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Royal Palace and Great Temple of Sumerian City of Girsu Uncovered

2023-03-02T05:28:49.592Z


ARCHEOLOGY - An Iraqi-British mission resumed excavations in 2021 at the site stirred up for nearly 60 years by French pioneers. Drones and radars make it possible to find the monuments that had escaped the construction sites of the 19th and 20th centuries.


It was one of the political lungs of southern Archaic Mesopotamia.

An Iraqi-British archaeological mission announced in February that it had unearthed the sumptuous palace of the kings of Girsu, one of the Sumerian city-states that flourished, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in the first half of the 3rd century. millennium BC.

Located near the current city of Tello, about 250 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, the site has already delivered into the hands of researchers more than 200 cuneiform tablets.

As precious as the imposing remains discovered, these hundreds of new administrative archives should delight epigraphists.

"These discoveries offer enormous potential for our understanding of this important civilization

," British Museum director Hartwig Fischer said in a statement.

The London institution provides the British part of the scientific partnership on the Girsu site, nearly a century after the last French excavations.

Carried out from 1877 to 1933, these long-term operations disturbed large sections of this ancient city of 250 hectares and revealed temples, statues and thousands of clay tablets loaded with cuneiform texts.

However, a "hill of tablets" identified by these old operations contained, neither seen nor known, the heart of the city Girsu lurking in its imperturbable depths.

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How did archaeologists manage to unearth what had passed nearly 60 years under the noses of French researchers?

Thanks to new technologies.

Equipped with drones as well as ground-penetrating radars, a first team of specialists identified a promising structure in the bowels of the hill, in the middle of the destructive trenches that the pioneers of archeology often left behind them in the 19th century. .

The first bricks of the palace were unearthed at the end of last autumn.

The palace complex has so far been fairly generally dated to around 2500 BC, at a time contemporary with the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

The Jerusalem of Mesopotamia

The excavation of the disappeared palace of the kings of Girsu will continue during the next excavation campaign, from the next few days.

The site has already exceeded all expectations, since near this venerable complex, the archaeologists of the Girsu Project - the Iraqi-British structure in charge of the excavations - have already exhumed the entirety of another structure of primary importance: the Eninnu.

The millennial texts thus named the main temple of Ningirsu, god of storms and agriculture, then god of war, one of the major figures of the Sumerian pantheon.

The huge building of worship has been identified in the enclosure of the sanctuary of Girsu, nicknamed the Urukug.

He will have long

"obsessed generations of archaeologists"

,

Read alsoHomo sapiens already used bows more than 50,000 years ago in Europe

Curator of the British Museum and director of the bilateral archaeological mission, Sebastien Rey remembers perfectly the moment when he knew that he had just found the lost temple of Girsu, this cult Grail of ancient Mesopotamia.

“An inscription, discovered on a block of stone, told of the construction of the temple of Eninnu by King Gudea.

This told us beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were at the very place,”

the archaeologist told the British daily

The Independent

.

Aerial view of the Ningirsu Grand Temple area.

Archaeologists have unearthed levels dated to around 2000 to 3000 BCE.

Sebastien Rey, The Girsu Project

The archaeologist, however, had to fight to win the right to dig on the site of Girsu.

Sebastien Rey had proposed in 2016 to return to this capital site of Sumerian archeology, before being retorted that there was nothing more to find on the spot, and that there should be nothing left of the Enninu. .

"At the international conferences I went to, everyone said to me, in short: 'Oh no, you're making up your mind, you're wasting your time and you're wasting the public funds of the British Museum'", recalls the researcher

.

Funding from the Getty Foundation finally makes it possible, in January 2021, to bring together around a common program the experts of the British Museum with their Iraqi colleagues from the Office of Antiquities and Heritage.

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This bilateral mission must also help Iraq train a new generation of experts and professionals.

"This discovery marks an important step in the revival of archaeological excavations in southern Iraq, after decades of interruption of fieldwork

," said the statement from the Girsu Project.

The excavation program is thus accompanied by a training component for Iraqi specialists in archeology and heritage preservation.

Discovered in 1877 by the French archaeologist Ernest de Sarzec, then vice-consul in Bassorah, Girsu was an influential Sumerian city of the period known as the Archaic Dynasties (2900-2340 BC).

The presence of the Enninu bestowed on the city, one of the largest urban centers in the kingdom of Lagash, a sacred character,

"like the Vatican or Jerusalem today"

, in the words of Sebastien Rey.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-03-02

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