As the climate crisis causes water levels to drop, riverbeds to dry up and glaciers to melt, artifacts such as old warships, an ancient city and human remains have emerged. This story is part of “Weather Artifacts,” a miniseries that chronicles the people, places, and items that have been encountered due to drought and rising temperatures.
About 3,800 years ago, investors in the ancient city of Zakhiku expected logged wooden beams in the forests of the mountains of northern and eastern Mesopotamia, which cover what is now Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria, on the Tigris. Once the logs arrived in Zakhiku, they were picked up and taken to warehouses.
From the same mountainous regions of what is now Turkey and Iran, traders transporting metals and minerals such as gold, silver, tin, and copper traveled by donkey or camel to Zakhiku. Themselves as bandits, they would perform the arduous adventure in caravans of travelers. . After promoting their wares to Zakhiku, the merchants crossed the Tigris River before proceeding to the borderlands.
Zakhiku was founded around 1800 BC by the ancient Babylonian empire that ruled Mesopotamia between the nineteenth and fifteenth centuries BC. With only water and soil in the region, Zakhiku was created to take advantage of caravan traffic and a thriving industrial direction in the Near East, which includes today’s Middle East. , Turkey and Egypt.
The trading post has become a commercial town in the region for about six hundred years before being hit by an earthquake and then abandoned.
Zakhiku disappeared completely in the 1980s, when, as part of the Mosul Dam project, built under Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, it flooded and submerged. Downstream irrigation.
Iraq is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and its southern governorates, where temperatures exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in summer, have been facing severe drought since 2019, forcing farmers to abandon dying crops. of the dam to irrigate farmland.
As water levels dropped, Zakhiku emerged earlier this year in Iraq’s Kurdish region. A team of local and German archaeologists stepped in to excavate the site, uncovering new details about the city following a brief initial excavation in 2018 that revealed a palace.
“With recent excavations, the population has become aware of Zakhiku; They stopped at the site. . . It was broadcast on local television. . . And other people are starting to know his story [more deeply] and are proud of it. “says Peter Pfälzner of the University of Tübingen, Germany, an archaeologist working at the site, known as Kemune.
Around 1500 BC, the ancient Babylonian city of Zakhiku fell with its empire when the Hittites, an Indo-European organization of other peoples of Anatolia, present-day Turkey, conquered Mesopotamia, but had no interest in installing a new government there.
When the Hittites returned to their northern lands, the Mittani Empire, originally from northeastern Syria, took Zakhiku.
“It’s an opportunity for the Mittani Empire to fill this void [left by the Hittites] to identify a very giant and tough empire,” says Pfälzner, who shared the findings of his excavation with Al Jazeera.
Few sites with layers or buildings have been discovered that can be attributed to this empire, and little is known about the other people who lived in Zakhiku or what the population liked in its heyday. But the city flourished under its current empire.
Most of the population of the Hurrian empire, such as the population of northern Mesopotamia, settled in present-day Syria and northern Iraq and spoke a language of the same name.
The infrastructure built during Mittani’s reign and discovered through archaeologists includes a palace for the local ruler, fortifications to protect the city from any invading forces, and a huge public storehouse for goods and crops, all made with bricks molded with mud.
It turns out that all this became imaginable thanks to the clever relations that the local king had with the emperor. According to Pfälzner, Zakhiku was a vassal state for the larger empire, with the capital in present-day northeastern Syria.
The king’s palace bigger than the houses, with thicker walls, larger rooms and even sidewalks made of bricks of baked powder, not just dry, sealed with bitumen – molded with oil – to waterproof.
With so few remains of the Mittani Empire, adding its capital, having been discovered to date, excavations tame new wisdom about the Mittani culture. “Zakhiku is very vital because it opens a big window into what the city looks like in Mittani. “says Pfalzner.
A key feature of Zakhiku was the warehouse which featured chambers up to 6 m (20 ft) wide and 8 m (26 ft) long and housed piles of wheat and barley, as well as imported steel and timber.
According to Pfälzner, farmers transported their season’s produce to the warehouse where state workers would write it down.
The large length of the rooms reserved for public crops indicates that the city is active and well populated.
Mesopotamia has long been known as the first position where wheat was domesticated about 10,000 years ago, and bread was the staple food of the other Zakhiku people, eaten with giant pots of soups and vegetable stews, according to Pfälzner.
Sheep, goats, cows and pigs were also raised at home, offering a normal source of milk and also meat, reserved for special occasions.
The Hurrian language was unknown outside the immediate region, and scribes hired for public purposes by the state, such as in city palaces or warehouses, knew Akkadian, the language and lingua franca most common in the ancient Near East at the end. of the Bronze Period, a period that became extinct since 3,300 BC. until 1,200 BC
Using rain clay, Pfälzner says, artisans made square tablets from 15cm to 15cm, and while the curtains were still raining, scribes etched notes on anything from a log on a freshly stored crop to a note destined for some other kingdom before hitting it in the sun. dry.
Mittani, the city of Zakhiku, met a devastating end when an earthquake demolished it in 1400 BC. C. y 1300 BC, according to Pfälzner, collapsing the walls around the inhabitants.
With the buildings so damaged, it was necessary to rebuild Zakhiku to its former eminence, and if there were survivors, they abandoned him.
Around 1300 BC, the indigenous Assyrians of Mesopotamia settled in the same city, built their houses amid the ruins and all structures are still in the Mittani era state as outer retaining walls.
“They created a new life in the city, it was great to see things start to expand again,” says Pfälzner.
In addition to those belonging to the Mittani period, excavated cuneiform tablets dating from after the earthquake will give archaeologists more information about the renewal of the city’s government.
Zakhiku was abandoned by the Assyrians only 50 years after their arrival, between 1270 BC. C. y 1250 B. C. To build his new provincial capital, Mardaman, 25 km (15. 5 mi) away on the plains of Mesopotamia in present-day Bassetki, a village in Duhok Governorate.
The publicity media profits that Zakhiku brought to his population in the Tigris Valley for some six hundred years vanished when the Assyrians, who were very cautious planners, attempted to exploit the now known fertile soil of Mesopotamia.
The move to Bassetki for economic and strategic reasons, according to Pfälzner, as agricultural spaces were smaller along the Tigris River compared to lowland fields that would generate greater economic gain.
In February, Pfälzner and the team of archaeologists halted excavations when the dam’s waters rose again and the water from Zakhiku disappeared.
Dr. Bekes Jamal Al Din, director of antiquities at Duhok’s Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage, which collaborates with archaeologists, told Al Jazeera that the excavations imply that this domain exerted a strong influence on the Mittani Empire. Still, he acknowledges that learning this history comes from the country’s water needs.
“We don’t expect the water [at the Mosul dam] to recede because of the importance of water to the region,” he said. “But if that’s the case, we’re definitely going to start digging back. “, and the effects will be for the history of the area. “