Southern Iraq has been suffering from extreme drought for months. Since December 2021, large volumes of water have been diverted from the Mosul dam, the country’s most important reservoir, to prevent crops from being totally lost.
Due to the low water level, the ruins of a 3,400-year-old city, missing for decades, emerged on the edge of the reservoir.
“I saw in satellite images that the water level was going down, but it was not clear when the water would rise again. So we had an indeterminate time window”, explains German archaeologist Ivana Puljiz, a professor at the University of Freiburg.
Despite the difficulties and urgency, the archaeologists knew that the site, known as Kemune, was interesting, as they had already been there.
So Puljiz met with Hasan Ahmed Qasim, a Kurdish archaeologist, director of the Kurdistan Archeology Organization, and Peter Pfälzner, a professor of Archeology at the University of Tübingen, to carry out a spontaneous rescue excavation.
They quickly assembled a team of German and Kurdish archaeologists to document as much of the great site as possible. So for seven weeks, between January and February, the team surveyed the Bronze Age city before it was completely flooded again.
During a similar drought phase in Iraq in 2018, researchers had discovered a fortress-like palace located in the vicinity of a small hill and bounded by a large wall.
At the time, Ivana Puljiz’s team found remains of wall paintings in bright red and blue tones, considered a typical feature of these palaces.
The fact that the pigments were preserved despite the floods was “an archaeological sensation,” Puljiz said after his visit to the site in 2022.
“Of course we had high hopes,” he said, referring to the new expedition. “Based on what we found in 2018, we knew this location could bring interesting discoveries. But we didn’t know exactly what we would find,” Puljiz explained.
All the effort was not in vain: during the recent excavation, archaeologists managed to discover other large buildings, such as a huge fortification with a wall and towers that surrounded the city.
The discovery of a large multi-storey warehouse was particularly surprising.
“The size of this building alone shows that it must have housed a huge amount of goods. And they had to be produced and taken there,” Puljiz said. This suggests that the city obtained supplies from a surrounding area.
Puljiz explains that initial findings suggest that the sprawling city complex could be ancient Zachiku, an important center of the Mitanni Empire (circa 1550 to 1350 BC), which controlled much of northern Mesopotamia and Syria.
However, not much is known about Zachiku. “There are very few mentions of the name of this city in other sources. We are only now acquiring new knowledge about it.”
According to Ivana Puljiz, despite being made of unburned adobe bricks that have been underwater for decades, the walls and foundations of the building appear to be in surprisingly good condition.
A major earthquake that hit the city around 1350 BC is believed to have helped to preserve these walls: when the building was destroyed, the falling debris may have covered the lower parts of the walls, preserving them.
One of the most fascinating finds, said the researcher, was the discovery of five ceramic vessels containing more than 100 cuneiform tablets – one of the oldest forms of writing in the world –, as if they came from a kind of archive.
Some of the clay tablets were found in “envelopes”, also made of clay. “These solid, unburned clay tablets have been underwater for so long and have survived. We hope they can soon be read by a philologist. That’s really a sensation,” said Puljiz.
mitani empire
The clay tablets were created in the Middle Assyrian period, shortly after the devastating earthquake, when the population may have started to settle again in the ruins of the ancient city.
Cuneiform texts may provide information about the end of the Mitanni period and the beginning of Assyrian rule in the region. The Mitanni Empire is still one of the least studied of antiquity.
During its heyday, in the mid-2nd millennium BC, it stretched from the Mediterranean coast, through present-day Syria, to northern Iraq.
Mitanni royalty is believed to have maintained a good relationship with the Egyptian pharaohs and Babylonian rulers. But around 1350 BC, the kingdom was conquered by neighboring Hittites and Assyrians.
The events that led to the fall of Zachiku City remain unclear. To learn more about the Mitanni Empire, researchers would need to investigate the center of the ancient empire — which was likely located in northern Syria, Puljiz explains.
However, the many years of war in the region made such archaeological excavations impossible.
“Without finding remarkable texts at the center of the empire, it’s very difficult to get an idea of ​​how it worked, what held it together, or what the landowners did. So far, we only have isolated spots of light in outlying areas, like now what is probably the old Zachiku. But the central area remains in the dark”, emphasizes Puljiz.
Before the crumbling city was again submerged by the reservoir, archaeologists covered the excavated buildings with plastic wrap and gravel, hoping to protect them from further damage. With luck, the lost city will reappear one day.
