Archeologists from the University of Manchester have just returned from a three month assignment to Southern Iraq are making significant new discoveries near the ancient city of Ur.
About Manchester spoke to Professor Stuart Campbell who directed the three person team.
While Islamic State militants continue their mission to culturally cleanse’ Iraq of its ancient relics, the area to the south of the country has for the first time in over twenty five years opened up to major cultural investigations using the latest scientific and technical methods.
Professor Stuart Campbell, and his colleagues, Dr Jane Moon and Dr Robert Killick, were invited by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities, to explore a part of the world that played an important part in the development of civilisation three and half thousand years ago.
This was the period sometimes refered to as the Dark Ages which had seen the first city states that had formed in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East start to crumble.
The site, at Tell Khaiber, is close to the ancient city of Ur, where Sir Leonard Woolley discovered the fabulous ‘Royal Tombs’ in the 1920s.
Professor Campbell’s team have uncovered evidence of this in public building the size of a football pitch, and of an unprecedented format, believed to be an administrative complex serving a capital city of the Babylonian empire.
Whilst this was a public building, Professor Campbell tells us, there is evidence that it was also heavily fortified, being surrounded by thick walls, and restricted entrances, all which points to the beginnings of a break down in civil structure.
Over three visits the team have unearthed fifty new documents written in Babylonian, and found evidence for a scribal school operating at the settlement.
“We found practice texts in the form of lists of exotic animals, and of precious stones, also evidence for the making and recycling of clay tablets. The whole complex dates to the ‘Dark Age’ following the fall of Babylon and the disintegration of Hammurabi’s empire.
For a time when this key area of Babylonia was thought to be de-urbanised and chaotic, we have evidence of sophisticated administrative mechanisms and large-scale distribution of grain and other commodities.”
Iraq’s archaeological
sites have been subjected to random looting and organized
robbery since 2003 but now this area, a land that witnessed the birth, among other things, of
writing and libraries, and of law and courts of justice and bears the imprint of the earliest civilization, and of the earliest
urban settlements are today now illuminating our human past.
Whilst the team were out there, further north in areas under Islmaic State control, militants destroyed ruins at the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh and are reported to have bulldozed an Assyrian palace at Nimrud and the classical city of Hatra too, as well as wrecking museum artefacts in Mosul.
Before returning to the UK, the archaeologists deposited 300 new artefacts in the Iraq Museum and set up a temporary exhibition in Baghdad as well as visiting universities that teach, or are planning to teach, archaeology.
While the artefacts will not be leaving Baghdad, there are plans for an exhibition surrounding the team’s work in Manchester in the next couple of years.
