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Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands
Science News ^ | October 13, 2022 | Bruce Bower

Posted on 10/23/2022 12:01:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv

New remote-sensing studies at southern Iraq’s massive Tell al-Hiba site, shown here from the air, support an emerging view that an ancient city there largely consisted of four marsh islands.

A ground-penetrating eye in the sky has helped to rehydrate an ancient southern Mesopotamian city, tagging it as what amounted to a Venice of the Fertile Crescent. Identifying the watery nature of this early metropolis has important implications for how urban life flourished nearly 5,000 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where modern-day Iraq lies...

Because Lagash had no geographical or ritual center, each city sector developed distinctive economic practices on an individual marsh island, much like the later Italian city of Venice, she suspects. For instance, waterways or canals crisscrossed one marsh island, where fishing and collection of reeds for construction may have predominated.

Two other Lagash marsh islands display evidence of having been bordered by gated walls that enclosed carefully laid out city streets and areas with large kilns, suggesting these sectors were built in stages and may have been the first to be settled. Crop growing and activities such as pottery making may have occurred there.

Drone photographs of what were probably harbors on each marsh island suggest that boat travel connected city sectors. Remains of what may have been footbridges appear in and adjacent to waterways between marsh islands, a possibility that further excavations can explore.

Lagash, which formed the core of one of the world’s earliest states, was founded between about 4,900 and 4,600 years ago. Residents abandoned the site, now known as Tell al-Hiba, around 3,600 years ago, past digs show. It was first excavated more than 40 years ago.

(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: bronzeage; brucebower; godsgravesglyphs; gudea; gudeaoflagash; iraq; mesopotamia; tellalhiba
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To: Alas Babylon!

You got game! :^)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/crhobh/statue_of_gudea_of_lagash_with_architectural_plan/

https://i.redd.it/e6nr8timuxg31.png

https://www.cjconroy.net/bib/treaties-ane.htm#three

Ebla and Lagash: Environmental Contrast
https://ixtheo.de/Record/1588616479


21 posted on 10/23/2022 3:59:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Ancient civilizations interest me to the extreme. I’ve studied these (and others) all my life.


22 posted on 10/23/2022 4:01:41 PM PDT by Alas Babylon! (Rush, we're missing your take on all of this!)
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To: Alas Babylon!

It’s a good hobby to have.


23 posted on 10/23/2022 4:17:04 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: SunkenCiv

My understanding is that what sank the sumerians was that their fields became too salty after two milleniums of farming. A lot of desert in southern iraq was once farmed. The sumerians were not a semetic people. But they were the people of abraham’s father.


24 posted on 10/24/2022 7:39:08 AM PDT by ckilmer (q)
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To: ckilmer
By their own account, the Sumerians came from the sea, presumably from further SE down the Gulf, or perhaps the Indus. They picked up the place names (rivers and cities) from whomever had already lived there, so they may have been culturally dominant rather than that a numerical majority.

Their language is/was agglutinative, which Semitic languages are not. They weren't the people of Abraham's father. Sumerians don't appear in the Bible, while the Elamites do (the Elamite king ruled a number of city-states and also expected tribute from the Cities of the Plain in the OT).

There's no evidence that the Sumerians destroyed their own ability to farm via irrigation (that's one of those gaslighting narratives). They were organized in city-states, and overall control was probably ambiguous, with most authority remaining local. Once in a while (as with Lagash) one town would pulverize another, ending its existence and absorbing its territory and perhaps its population.

They seem to have been prosperous, and their cuneiform writing system was widely adapted throughout the Middle East and Egypt, and remained in use about 3000 years, with the last known surviving inscription having been made around 400 AD.

The Assyrians, one of many Semitic groups, had an earlier phase called Akkadian, and by the time they started to run things as a central authority, they used cuneiform for both languages, such that Sumerian continued in use for a good while. It's possible that spoken Sumerian could still be heard for a few centuries of the Akkadian Empire. The last fossil use of written Sumerian dates to 1st c AD.

The whole Mesopotamian craphouse went up in flames with the arrival of the Kassites, or maybe they just took advantage during the fire. The Assyrians reemerged, the Kassites vanished (or were assimilated), and written Sumerian was probably all that remained of their milieu.

25 posted on 10/24/2022 9:46:08 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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26 posted on 10/24/2022 11:13:54 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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