Can Technology Discover the Ancient City of Gilgamesh?

Biblical Archaelogical Review ^ | FR Post 1-10-3 | Editorial Staff

[vannrox]

Surveying the Walls of Uruk

Can Technology Discover the Ancient City of Gilgamesh?

German archaeologists working at the ancient site of Uruk (modern Warka, just east of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq) have begun mapping the canals, walls and building foundations of the sprawling, buried city—without even lifting a spade.

Over the past two winters, a team headed by Margarete van Ess of Berlin’s German Archaeology Institute has laid out a grid system over the site and begun to map the buried ruins with a magnetometer an instrument that measures differences in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field under the soil. (At upper right, Jörg Fassbinder of Munich’s Bavarian State Conservation Office maps a small portion of the site grid.)

“With this method, we get a complete picture of all the lower areas of the city. We will be able to define city quarters, neighborhoods, technical installations and the directions of streets and canals. Of course, we can’t see small things like pottery, cuneiform tablets or figurines to define the function of a structure or to reconstruct the living circumstances. So the magnetic survey doesn’t replace an excavation, but it shows very well where we should dig in the future,” van Ess told Archaeology Odyssey.

The initial results reveal the kinds of structures mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, portions of which were first written down in the early second millennium B.C. Gilgamesh, the legendary mid-third millennium B.C. king of Uruk, ruled an impressive city: “[A square mile the] city, [a square mile the] date grove, [a square mile] the clay-pit, [half a square mile] the temple of Ishtar: [three and a half square miles] is Uruk’s expanse.”

Piecing together a map of ancient Uruk has turned out to be a painstaking process. “The magnetic survey delivers us pictures of only four- fifths of an acre a day,” van Ess said. Given the size of ancient Uruk about 6 miles in circumference the measurements will probably take at least another three years to complete.

Uruk was settled from about the fifth millennium B.C. to the third century A.D. A series of German excavations beginning in the late 19th century revealed temple complexes adorned with colorful mosaics, monumental ziggurats (the ziggurat of Ishtar/Inanna, the goddess of love and war, is shown at lower left), houses, a cemetery filled with sarcophagi and portions of the city’s wall. German archaeologists also found clay tablets inscribed in an early form of cuneiform (a wedge- shaped script used to write Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages) dating to the latter part of the fourth millennium B.C.—the world’s earliest recorded writing.

Political turmoil in Iraq may well scuttle this latest round of German investigations. In the future, van Ess and her team hope to learn how the ancient city’s teeming masses lived and worked. “We would like to get more information about the construction of Uruk’s canals and the connections between the canals and the city’s living quarters,” she said.

[vannrox]

Very Cool.

[raisincane]

I just love these discoveries. Thank you for the heads up.

[Mamzelle]

Enkidu! (Gilgamesh was one of the stories I studied when I took a Tolkein course in the seventies)...interesting to read "Uruk" as in "Uruk-hai"--must have provided Tolkein with some background color.

[Darksheare]

Coool.
Wonder just what they'll find when they fianlly DO start digging. Like any paintings on the floors or plaster still on the walls.

Wonder what pottery forms are there.

[Mo1]

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[RudeJude]

Thanks, interesting info.

[lds23]

Also found, the "Song of Gilgamesh"

Enki-denki-du....

[Quix]

Uhhhh, Chinese writing has been discovered from about 7,000 years ago.

Unless I've forgotten simple math . . . 500 BC is more recent than 7,000 years ago.

[Quix]

I agree. What pottery forms . . . what mosaics . . . etc.

[Darksheare]

I for one would love to see dig results.
Get a look at what's under the detritus of the passage of time.

[Quix]

For sure, me too.

And before the blood of our troops and debris from our arms are added to the chaos. Sigh.

[SunkenCiv]

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