Tell Sukas, the Harbour Mound South of Jableh

A mound on a headland running out to sea 6 kilometres south of Jableh. There is a natural harbour cove on each side of it, north and south, and those two coves are why people lived here for thousands of years. The site covers close to two hectares. It is identified with Suksu, a town named in the tablets of Ugarit. What sets Sukas apart from the other mounds on this coast is that one hill shows the period when Phoenicians and Greeks lived side by side in the same port.

Getting there

The mound lies south of Jableh along the shore, 5 kilometres south of Tell Tweini and 6 kilometres from Tell Siyannu. It has no marked point on maps, so ask for the headland as you head south from Jableh. Published sources do not say how the site is open to visitors or whether it is fenced.

How long it takes

Forty-five minutes, enough to walk around the top and look at both coves. Tell Tweini and the centre of Jableh fit comfortably into the same day.

Sukas layer by layer

• Neolithic: the first settlement is dated between 6550 and 4800 BC.
• Middle Bronze Age: a collective tomb where the bones of 41 people had been gathered as secondary burials.
• End of the Late Bronze Age: a burnt layer from around 1170 BC, as at Ugarit and Tell Tweini. The difference is that Sukas, unlike them, was resettled at once.
• Iron Age: invaded by Shalmaneser III around 850 BC; from the 10th century it served as the port of the land of Luhuti.
• Greek period: after Esarhaddon’s destruction between 677 and 671 BC, Greeks and Cypriots made up most of the population. A temple in Greek style and Greek-type graves from the late 7th century belong to this phase. The town was destroyed in 588 and 552 BC and abandoned around 498 BC.
• Hellenistic and after: Phoenicians settled again between 380 and 140 BC, and these levels were brought down by an earthquake. In the Byzantine period the mound became a fort; the Crusaders enlarged it, and the site was abandoned in the 14th century.

The excavations and the tablet

Emil Forrer dug the first soundings in 1934. The main excavations, from 1958 to 1961 and again in 1963, were those of the Danish Carlsberg Expedition to Phoenicia under P. J. Riis. Across the water from the south harbour they excavated an open-air sanctuary known as Mina Sukas. South of the mound they found an Iron Age cemetery of the 13th to 10th centuries BC and a large Phoenician temple of the 7th century.

The most striking find is a clay tablet written in the cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit: 67 x 89 x 29 millimetres, a list of payments to soldiers. Its edge says it belonged to the House of the King. The tablet is now in the National Museum of Damascus, and part of the finds from Sukas is on display in the Tartus Museum.

What most people miss

The far shore of the southern cove. The Mina Sukas sanctuary was excavated there, and looking across from the mound you see the harbour and the sanctuary facing each other over the water, which is how Sukas worked as a port town.