Two long-lost cities in Iraq have started to emerge: one in the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan; the other is thought to be somewhere in the south.
The first suspicions of the existence of a city in the north of the country were aroused when fragment of a bronze statue of the Akkadian sun-king Naram-Sin was found during road building near the village of Bassetki in 1975. Dated from around 2250 BC, it had an inscription on the base indicating that it stood in the doorway of a palace.
In 2016, after five years of field work, archaeologists from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) at the University of Tübingen, under lead researcher Professor Peter Pfälzner, did indeed uncover a large Bronze Age palace here. Then, last year, 92 cuneiform tablets were found stashed inside a vessel covered in clay.
Now deciphered, they show that, several centuries after the collapse of the Akkadian empire, this was the royal city of Mardaman, which Babylonian sources date to around 1800 BC when it was a commercial hub and centre of the Assyrian kingdom of Shamshi-Adad I.
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John Osborne CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £75 HARDBACK - ISBN 978-1108834582
