Ancient City Emerges From Tigris River After Drought Lowers Water Level

An ancient city emerged from the Tigris River amid droughts in Iraq. Archaeologists scrambled to document the 3,400-year-old urban center before it was submerged underwater again.

The ancient city is quite "extensive," having a few large buildings and even a palace, the University of Tübingen noted in a news release. It emerged earlier this year after large amounts of water had been taken from the Mosul reservoir to prevent crops from dying amid the "extreme drought" in the southern parts of Iraq.

"This led to the reappearance of a Bronze Age city that had been submerged decades ago without any prior archaeological investigations," the university said.

The city is about 3,400-year-old and is believed to have been Zakhiku, which was an important site during the Mittani Empire. Not knowing when the water would end up submerging the city again, experts quickly mobilized a team to excavate and document the city.

Apart from the palace, which was excavated back in 2018, this time they were able to map the city and uncover a multi-story storage building, an industrial complex and even a fortification that includes a wall and some towers.

The walls were said to be particularly impressive because of their height and how they stood the test of time even though they were submerged underwater for decades. Ivana Puljiz of the University of Freiburg, who was among the team of experts who excavated the city from January to February 2022, also noted the building's importance, saying that likely stored "enormous quantities of goods."

"The excavation results show that the site was an important center in the Mittani Empire," another expert who was a part of the team, Kurdish archaeologist Hasan Qasim of Kurdistan Archaeology Organization, said, as per the University of Tübingen.

A particularly curious find, however, are five ceramic vessels that had more than 100 cuneiform tablets dating back to the Middle Assyrian period. Cuneiform was the writing system used in the ancient Middle East, and some of the tablets that the experts found are believed to be letters.

"It is close to a miracle that cuneiform tablets made of unfired clay survived so many decades underwater," Peter Pfälzner of the University of Tübingen, also among the excavating team, said in the university news release.

Now the site is submerged underwater again. But to protect it, the experts covered the site in a "tight-fitting" plastic sheet, the University of Tübingen noted.