of a monumental, palace-like complex in the city’s Qala district. It consists of two buildings from different periods, the later one standing partly on top of the earlier. The excavators say no structures of this scale had been documented before in Gabala’s historic Qala and Salbir districts.
An unfinished trench
The ground itself was not new. The archaeologist Saleh Gaziyev first opened this excavation area in the 1960s, but the work was never finished, and parts of the site went untouched for decades. Jabiyev’s team extended the old dig to the south and east. What emerged were walls of large, carefully dressed stone blocks. By July they had exposed a section 18 metres long and 1.8 metres high, and the wall had not ended. It ran on eastward past the edge of the excavation, which is why Jabiyev believes it may be part of a considerably larger complex.
The first word reached the Azerbaijani press at the end of July. Yeni Sabah, citing the state news agency AZERTAC, reported the find after a single month of work in what the expedition calls Excavation Area III. Later the newspaper İki Sahil ran the story under a headline calling it “a first in Azerbaijani archaeology”.
The weight of stone
The stones say the most. According to Jabiyev, there is no known source of suitable stone anywhere within roughly 35–40 kilometres. The blocks appear to have been brought from a distant quarry, a job that would have taken a great deal of labour, planning and money.
Here the dig becomes a small lesson about rulers, offered as reflection and nothing more. A household builds with whatever lies close to hand. Only a power that can command many workers and pay for them can ignore distance. Jabiyev reads the effort the same way: the builders, he thinks, probably drew on the resources of the state rather than those of ordinary residents. The sheer mass of the masonry also sets the building apart from any dwelling, which supports his view that it served an important public function.
Still, a palace remains a hypothesis. The archaeologists have not established what the building was for.
Ruin and replacement
Toward the end of the early medieval period the stone building was badly destroyed. Jabiyev blames a mix of internal and external factors. The evidence does not yet show exactly what happened.
The site was not abandoned.
In the late eighth or ninth century AD, new builders put up a building on the same spot, and it appears to have been even more elaborate than the first. They built in fired brick instead of dressed stone and worked parts of the old foundations into the new structure. The team found three brick platforms, a brick column and surrounding walls of fired brick. They take this second building to have been another important public structure, though its exact function is also uncertain.
Capitals have an old habit, again offered here as reflection. Power falls, and whoever comes next builds on the same ground and the same foundations, as if authority belonged to the soil. Whether the brick building inherited the administrative role of the stone one, or served some entirely different purpose, is one of the questions the site now raises.
Pots and patience
The season lasted three months and covered about 500 square metres. Along with the walls, the team recovered numerous artefacts. The researcher Elmira Abbasova pointed to construction ceramics and to household vessels, both glazed and unglazed. They are evidence of local craftsmanship and daily life, and they may also help trace Gabala’s commercial and cultural ties. Earlier work had already identified four construction layers at the site, running from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century: one piece of ground built on again and again for more than a millennium.
Ancient Gabala is on UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list. The entry dates the city’s most significant occupation to the end of the fourth century BC, when Caucasian Albania was growing. Jabiyev speaks of a history of 2,500 years.
He is careful about what has been found. The research, he says, is at an early stage. The chronology, layout, construction and original purpose of both buildings all have to be established before anyone can reach firm conclusions. He believes further excavation could answer many open questions about Gabala and about Caucasian Albania as a whole. For now the stone wall still runs east, into ground that has not yet been dug.