The archaeologists have returned to the south of Iraq and have discovered an ancient harbour

28 March 2018

Notwithstanding the serious security issues they face, in the last few years archaeologists have resumed their work in the south of Iraq. Their discoveries have increased and include a port that dates from the third millennium BCE. The archaeologists’ investigations are reframing our perception of the region.

The British, Americans and Germans have returned to the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, which was first discovered by Leonard Woolley at the beginning of the twentieth century. They have excavated buildings containing cuneiform tablets dating from the second half of the third millennium and the beginning of the second millennium BCE. These writings include bookkeeping texts, lists of goods and chattels, and documents relating to agriculture and raising livestock. In 2017, the German team unearthed the house of a Babylonian general dating from the eigtheenth century BCE. Inside the house, they discovered an archive consisting of 120 cuneiform tablets. These tablets reveal that a platoon of soldiers spent their spare time fishing.

Roughly 20 kilometres from the general’s abode, a team from Manchester University has been exploring the Tell Khaiber site since 2013. The team has brought to light a fortified administrative building dating from the Sealand Dynasty at the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BCE), a period that remains poorly documented in the history of the ancient Near East, and moreover solely through texts issuing from illicit excavations. The ancient administrative building was found to contain an archive consisting of 200 cuneiform texts addressing the management of cereals.

Since 2011, an Iraqi-Italian mission has been installed on Tell Abu Tbeirah, with an area of roughly 45 hectares, situated seven kilometres to the south of the town of Naziriyah. The tell has never before been explored. In 2016, the team discovered that the tell had been a busy port throughout the third millennium BCE, when they uncovered a brickwork rampart surrounding an artificial basin measuring 130 metres by 40 metres, connected to a canal dividing the town in two. Today, the site is located in the middle of a plain, 200 kilometres from the sea, but in the third millennium BCE the waters of the Persian Gulf reached just south of the city of Ur, which lies only fifteen kilometres to the west of Abu Tbeirah. The latter was therefore a port city bordered by marshes and close to where the Euphrates opens into the Persian Gulf. A significant number of freshwater and marine fishbones have provided evidence to support this scenario. The basin, located in the Northwestern area of the site and equivalent in size to roughly nine Olympic swimming pools, as Franco d’Agostino, one of the Italian mission’s co-directors has explained, was also able to serve as a holding basin to control the river’s floodwaters. As borne witness to by the discovery of alabaster vases and a pearl necklace, the port of Abu Tbeirah served as a link between distant places, such as the Indus Valley, with Ur, and even with Uruk, thanks to a system of canals which made it possible to reach inland areas. The abandonment of the site at the end of the third millennium was very likely due to a drought that struck the region about 2,200 years ago.

Many archaeological remains still await discovery in this region of the world that witnessed the birth of writing. Numerous ancient sites, which for some thirty years now have suffered heavily from looting (e.g. Uma, Larsa and Isin) still have much to teach us about Mesopotamian civilization, and plenty of other tells are waiting to be explored.