Lost city of Alexander the Great found
IRAQ: In what may sound like an extraordinary act of carelessness, a city thought to have been founded by Alexander the Great was lost for more than 2000 years.
Qalatga Darband, a fortified settlement in northern Iraq with a thriving wine trade, went unrecorded by history until its remains were discovered by archaeologists at the British Museum with the aid of drones.
Archaeologists stumbled across the lost city while poring over declassified spy satellite photographs taken by the American government for military purposes in the 1960s but made public only in 1996.
An archaeological dig was out of the question when Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq and this remained the case after the US-led invasion in 2003.
However, improved security prompted the British Museum to explore the site as a way of training Iraqis who will be asked to rescue sites damaged by Islamic State.
John MacGinnis, the archaeologist in charge of the governmentfunded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, said the trainees had helped to establish there was a city that could be dated to the first and second centuries BC.
The city was built on the likely route that Alexander of Macedon took in 331 BC as he was pursuing Darius III of Persia, whom he had defeated in battle at Gaugamela. Statues of Greco-Roman deities and terracotta roof tiles show a strong Greek influence, indicating that its early residents were Alexander’s subjects and those of his successor.
The team confirmed the location of the buried city by flying a drone equipped with a camera. When images were processed to exaggerate contrasts in colour the team found outlines of a large rectangular building hidden beneath fields of wheat and barley.
‘‘The drone yielded excellent information,’’ MacGinnis said. ‘‘We got coverage of all the site using the drone in the spring – analysing crop marks hasn’t been done at all in Mesopotamian archaeology.
‘‘Where there are walls underground the wheat and barley don’t grow so well, so there are colour differences in the crop growth,’’ he said.
The first suggestion there was a city at the site emerged three years ago but its size, density and complexity were unsuspected. Other big buildings have been detected along with a fortified wall and stone presses suitable for wine production.
‘‘It’s early days, but we think it would have been a bustling city on a road from Iraq to Iran. You can imagine people supplying wine to soldiers passing through.’’
The team returned to the site last week to make further discoveries. ‘‘What we would like to have is language evidence,’’ MacGinnis said.
The most intact evidence is a pair of statues. One depicts a seated female figure who may be Persephone, the Greek goddess of vegetation and wife of Hades, god of the underworld. The other is a nude that could be Adonis, a divine symbol of fertility.
The scheme was set up in 2015 to help Iraq get ready to deal with the destruction of sites such as Nineveh, Nimrud and Hatra by Islamic State.