Iraq’s drought has unveiled a 3,400-year-old palace of a mysterious empire, under the receding waters of the Mosul Dam reservoir.
“The find is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the region in recent decades and illustrates the success of the Kurdish-German cooperation,” said Hasan Ahmed Qasim, a Kurdish archaeologist of the Duhok Directorate of Antiquities who worked on the site.
The ruins are only a handful of discoveries from the Mittani Empire.
“The Mittani Empire is one of the least researched empires of the Ancient Near East,” said archaeologist Ivana Puljiz of the University of Tübingen. “Even the capital of the Mittani Empire has not been identified.”
The find was only made possible when receding waters revealed them on the ancient banks of the Tigris. According to researchers, the team had little time to gather together the finds before the waters once again submerged them.
“We also found remains of wall paints in bright shades of red and blue,” Puljiz said. “In the second millennium BCE, murals were probably a typical feature of palaces in the Ancient Near East, but we rarely find them preserved. Discovering wall paintings in Kemune is an archaeological sensation.”
The findings have been sent to Germany, who hope to interpret the tablets.
The Mittani empire once dominated life in parts of Syria and northern Mesopotamia.
