Communication to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 6 August 1948Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Printed: MINISTÈRE DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES — LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE — PARIS

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layers of ash and stones reddened by fire. / After having been levelled, the ruins of the original gateway were incorpo[handwritten: ?]rated into the new construction for which they served as foundations.

Now, the positions foreseen by the bas-reliefs of the original gateway, notably the two piers serving as jambs on the side of the inner courtyard are stripped of their sculptures. / The dimensions agree; the bas-reliefs or those among them which had escaped destruction must have been transferred to the Lion Gate erected on the site of the earlier [handwritten: burnt] gateway. This explains the character not very homogeneous of the reliefs and sculptures of the so-called Lion Gate, among which, as your former Perpetual Secretary Mr Dussaud was the first to establish, there are several which are indisputably earlier than the Neo-Hittite period.

As one must expect when a monument of this scale has been rebuilt after an interval of d more[handwritten: than several] d'un centuries, the movable remains of the original monuments have almost entirely been removed. / On the other hand, there was produced then a mixture of materials coming from the original gateway with the contemporary evidence of the building works of reconstruction. / It required [handwritten: a] constant observation and an in situ recording by my architects, aided by instruments of precise levelling, of several hundred remains, including the most modest, to succeed in identifying the layers correspond[handwritten: ing] to the two monuments intermingled in many places, notably at the position of the foundations.

Nevertheless, with the help of stratigraphic indications and /