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Archaeologists Unearth Temple Structure and Valuable Artifacts in Southern Iraq

 

Tuesday, 25 September 2012

 

By REUTERS

NASSIRIYA-IRAQ

 

"Iraq, which the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia or “land between two rivers” because of the Tigris and Euphrates, has always been regarded by archaeologists as the cradle of civilization.

 

Driven by the desire to reassemble some of the country’s lost history, a group of Iraqi archaeologists have recently managed to unearth artifacts and a Babylonian temple’s structure dating back to the middle Babylon period between 1532 BC to 1000 BC at an archaeological site in Iraq’s southern province of Nassiriya.

 

The site, excavated at 500 square meter at Abu Rabab plateau and located 150 km in east of Nassiriya city, is part of a project called “Gardens of Eden” which Iraqi government plans to launch over the next few years to promote tourism in the province.

 

“There are many archaeological sites in this region including the ancient archaeological plateaux that was excavated as part of the marshes project, the archaeological site of Abu Rabab, Abu al-Dhahb, Abu Massaed site, and other archaeological plateaux. Now we are working in four archaeological plateaux that are located near the province and near the marshes. The work is being done in this area because the site is close to the province, and water does not leak in the archaeological plateaux,” said Iyad Mahmoud, Archaeologist and director of archaeological team."

 

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Archeologists Uncover New Assyrian Site in Northern Iraq

 

Tuesday, 02 October 2012

 

By AL ARABIYA

 

"Archeologists working in northern Iraq have discovered a new Assyrian site in the vicinity of the historic Arbil city center, the head of the antiquities office in the Kurdish Province of Arbil, Haydar Hassan, was quoted as saying in an Iraqi newspaper.

 

The Assyrian civilization flourished in northern Iraq between 1000-700 B.C., archeologists were led to discover the site when they exhumed a burial ground, complete with mud brick grave heads.

 

To further unearth this site the foreign archeological team had to study and remove two more layers of civilization under which the Assyrian structure was buried, according to a report published by Iraq’s al-Zaman on Monday."

 

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Ancient Iraq revealed: Harvard illuminates 'richest archaeological landscape in the Middle East'

 

November 27, 2012 by Peter Reuell

 

After nearly a century away, Harvard archaeology has returned to Iraq.

 

"Jason Ur, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, earlier this year launched a five-year archaeological project—the first such Harvard-led endeavor in the war-torn nation since the early 1930s—to scour a 3,200-square-kilometer area around Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, for signs of ancient cities and towns, canals, and roads. Already, Ur said, the effort is paying massive dividends—with some 1,200 potential sites identified in just a few months, and potentially thousands more in the coming years. "What we're finding is that this is, hands down, the richest archaeological landscape in the Middle East," Ur said. "Due to the history of conflict and ethnic strife in this region, there was no work done in this area at all, so it really is a tabula rasa, so it's a very exciting time." Unfortunately, he said, that blank slate is quickly being erased by development."

 

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Article:

 

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language

 

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff WriterDate: 04 December 2012 Time: 11:35 AM ET

 

SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

 

"Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought.

 

The findings, which were presented Monday (Dec. 3) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change."

 

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An Ancient Statue, Re-Created

 

Through technology, museum augments shards of ceramic lion

 

By Alvin Powell

Harvard Staff Writer

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

 

"As part of a repair job 3,300 years in the making, Harvard’s Semitic Museum is seeking to undo some of the destruction wrought when Assyrians smashed the ancient city of Nuzi in modern-day Iraq, looting the temple and destroying artifacts.

 

In a high-tech project that would have been impossible even four years ago, technicians are attempting to re-create a 2-foot-long ceramic lion that likely flanked an image of the goddess Ishtar in a temple in long-ago Nuzi, which is the modern archaeological site of Yorghan Tepe. The project will blend fragments of the original statue held by the museum with pieces created through 3-D scans of its intact mirror image, which likely sat on Ishtar’s other side.

 

Museum assistant director Joseph Greene said the project is partly driven by the desire to re-create the damaged lion and partly by a commitment to use the latest technology to probe the thousands of artifacts in the museum’s collection in search of new data from them."

 

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First Published: 2013-01-07

 

Ancient Gold Coins Discovered in Iraq

 

Iraqi archaeologists have unearthed 66 gold coins that are at least 1,400 years old in Aziziyah.

 

Middle East Online

 

"KUT, Iraq - Iraqi archaeologists have found 66 gold coins that are at least 1,400 years old, officials said on Monday, adding that they hope to put them on display in Baghdad's National Museum.

 

The artefacts, which date back to the Sassanid era that extended from 225 BC to 640 AD, will be sent for laboratory tests in order to confirm their authenticity.

 

They were discovered in the town of Aziziyah, which lies 70 kilometres (40 miles) southeast of Baghdad in Wasit province, according to Hassanian Mohammed Ali, director of the provincial antiquities department."

 

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Historic Iraqi Building Gets New Lease on Life as Museum

 

NAJAF, Iraq - Agence France-Presse

 

January 08, 2013

 

Iraq’s Khan al-Shilan, a former Ottoman military headquarters that later became a government administrative building, will turn into a museum featuring antiquities and archaeological pieces

 

"It served as an Ottoman headquarters, a prison, an ice factory and a mill before falling into neglect.

 

Now, Najaf’s historic and much-loved Khan al-Shilan is getting a new lease on life as a museum.

 

Local authorities in Najaf plan to turn the structure into a museum featuring antiquities and archaeological pieces as well as statues of rebels and some of the actual weapons they used in a 1920 Iraqi uprising against the British, during which captured soldiers were held at Khan al-Shilan.

 

In addition to its long history, Khan al-Shilan is significant due to the remains of drawings and dates left by the captive British soldiers, which are still visible on its walls.

 

According to Hassan al-Hakim, a history professor at Kufa University, Khan al-Shilan was originally intended to be a rest house for pilgrims visiting Najaf, which is home to the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the most revered figures in Shiite Islam, and visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year.

 

But it was used as an Ottoman military headquarters before the defeat of the empire in World War I, and then as a local government administrative building."

 

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Iraqis, Foreign Teams Work Together to Excavate Ancient Sites

2013-02-19 By Khalid al-Taie in Baghdad

"The Iraqi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities on Monday (February 18th) announced it has authorised six foreign teams to start archaeological excavations at a number of ancient sites.

"As part of its work programme for the current year, the ministry has reached agreements with six archaeological teams from Italy, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic," Hakim al-Shammary, director of the tourism minister's media office, told Mawtani.

The teams will begin excavations at a number of sites, particularly in the south, he said.

"Among the sites to be excavated are ancient hills such as Tal Abu Tuwaira in the city of al-Nasiriya, Tal al-Baqarat in al-Kut and Tal Abu Shathar in Maysan province, as well as other sites in al-Dalmaj marshes," he said.

Iraqi archaeologists and excavators will work alongside these teams to acquire additional skills, using advanced equipment to salvage relics and identify historical periods, and learning how to preserve the pieces, al-Shammary said."

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Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq

Naomi F. Miller

January 2013 (117.1)

"Fertility and abundance are important themes of ancient Mesopotamian texts and images. The goddess Inanna and her consort Dumuzi personify these ideas in texts of the second millennium B.C.E. Excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, the Royal Cemetery at Ur dates to the mid third millennium B.C.E. Among the tombs, that of Queen Puabi yielded many ornaments of gold, carnelian, and lapis. Some of the pendants realistically depict identifiable animals. Others are more stylized depictions of clusters of apples, dates, and date inflorescences."

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Ancient Iraq Yields Fresh Finds for Returning Archaeologists

Posted GMT 3-27-2013 23:34:3

"Baghdad -- British archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown palace or temple near the ancient city of Ur in the first foreign excavation at the site in southern Iraq since the 1930s.

A small team of archaeologists working from satellite images hinting at a buried structure have uncovered the corner of a monumental complex with rows of rooms around a large courtyard, believed to be about 4,000 years old.

"The size is breathtaking," says Jane Moon, a University of Manchester archaeologist who heads the expedition. Ms. Moon says the walls of the structure are almost nine feet thick, indicating that the building was of great importance or indicated great wealth.

The discovery is even more significant because of its location more than 10 miles from Ur, on what would then have been the banks of the Euphrates River -- the first major archaeological find that far from the city.

Ur, the last capital of the Sumerian empire, was invaded and collapsed in about 2000 BC before being rebuilt. The city was dedicated to the moon god and is famous for its ziggurat (a stepped temple). Many believe it is the birthplace of the prophet Abraham, known as the father of monotheistic religion. Modern methods

The last major excavation at Ur was performed by a British-American team led by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and the 1930s. After the 1950s revolution, which toppled Iraq's monarchy, a nearby military air base put the area off limits to foreign archaeologists for the next half century."

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Huge Find Throws New Light on Ancient Iraq

05 Apr 2013

University of Manchester archaeologists have started the excavation of an enormous building complex in Iraq, thought to be around 4,000 years old.


"The team, directed by Professor Stuart Campbell and Dr Jane Moon, both from Manchester, and independent archaeologist Robert Killick, first spotted the amazing structure – thought to be an administrative complex serving one of the world’s earliest cities– on satellite.

It was after carrying out geophysical survey and trial excavations at the site of Tell Khaiber that they were able to confirm the size of the complex at about 80 metres square – roughly the size of a football pitch.

They are the first British archaeologists to excavate in Southern Iraq since the 1980s, working close to the ancient city of Ur, where Sir Leonard Woolley discovered the fabulous 'Royal Tombs' in the 1920s.

The arrangement of rooms around a large courtyard are at a site only 20km from Ur, the last capital of the Sumerian royal dynasties, the founders of the earliest cities in the world.

Professor Campbell is head of the University’s renowned Department of Archaeology. He said: “This is a breathtaking find and we feel privileged to be the first to work at this important site.

“The surrounding countryside, now arid and desolate, was the birthplace of cities and of civilization about 5,000 years ago and home to the Sumerians and the later Babylonians."

 

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Bringing Babylon Back from the Dead

By Arwa Damon, CNN

April 5, 2013 -- Updated 0259 GMT (1059 HKT)

CNN) -- "Babylon was one of the glories of the ancient world, its walls and mythic hanging gardens listed among the Seven Wonders.

Founded about 4,000 years ago, the ancient city was the capital of 10 dynasties in Mesopotamia, considered one of the earliest cradles of civilization and the birthplace of writing and literature.

But following years of plunder, neglect and conflict, the Babylon of today scarcely conjures that illustrious history.

In recent years, the Iraqi authorities have reopened Babylon to tourists, hoping that one day the site will draw visitors from all over the globe. But despite the site's remarkable archaeological value and impressive views, it is drawing only a smattering of tourists, drawn by a curious mix of ancient and more recent history."

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Uruk, Possibly World's First Metropolis, Is On View At Pergamon Museum In Berlin (PHOTOS)

By GEIR MOULSON 04/24/13 09:26 AM ET EDT

BERLIN — "Berlin's Pergamon Museum is offering visitors a glimpse of perhaps the world's first real metropolis in a new exhibition that traces the long history of Uruk, in present-day Iraq.

Artifacts, including clay masks of demons, figurines of rulers, limestone ducks used as weights, a prism listing Sumerian kings and clay vessels used as water pipes, grace the exhibition "Uruk – 5,000 Years of the Megacity." They date back as far as the 4th millennium B.C.

The show marks a century of excavations at Uruk in which German experts have played a prominent part. But even now, organizers say, less than 5 percent of the sprawling site in the Iraqi desert about 260 kilometers (160 miles) south of Baghdad has been explored."

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Babylon's Hanging Garden: Ancient Scripts Give Clue to Missing Wonder

A British academic has gathered evidence suggesting garden was created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon

Dalya Alberge

The Guardian, Sunday 5 May 2013 18.52 BST

"The whereabouts of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the fabled Hanging Garden of Babylon – has been one of the great mysteries from antiquity. The inability of archaeologists to find traces of it among Babylon's ancient remains led some even to doubt its existence.

Now a British academic has amassed a wealth of textual evidence to show that the garden was instead created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon, in the early 7th century BC.

After 18 years of study, Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University has concluded that the garden was built by the Assyrians in the north of Mesopotamia – in modern Iraq – rather than by their great enemies the Babylonians in the south.

She believes her research shows that the feat of engineering and artistry was achieved by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, rather than the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar."

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URUK RISES AGAIN IN DIGITAL 3D

Article created on Friday, May 10, 2013

"Uruk, in modern-day Iraq, is one of the first cities in the world and was populated almost without interruption for over 5,000 years – from the 4th millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD.

The city is famous for the invention of cuneiform writing at the end of the 4th millennium, in the “late Uruk period”. During this creative flourishing the city already covered an area of 2.5 square kilometres and many distinctive architectural features were invented and developed.

Recreating the architecture of innovation

Today, little is known with certainty about the purpose and function of this early representative architecture, among which the so-called “Stone-Cone Building” is perhaps one of the most puzzling."

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Restoring the Glory of Ancient Babylon

BABYLON, Iraq - Agence France-Presse

June 25, 2013

"At ancient Babylon’s Ishtar Gate, Iraqi workers labor with a heavy saw, hammers, a chisel and crowbar to break up and remove a concrete slab that is hastening the structure’s decay.

The concrete lies between the two long, towering walls of tan bricks decorated with processions of bulls and dragons that make up the more than 2,500-year-old Ishtar Gate, in what is now Iraq’s Babil province. The masonry slab was laid during the late dictator Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Removing the concrete is deemed essential to preserving the Ishtar Gate at Babylon, which also served as the base for a later gate of the same name, the reassembled remains of which are now located in Germany."

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Ur Digitization Project: August 2013

By BRAD HAFFORD | Published: SEPTEMBER 4, 2013

Reconstructing Excavation Processes

Spotlight on Division of Finds: Penn’s acquisition of its Ur material

"Tens of thousands of artifacts were uncovered in the twelve years of excavation at the ancient city of Ur, from 1922-1934. The Ur of the Chaldees project, with lead funding from the Leon Levy Foundation, is still uncovering exactly where each of them went, piece by piece. It is a difficult but fascinating process, one in which we must reconstruct not just the procedures governing the recording and distribution of objects, but also recreate conditions and mindsets of the day from letters, photos, diaries, and any other information we can acquire. Understanding how and why Woolley assigned numbers to objects is vital since he did not consistently record every piece. Therefore, objects without a direct paper trail exist in all of the primary museums involved in the excavation."

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Ancient Kingdom Discovered Beneath Mound in Iraq

By Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor | September 30, 2013 02:21pm ET

"In the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq archaeologists have discovered an ancient city called Idu, hidden beneath a mound.

Cuneiform inscriptions and works of art reveal the palaces that flourished in the city throughout its history thousands of years ago.

Located in a valley on the northern bank of the lower Zab River, the city's remains are now part of a mound created by human occupation called a tell, which rises about 32 feet (10 meters) above the surrounding plain. The earliest remains date back to Neolithic times, when farming first appeared in the Middle East, and a modern-day village called Satu Qala now lies on top of the tell.

The city thrived between 3,300 and 2,900 years ago, said Cinzia Pappi, an archaeologist at the Universität Leipzig in Germany. At the start of this period, the city was under the control of the Assyrian Empire and was used to administer the surrounding territory. Later on, as the empire declined, the city gained its independence and became the center of a kingdom that lasted for about 140 years, until the Assyrians reconquered it."

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Cornell to Return 10,000 Ancient Tablets to Iraq

Forfeiture of private collection detailing ancient daily life may be largest return of antiquities by a U.S. university.

By Jason Felch

November 3, 2013, 6:30 a.m.

"Cornell University is preparing to forfeit to Iraq a vast collection of ancient cuneiform tablets in what is expected to be one of the largest returns of antiquities by an American university.

The 10,000 inscribed clay blocks date from the 4th millenium BC and offer scholars an unmatched record of daily life in ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.

New York antiquities collector Jonathan Rosen and his family began donating and lending the tablets to Cornell in 2000. Many scholars have objected to the arrangement, suspecting the tablets were looted in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, which unleashed a wave of plundering in the archaeologically rich expanse of southern Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers."

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The Salty Pots of Ur and the Desalination Station

By TESSA DE ALARCON | Published: OCTOBER 31, 2013

 

"In July, I joined the Ur Digitization Project. As a part of this project, I have been working on a condition assessment of the ceramics from Ur. In doing the condition assessment I am looking at, measuring, and evaluating the stability of every ceramic vessel in the Museum’s collection from Ur. So far I have examined over half of the ceramics, and found that the main issue is soluble salts. I know when we all hear salt we think table salt. This is not too far off as table salt, or sodium chloride, is a soluble salt. This just means that the salt is soluble in water and in many cases is also hygroscopic (a big word for “absorbs moisture from the air”). We have all seen how salt clumps in salt shakers and won’t shake out nicely when it’s humid. This happens because the salt is hygroscopic."

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Despite Iraq's Troubles, Archaeologists Are Back

BY ALISTAIR LYON

UR, Iraq Tue Feb 18, 2014 7:45am GMT

Reuters) - "Ur's palaces and temples lie in ruins, but its hulking Ziggurat still dominates the desert flatlands of what is now southern Iraq, as it has for millennia.

Climbing the Ziggurat's baked-brick stairway to its wind-scoured summit, you gaze over the royal cemetery excavated 90 years ago by Leonard Woolley, a Briton who recovered treasures rivalling those found in Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt in 1924.

Very little work has been done here since, but British archaeologists are now back in the area despite the insecurity in Iraq that had kept them - and all but the most adventurous tourists - away from one of the world's oldest cities.

Brushing the caked dust from their clothes, Jane Moon and Stuart Campbell arrive back in Ur from another day of digging in a smaller settlement at Tell Khaiber, 20 km (13 miles) away."

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4,500-year-old Food Items Found in Cupboard in Bristol

- last updated Sat 21 Jun 2014

"University staff expecting to find nothing more than dustballs during a departmental cupboard clean out stumbled on royal food items from the Mesopotamian city of Ur in southern Iraq.

Researchers from the University of Bristol pulled a wooden box down from the top of a cupboard in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and found it was filled with ancient pottery, seeds and animals bones.

The goods were marked with words such as 'predynastic', 'sargonid' and 'Royal Tombs' written on index cards."

 

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Remains of Long-Lost Temple Discovered in Iraq

By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor | July 07, 2014 08:08am ET

"Life-size human statues and column bases from a long-lost temple dedicated to a supreme god have been discovered in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

The discoveries date back over 2,500 years to the Iron Age, a time period when several groups — such as the Urartians, Assyrians and Scythians — vied for supremacy over what is now northern Iraq.

"I didn't do excavation, just archaeological soundings —the villagers uncovered these materials accidentally," said Dlshad Marf Zamua, a doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who began the fieldwork in 2005. The column bases were found in a single village while the other finds, including a bronze statuette of a wild goat, were found in a broad area south of where the borders of Iraq, Iran and Turkey intersect."
 
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ScienceAAAS

 

Skeleton in the Closet Identified: Bones from Ancient Ur

By Hassan DuRant 7 August 2014 6:15 pm

"The skeleton lay hidden in a crate in the “mummy room” of the museum for decades. Curators at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) knew about it, but had no idea who lay buried there—or even in what long-ago era he had lived. Now, a careful examination of records has revealed his identity: The bones belong to a man who lived in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom of Ur, 6500 years ago. They may be the oldest known from this early city, located in present-day Iraq. “It’s really cool we found it now,” said Janet Monge, curator for the museum’s physical anthropology section. “20 years ago we might have damaged it just trying to get a better look.”

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