The Bronze Age palace in Iraqi Kurdistan has emerged from the waters of Tigris River after a drought caused water levels to drop dramatically. Iraq continues to reveal its ancient secrets.
A Kurdish-German team of archeologists from the University of Tübingen and the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization made the discovery in the Mosul Dam reservoir, on the banks of the Tigris River. The site was first discovered in 2010 when the water level in the reservoir was low.
The territory was flooded after the Mosul Dam was built in the mid-1980s, yet an absence of rain and water in southern Iraq caused the water level to drop throughout the late spring and fall, a year ago. The ruined palace was found at a site known as Kemune.
Kemune Palace can be dated to the period of the Mittani Empire, which dominated enormous parts of northern Mesopotamia and Syria from the fifteenth to the fourteenth century BC.
According to Kurdish archaeologist Hasan Ahmed Qasim, “the find is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the region in recent decades.”
The castle is entitled as ‘archeological sensation’ by Dr. Ivana Puljiz as she asserts that “discovering wall paintings in Kemune is an archaeological sensation.”
Based on preliminary examination of the site it is evaluated that the building originally stood 65 feet (22 meters) high. It was built out of mud block, which was broadly utilized in structures of various sorts during the Bronze Age in the Ancient East. The spacious and massive room walls were estimated 2 meters thick and plastered.
The team has also found murals painted in bright hues that were the pomp and show of the ancient times but they mostly have been destroyed. Dr. Ivana Puljiz the archeologist of the Tübingen Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies also said “we have also found remains of wall paintings in bright shades of red and blue.”
Amongst other discoveries, archeologists have also found ten clay tablets, written in a form of writing known as cuneiform, some of them are in the process of being translated and being transferred to Germany to be transcribed by the experts. More information can be revealed about the Mittani Empire if more tablets could be deciphered – in areas like religion, organization, legislative issues, and history of this confounding antiquated Eastern culture.
“From the texts we hope to gain information on the inner structure of the Mittani Empire, its economic organization, and the relationship of the Mittani capital with the administrative centers in the neighboring regions,” Dr Puljiz affirmed.
