LOST AND FOUND DEPARTMENT

We’ve remarked before that it seems incredibly careless of history to lose things as large as cities, but it happens a lot. Here are some recent finds.

Archæologists from Turkey’s Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, working with a team of divers, have found 3,000-year-old ruins stretching for about a kilometre under Lake Van. The structures are thought to belong to the Iron Age Uratu civilization. Even though submerged for many centuries, one of the ruins, that of a fortress, still has walls 10-13ft (3-4m) high. The Independent, 23 Nov 2017.

Also in Turkey, a small team of historians and economists have developed a cunning plan – a cunning algorithm, actually. They have analysed 12,000 clay tablets from the Bronze Age kingdom of Assyria (centred on the Tigris in Iraq and extending partially into Turkey, Syria and Iran). The cuneiform texts inscribed into the tablets relate mainly to shipment documents, accounting records, seals and contracts. City names involved in the passage of goods are mentioned. Some of those cities, such as Kanesh in central Turkey, are known, but others are lost. By using mathematical calculations based on the volume of shipped goods between cities and the frequency of such shipments to certain ones, the team has been able to work out which cities were nearer or further from the known locations. In all, 26 cities were

involved, 15 known and 11 unknown, but now the locations of those 11 lost cities can be identified with high probability. Washington Post, 13 Nov 2017.

Finally, satellite imagery has revealed square-ish structures separated by narrow water channels clustered on a shore of the remote island of Pohnpei in the western Pacific (pictured below). Massive walls form the perimeters of each of these geometrical features, which have now been collectively classed as an archæological site called Nan Madol. Initial speculation is that it was the capital of some ancient civilisation on Pohnpei, but there is much that still needs to be known. D.Express, 4 Nov 2017.