3400-year-old City Discovered in Iraq
Years of relentless drought have recently exposed multiple cities typically submerged in water reservoirs in Iraq.
The waters of the Mosul dam – located near Kemune in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region – relinquished an ancient city, a team of German and Kurdish archaeologists announced May 30 in a news release.
The 3,400-year-old “urban center” could be Zakhiku, an “important center in the Mittani Empire” that ruled modern-day Iraq from 1550-1350 B.C., researchers said.
Image: Washington Post
Tan-ish brown and dusty, the ruins of the city boast a palace, fortified walls and towers, a “monumental, multi-storey” storage facility and industrial building, researchers explained. From above, the buildings look grid-like — squared-off indents in an otherwise rocky mound, photos show.
Image: NBC News
Despite decades underwater, the site is stunningly well-preserved, partially due to an earthquake that destroyed the city in 1350 B.C., researchers said.
Big findings also came in small packages at the excavation site. Tucked in the corner of the storage facility, researchers found five pottery vessels, photos show.
Image: Universities of Freiburg and Tübingen, Kurdistan Archaeology Organisation
Tucked inside the pottery vessels, they found more than 100 cuneiform writing tablets, per the release. One notable tablet, possibly a letter, remained partially enclosed in its original clay envelope, photos show.
“It is close to a miracle that cuneiform tablets made of unfired clay survived so many decades under water,” researcher Dr. Peter Pfälzner said in the release.
Image: Universities of Freiburg and Tübingen, Kurdistan Archaeology Organisation
About 20 miles east, another submerged city vied for attention, lurking visible but still unreachable beneath the waters of Dohuk Dam, photos from Ismael Adnan on Aug. 31 showed.
Image: Ismael Adnan
Gary Qasruka, a city abandoned in 1985, has surfaced for the fifth time, Wired reported on Aug. 29. Decades underwater have left the village ruins “algae-painted and shell-marked,” according to Wired.
Iraq’s devastating drought has wreaked havoc on the northern part of the country since 2021 and the southern part for several years longer, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said in a July 15 report.
See more here miamiherald.com
Header image: NBC News
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VOWG
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Atlantis, where’s Atlantis?
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VOWG
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The silliness of my last brief comment aside, I find that very interesting.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi VOWG,
Specially what do you find very interesting? I find what can be done with MANUAL LABOR and that “clay” is so impervious to water and these ancient people took advantage of this fact in more ways than just making tablets. It was the ancient concrete and evidently more practically valuable than gold. And the first person who discovered clay’s practical application was likely an experimentalist.
Have a good day, Jerry
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K Kaiser
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The current drought in much of the European, Near-East, and African lands is likely both natural and man-made. This aridification process started already when the forests on the east side of the Adriatic Sea were denuded by the ancient Romans, required old-growth lumber for housing and galleons, I turned the entire area into a Karst-landscape. Not much has changed since.
New forest growth is nearly non-existent as farmers’ olive and fig trees are continuously cropped by goats, right to the juicy top twigs.
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