Archaeologists Discover They’ve Been Excavating Lost Assyrian City
Cuneiform tablets revealed the site in Iraqi Kurdistan is the legendary city of Madaman
(Peter Pfälzner, University of Tübingen)
By Jason Daley
2 hours ago
In 2013, archaeologists from the University of Tübingen in Germany began excavations on an ancient Assyrian city in the Kurdistan region of modern-day Iraq. While they were able to establish the city dated back as early as 2800 to 2650 B.C., they weren’t sure exactly what city it was that they were excavating, according to Owen Jarus at LiveScience. That is until last summer. While digging in a site that was once a palace, they unearthed 92 cuneiform tablets hidden in a piece of pottery that revealed where, exactly, they were working: the lost city of Mardaman.
According to a press release, the city was once an important commercial hub that’s been cited in many writings. Over the course of its 1,000-year history, Mardaman was captured, destroyed and rebuilt several times. Notably, during that time span, its position on trading routes between Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Syria, made it a desirable slice of geography, and it served for a time as a capital of a Mesopotamian province and at one point was its own independent kingdom.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-discover-theyve-been-excavating-lost-assyrian-city-180969076/#G0U04UaqCRKHb36F.99
