A Brief History of Ancient Nuzi, Yorghan Tepe
Yorghan Tepe was first settled more than 7,000 years ago and was occupied intermittently from the 6th millennium BC through the 4th century AD.  It was an agricultural town and provincial center in the small Hurrian kingdom of Arrapha during the 15th and 14th centuries BC. Arrapha, in turn, was a vassal state of the Mittani (formerly rendered as Mitanni) kingdom. At the height of its power, Mittani extended from northwestern Syria to northeastern Iraq, and during the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was one of the great powers of the Near East, along with Babylonia, Egypt, and the Hittite kingdom.
From 1925 to 1931, archaeologists exposed remains from the entire occupational sequence of Yorghan Tepe. During periods of successive habitation or occupation, abandoned or destroyed buildings were leveled, creating foundations for the new structures that were built. Thus, over millennia, the mound (tepe) was built up, rising well above the original founding levels of the settlement. As a result of these multiple reoccupations, Yorghan Tepe today rises to a height of about 5 meters (16 feet) in the midst of its surrounding landscape.
Regrettably, the layout of the earliest settlements cannot be reconstructed completely because they were only glimpsed in relatively small probes dug below the floors of later buildings (see Stratum III map).  The oldest known occupation, discovered at the lowest point of excavation, just above virgin soil, was during the Ubaid period, dated to 5500–4000 BC. At the nearby site of Kudish Saghir, Nuzi excavators found not only contemporaneous Ubaid but also even earlier remains dating to the Halaf period (early 6th millennium BC). Located above the Ubaid remains at Nuzi were finds from the end of the 4th millennium BC, contemporaneous with the Uruk period in southern Iraq. And above this layer, several burials and a cache of more than 200 cuneiform tablets, the archives of a royal estate, can be dated to the Old Akkadian or Sargonic Period (24th to 22nd centuries BC). In addition, an exceedingly important find at this level is the earliest known map, drawn on clay and showing the location of a plot of land.
As they excavated down through the habitation levels, the archaeologists labeled the various coherent occupational phases they encountered with Roman numerals, from Stratum I to VIII, with Stratum I being nearest the surface. Above Stratum I, a cemetery and some traces of habitation datable to the Sasanian period (224–651 AD) were found on top of and around the mound, although most late archaeological features at Nuzi have been lost to erosion.
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