![]() Quartered in the concrete compound in the village of Nasr, experts working on the British Museum’s ongoing Girsu Project, which is funded by Getty, have flown drone flights and tested the soil to establish that the mysterious construction once straddled a 12-mile canal, proving it to be the world’s oldest known bridge. The twin buildings appeared so purposeless to archaeologists in the 1920s that the site was simply named “the enigmatic structure”, with more daring theories suggesting that it might have been a bizarrely arranged temple. It dwarfs the workmen in keffiyeh who straddle the structure, working to shore it up with soft river clay now used as a cheap material by local farmers as it once was by the Sumerians. The device deployed to preserve their way of life is formed of two symmetrical mud-brick structures about 130 feet long, 33 feet wide and with 11-foot-high walls arranged in two opposing curves bending outwards. Their civilisation revolved around water and depended on advanced irrigation that directed water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into canals that watered fields providing the food necessary to support urban life.Īccording to ancient writings, it was part of an order maintained by gods who in turn were maintained by sacrifice and libations, but when the gods abandoned Girsu, the Sumerians were forced to effect their own salvation. In the great Sumerian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which a king seeks immortality from a man who spared mankind from a deadly deluge with a giant boat, the Sumerians also first told the flood story that became the Biblical story of Noah. The team is based in the region once known as Sumer, which gave rise to the world’s first civilization. ![]() It is a civilisation-saving effort.”ĭr Rey spoke between bounds across the spoil heaps of past excavations in the pre-dawn twilight, before the merciless sun of the Iraqi autumn makes work unbearable for the British Museum team and the 40-strong cohort of villagers digging through 4,000 years of dust. The monumental scale of the structure shows how important this project was to them. This is one last desperate attempt to save themselves. “The canals are drying up, silting up, one by one. He added: “It is not just a bridge, it’s an anti-drought machine, anti-collapse. All of the texts tell us about the crisis.” There is no other example of it in history, really, until the present day.”ĭr Sebastien Rey, an archaeologist and the project’s leader in Iraq, explained: “They are struggling for one thing and that is water. ![]() The Sumerians, who were the first people to tell early versions of the biblical story of the flood, appeared to have devised this “anti-drought machine” in an effort to preserve a way of life threatened by vital canals drying up.ĭr Ebro Toruń, an architect and conservationist working with the British Museum team in Iraq, said: “This is absolutely one of a kind. ![]() The inhabitants of the ancient city created a device known as a “flume” to propel water to distant locations where it was needed, thousands of years before this technology was thought to have been discovered. Ancient Sumerians invented a “civilisation-saving” water channel 4,000 years ago, a British Museum dig has revealed.Īrchaeologists working at the ruined city of Girsu in Iraq have discovered the true function of a mysterious structure created by the civilisation. ![]()
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