Drought reveals a city in Mittani

18 July 2022

In this period of heat waves when the earth is cracking and the rivers are at their lowest, archaeologists sometimes make unexpected discoveries. The significant drop in the water level of the Mosul dam built in the 1980s has thus revealed, on the eastern bank of the Tigris, the remains of the ancient Zakhiku, a city of the Mittani empire, on the site of Kemune, in the province of Dahuk (Iraqi Kurdistan).

The identification of the site was possible thanks to the cuneiform tablets that were discovered there.

The Mittani Empire, which in the middle of the 15th century BCE covered the whole of Upper Mesopotamia, from the Mediterranean in the west to the Zagros mountains in the east, is still poorly known. Few sites have yielded tablets for this period. Moreover, the successive capitals of the Mittani, Waššukanni and Ta'idu, probably in the Khabur triangle, and Irrid, the last residence of the Mittani ruler, perhaps further west, towards the Balikh, have not yet been located with certainty. The Hourrite kings of the Mittani exchanged letters with the Egyptian pharaoh; a dozen of their letters have been discovered among the cuneiform tablets exhumed in the archives of Akhenaten at El-Amarna, the ancient Akhetaton.

The Kurdish-German archaeological team noted a significant drop in the water level of the lake in early 2022, a consequence of the intense drought in the country in recent years. Water was drawn from the lake to save crops, as the country is heavily affected by climate change. This drop in water levels revealed a large area of the site, which was intensively excavated in January and February 2022, under difficult conditions.

The excavations uncovered the city's fortifications and a large multi-storey storage building dating from the Late Bronze Age, testifying to the site's important role in the Mittanian Empire. The palace, discovered during a short campaign in 2018, could be excavated. Some of its walls were found to be covered with colourful murals, for although submerged by water for some 40 years, the baked brick walls of the buildings have stood the test of time particularly well. The city was destroyed by an earthquake in the mid-14th century, after which it was reoccupied.

In the palace, one room contained five earthen jars in which there were cuneiform tablets from the Middle Assyrian period, including letters still preserved in their clay casings. In total, more than a hundred cuneiform tablets were discovered, some in very poor condition. They document the end of the Mittani period and the beginning of the Assyrian occupation of the region.

After two months of salvage excavations, the site, covered with plastic tarpaulins weighted down with gravel, was again submerged. The jars filled with tablets were taken to the National Museum in Dohuk for a thorough search of their contents.

This discovery is not unlike that of Babylon in the time of Hammurabi (18th century). The rise of the water table in antiquity prevented the excavation of the Palaeo-Babylonian levels, except for a short period when a heavily damaged residential quarter was excavated, but which was immediately covered by water again.

The systematic survey of the ruins of Zakhiku and the deciphering of its archives will improve our knowledge of one of the major powers of the Near East in the 15th and early 14th centuries BCE.