A ground-penetrating skyeye has helped to rehydrate an old Mesopotamian town, thus tagging it as the Venice of the Fertile Crescent. It is important to understand the watery nature and history of this early city, which can be used as a guideline for understanding how urban life developed between the Euphrates River and the Tigris river.
According to Emily Hammer, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, remote-sensing data mainly gathered by a specially-equipped drone indicate that Lagash, a large urban settlement, largely consisted of four marsh island connected by waterways. These discoveries add important details to an emerging view. Southern Mesopotamian cities were not as spread out from temples, as was commonly thought.Hammer reports in December that the administrative districts were converted into irrigated farming land, which was surrounded by a single wall. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
“There could have been multiple evolving ways for Lagash to be a city of marsh islands as human occupation and environmental change reshaped the landscape,” Hammer says.
Lagash did not have a central location for ritual or geographical purposes, so each sector of the city developed distinct economic practices on its marsh islands, much like Venice in Italy. One marsh island was dotted with waterways and canals, which may have been used for fishing or collection of reeds to build.
Two other Lagash marsh islands have evidence that they were bordered with gated walls. These walls enclosed well-planned city streets and large kiln areas. This suggests that these sectors were constructed in stages and could have been the first to settle. There may have been crop growing or pottery-making activities.
Drone photos show what looked like harbors on each marsh Island. This suggests that boat travel was connected to certain city sectors. Further excavations are possible to uncover the possibility of footbridges, which may still be visible in the waterways connecting marsh islands.
Lagash, which formed the core of one of the world’s earliest states, was founded between about 4,900 and 4,600 years ago. According to past digs, the site, now called Tell al-Hiba was abandoned by its residents around 3,600 Years ago. It was discovered for the first times more than 40-years ago.
Jennifer Pournelle (anthropological archaeologist), from the University of South Carolina, Columbia conducted previous analyses of the timing of ancient wetland expansions in south Iraq. She found that Lagash and other southern Mesopotamian city were built on mounds raised in marshes. Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York, has suggested that Lagash was composed of 33 marsh islands. Many of these were quite small.
Drone photos provided a more detailed look at Lagash’s buried structures than possible with satellite images, Hammer says. Guided by initial remote-sensing data gathered from ground level, a drone spent six weeks in 2019 taking high-resolution photographs of much of the site’s surface. Soil moisture and salt absorption from recent heavy rains helped the drone’s technology detect remnants of buildings, walls, streets, waterways and other city features buried near ground level.
Hammer was able to pinpoint the most densely populated parts of the city using drone data, she said. It is possible that these islands could have been part delta channels running toward the Persian Gulf. The large temple dominated a smaller island.
Hammer’s drone probe of Lagash “confirms the idea of settled islands interconnected by watercourses,” says University of Chicago archaeologist Augusta McMahon, one of three co–field directors of ongoing excavations at the site.
McMahon suggests drone evidence that shows contrasting neighborhoods on marsh islands. Some look planned, while others are more chaotically organized. This is evidence of waves of immigration into Lagash, which occurred between 4,600 to 4,350 years ago. Excavated material shows that new arrivals included residents from nearby and distant villages, mobile sheders seeking to settle down, and slave laborers rescued from neighboring city states.
Hammer claims that there are dense clusters of homes and other buildings throughout much of Lagash, indicating that there were many people who lived there in its glory days. It covered approximately the same area as Chicago at that time, with an area of 4 to 6 km2.
It’s unclear whether Cities in northern Mesopotamian from approximately 6,000 yearsPreviously, they were not found in marshes and contained separate city sections (SN: 2/5/08). Guillermo Algaze of University of California San Diego says that Lagash, and other Mesopotamian towns, likely exploited water transportation and trade among close-knit settlements. This enabled unprecedented growth.
Hammer says that Lagash is an early southern Mesopotamian city that has been preserved in time. Nearby cities continued to be inhabited for a thousand years or more after Lagash’s abandonment, when the region had become less watery and sectors of longer-lasting cities had expanded and merged. At Lagash, “we have a rare opportunity to see what other ancient cities in the region looked like earlier in time,” Hammer says.
