The sands of Mesopotamia yielded a wreck.
It has been unearthed in recent weeks, around the ruins of Uruk, Iraq, by researchers from the German Archaeological Institute.
The delicate vestiges of an antediluvian ship, tired by the centuries, would be some 4000 years old, estimate the archaeologists who handed over the boat, on March 23, in the hands of the national museum of Baghdad.
To discover
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Several empires ago, the remains of this boat, extremely fragile, ended their journey in an area of the archaeological site badly affected by erosion.
They were already partially apparent when they were identified in 2018, says a statement from the German Archaeological Institute.
These invaluable remains were fortunately able to be secured in time by the Iraqi-German mission in charge of the excavations of the ancient Sumerian city-state of Uruk (now Warka), in southern Mesopotamia.
Sheltered, the find was then stripped with a precautionary deluge of its earth gangue.
Over the subsequent excavations, a wreck 7 meters long and measuring up to 1.4 meters wide resurfaced to the eyes of archaeologists.
Zenithal view of the boat before the search.
Its silhouette emerges under the Iraqi earth and sand.
Mayssoun Issa/Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut
Urukean barge
The old building is more like a barge or a rowboat than a famous three-master.
It is nonetheless considerable in the eyes of specialists.
According to their first observations, the structure, entirely preserved, had been built in its time with unidentified organic elements, either reeds, wood or palm leaves.
The whole was coated with natural bitumen, to ensure watertightness.
And to preserve, fortuitously, the imprint of these famous organic elements returned to dust for many millennia.
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What was this Sumerian barge doing in Uruk?
The remains of the city-state today lie nearly ten kilometers from the Euphrates, due to the shifting of the riverbed over the millennia.
She used to be closer to it.
According to the German researchers, the craft may have navigated the canals that irrigated the agricultural domain of Uruk.
She was thus found by archaeologists along a secondary stream, where she must have run aground under unknown circumstances.
Uruk was one of the most powerful and recognized entities of the so-called archaic dynasties of Sumer, in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC.
A thousand years later, at the time from which the boat would date, the city-state had nevertheless allowed itself to be eclipsed for a long time by its neighbors Irsin and Larsa, as well as by the ancient Mesopotamian port overlooking the Persian Gulf: Ur. As for the ancient ships of the sands, the most famous building is still the solar boat of Cheops.
Discovered at the foot of the Giza pyramids, this ritual vessel from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC was transferred with great fanfare last August to the new Cairo museum.