The ‘Ain Dara Temple

From the rubble-filled courtyard in the foreground to the shrine room in the distance, the

ancient temple at ‘Ain Dara, Syria, is our closest parallel—in size, date and design—to the

Temple built by King Solomon in the tenth century B.C.E. Beautifully preserved despite

fire damage and massive looting (for many years, the remains served as a quarry for local

builders), the Syrian temple allows us to visualize the magnificent Jerusalem Temple that

was utterly destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. Built on the highest point of the

tell, the temple (dating from 1300 to 740 B.C.E.) was fully excavated in the 1980s but has

received little attention since—despite its correspondences with Solomon’s Temple.

*Map showing location of ‘Ain Dara.

‘Ain Dara from above. In this aerial photograph of the upper city, the temple remains liewithin a circle of columns erected by a restoration team. At right is a plan of the site

Plan of the ‘Ain Dara temple.

To enter the temple, worshipers would cross the flagstone pavement—made of massive

limestone slabs framed with narrow strips of black basalt—in the temple courtyard. Mythiccreatures, carved from basalt, enlivened the walls surrounding the entryway. To the right

of the entrance is a sphinx, with a bull’s body, the feathered breast and wings of an eagle,

and a human face (right).

the floor of the temple portico. The delicate carving is designed to look as if the printswere impressed into the stone by an extra-human figure striding into the temple.

Throughout the Near East, temples were considered the dwelling places of gods. TheJerusalem Temple, for example, was known in Hebrew as Beit Yahweh, the House of

Yahweh. These footprints—a very unusual image in ancient Near Eastern art—areprobably intended to indicate the presence of the deity who resided in the temple.

Balancing on a lion’s back, the goddess Ishtar appears on this eighth-century B.C.E. stela

from Tel Barsib, northeast of ‘Ain Dara, Syria. The goddess of love and war, Ishtar was theprincipal female deity of Mesopotamia. An early-first-millennium poem exalts Ishtar as

“goddess of goddesses,” “queen of all peoples” and as both a “lion” and “lioness.” The abundance of lion statuary at ‘Ain Dara

has led excavator Ali Abu Assaf to identify thetemple as a monument to Ishtar.

A tier of basalt slabs engraved with a ribbonlike design runs beneath the windows andaround the entire room. Only the carved claws remain of a tier of massive birdlike animals

that once perched above this frieze.

The gods of ‘Ain Dara. Two horned bull-men flank a mountain god in this relief from the‘Ain Dara temple’s holy of holies. The deity may be identified by his signature scaled skirt,

which is thought to represent the mountain where he dwells.

A stela from the temple’s outer corridordepicts a goddess dressed in a

semitransparentgown. If the temple is indeed

dedicated to Ishtar, this stela mayrepresent the goddess, who took a

mountain god as her lover. But the factthat this figure wears shoes, and the

footprints in the temple threshold arebare, calls into question this

identification.

Biblical puzzle solved. A 15-foot-wide hallway wraps around three sides of the ‘Ain Daratemple. In this excavation photo, the back wall of the temple’s shrine room appears atright. Two massive basalt stelae protrude from the wall. The outer corridor wall (at left)was also originally decorated with stelae and reliefs.This corridor is a unique archaeological find in second and first millennium B.C.E.temples. Yet it still has a parallel—in the Bible’s description of the Jerusalem Temple:“Against the outside wall of the House—the outside walls of the House enclosing theGreat Hall and the Shrine—he built a storied structure; and he made side chambers allaround … The entrance to the middle [story of] the side chambers was on the right side ofthe House; and a return staircase [?] led up to the middle chambers and from the middlechambers to the third story” (1 Kings 6:5, 8). The thickness of these corridor walls at ‘AinDara suggests that it, too, may have supported at least one upper story.

A stela found in the temple’soutermost corridor once depicted anenthroned deity. Only the bottom ofthe relief has survived, which shows(from left) two legs of a throne andthe deity’s own two feet, emergingfrom beneath the hem of a gown.

Recessed and latticed carvingfrom the antechamber of the ‘Ain

Dara temple

An ivory from Arslan Tash, in northernSyria, depicts a woman gazing out of a

small square window with recedingwindow frames.

The faces of ‘Ain Dara are characterized by almond eyes, rounded noses and half-smilinglips—all sculpted in basalt. The 22-inch figure—perhaps a royal or divine female—shown

at left wears a diadem studded with rosettes. This face, shown restored, was found innumerous pieces. The 35-inch-tall face at right originally belonged to one of the hybrid lion

creatures that lined the facade of the building.

Plan of the ‘Ain Dara temple.

The ‘Ain Dara Temple