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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the before-they-ironed-out-the-kinks dept.

Archeologists from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) at the University of Tübingen have uncovered a large Bronze Age city not far from the town of Dohuk in northern Iraq. The excavation work has demonstrated that the settlement, which is now home to the small Kurdish village of Bassetki in the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan, was established in about 3000 BC and was able to flourish for more than 1200 years. The archeologists also discovered settlement layers dating from the Akkadian Empire period (2340-2200 BC), which is regarded as the first world empire in human history.

Scientists headed by Professor Peter Pfälzner from the University of Tübingen and Dr. Hasan Qasim from the Directorate of Antiquities in Dohuk conducted the excavation work in Bassetki between August and October 2016. As a result, they were able to preempt the construction work on a highway on this land. The former significance of the settlement can be seen from the finds discovered during the excavation work. The city already had a wall running around the upper part of the town from approx. 2700 BC onwards in order to protect its residents from invaders. Large stone structures were erected there in about 1800 BC. The researchers also found fragments of Assyrian cuneiform tablets dating from about 1300 BC, which suggested the existence of a temple dedicated to the Mesopotamian weather god Adad on this site. There was a lower town about one kilometer long outside the city center. Using geomagnetic resistance measurements, the archeologists discovered indications of an extensive road network, various residential districts, grand houses and a kind of palatial building dating from the Bronze Age. The residents buried their dead at a cemetery outside the city. The settlement was connected to the neighboring regions of Mesopotamia and Anatolia via an overland roadway dating from about 1800 BC.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:09AM (#423963)

    Well, the alternative would be to wait for them to destroy their own history.

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 08 2016, @02:36PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @02:36PM (#424078) Journal

    War and politics are probably the reasons this site wasn't discovered sooner. Otherwise, I find it hard to believe archaeologists could have missed a major Bronze Age settlement. We have all kinds of tools such as satellite imaging and ground penetrating radar. We've figured out cuneiform writing. If it's a major settlement, was around for 1200 years, seems it ought to be mentioned a time or three in ancient writing. Then there's roads. Surely we've done our best to map ancient roads, and surely we would've noticed the sort of gap in the network pointing to an unknown major city.

    More like this site was known about but not yet studied, and the headline is overly sensationalist.