Til  Barsib

Excavations indicate that the site has been occupied from Ubaid period onward.  The site became the capital of the Aramaean kingdom of Bit-Adini in Upper Syria.  It was conquered by Shalmaneser III in 856 BCE.  He then renamed the site Kar Shalmaneser and built a palace on the acropolis, probably as a provincial residence.  The Palace's final form is likely by Ashur-bani-pal. 

Only about 88 x 132m of the Palace area has been uncovered.  It was considerably larger, but much of the building has now eroded away, primarily due to encroachment by the Euphrates River. 

Areas beyond the Palace, notably the so-called Lion Gate (an entry through the town's encircling fortification walls along the northeast side), were also excavated by the French team.

Currently, further research via satellite imagery and test excavations are ongoing by two teams, one led by John Russell and another by Guy Bunnens.  

Our 3D digital reconstructions make use of data from the original excavation report, as well as information supplied by the two new investigations.

Reconstruction by Learning Sites of the so-called King's Reception Room.
(click on the image to enlarge)

Learning Sites has re-created the Palace as an interactive 3D computer model as the basis for an elementary school educational package.  All of the primary suites of rooms have been digitally reconstructed, with digital surrogates of the wall decorations re-placed on the walls of the model using copies of the original Lucien Cavro drawings, now in the Museé du Louvre (used with their permission).

In addition, the teaching package includes a 3D computer model of the topography of the site, a model of the Lion Gate (through the enciente wall at the northeast edge of the site), the nearby stela of Esarhaddon, and an Assyrian temple (situated to the west of the palace mound, and based on evidence from Tel Halaf and Arslan Tash).

The result is available in Flash with QTVR. 

[images and discussion of the Palace throughout the book; note, however, that the images of the wall paintings published here have been doctored to look "old" and do not reflect the carefully copied original drawings made by Lucien Cavro during excavations; those original drawings are now in the Museé du Louvre]

Thureau-Dangin, F. and Maurice Dunand.  Til-Barsib. Avec le concours de Lucien Cavro et Georges Dossin. 2 vols., Paris:Paul Geuthner, 1936.

[this is the excavation report by the French team and includes the palace and surrounding landscape; the plates volume consists of black-and-white photographs of the excavation and some artifacts plus black-and-white line drawings of the wall paintings]