Zakhiku, the capital of the Mitanni Empire and the ancient city revealed by the drying up and receding Tigris River
Zakhiku, the capital of the Mitanni Empire and the ancient city revealed by the drying up and receding Tigris River
The city of Zakhiku was founded around 1800 BC by the Old Babylonian Empire, which ruled Mesopotamia between the 19th and 15th centuries BC. With only water and soil, the city benefited from caravan traffic and the flourishing trade route to the Near East, which today means the Middle East, Turkey and Egypt.
About 3,800 years ago, merchants in the ancient city of Zakheko waited for logs of wood cut from forests to float down the Tigris River in the mountains of northern and eastern Mesopotamia, which includes what is now Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Once the logs arrived in Zakheko, they were collected and transported to designated warehouses.
From the same mountainous regions (in present-day Turkey and Iran), traders would travel by donkey or camel, carrying metals such as gold, silver, tin and copper to Zakho, Al Jazeera English correspondent Tessa Fox reports.
To protect themselves and their cargo from bandits, they traveled the difficult journey in mass caravans. After selling their goods in Zakheko, the merchants crossed the Tigris River before continuing to the frontiers and borderlands.
The trading post developed and grew into an important strategic city in the region for about 600 years before it was struck by a powerful earthquake and subsequently disappeared.
The Zakhiku site disappeared completely in the 1980s, when it was flooded as part of the Mosul Dam project built under the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (formerly known as Saddam Dam), the largest and most important water reservoir in Iraq used for irrigation downstream.
Iraq is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and its southern provinces, where temperatures exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in the summer, have been experiencing a severe drought since 2019, forcing farmers to abandon their withered crops. Last December, water was released from the dam to irrigate farmland.
As the water level dropped, Zakheko emerged earlier this year in the Kurdish region of Iraq. A team of local and German archaeologists began excavating the site, uncovering new details about the city after a short initial dig in 2018 revealed the ruins of an ancient palace.
“With the recent excavations, locals have become aware of Zakheko,” Peter Walzner of the University of Tübingen in Germany, an archaeologist working at the site known locally as “Kamuna,” told Al Jazeera. “They visit the site… it has been broadcast on local television… people are learning more about their history and are proud of it.”
City in a Lost Empire
Around 1500 BC, the ancient Babylonian city of Zakhiku fell along with its empire when the Hittites, an “Indo-European” group from Anatolia (present-day Turkey), invaded Mesopotamia, but they had no interest in building a new administration.
The Hittite civilization (1600-1178 BC) extended its control over Anatolia and northern Syria, and was a rival to the contemporary civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. At that time and with the end of the Late Bronze Age, it was divided into independent states in the Syrian lands, some of which continued for several more centuries, until they were subject to the Assyrian Empire.
When the Hittites returned to their northern lands, the Mitanni kingdom (originally located in northeastern Syria) took over Zakhiku.
The Mitanni Empire (c. 1500–1300 BC) was known in the northern Fertile Crescent in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, and became a regional power after the Hittites invaded and then retreated from Amorite Babylon, leaving a political vacuum in the region. The few studies of this mysterious or forgotten ancient kingdom have not succeeded in identifying the locations of its capital, which was known in Hittite, Assyrian, and ancient Egyptian texts as “Washukanni.”
“This was the occasion when the Mitanni Empire had to fill this void (left by the Hittites) to establish a very large and powerful empire,” says Walzner, who shared his excavation findings with Al Jazeera.
Only a few ancient buildings and sites have been discovered that can be attributed to this empire, and little is known about the people who lived in Zakheiko and its population during its heyday, but the city reached its peak under its second imperial period.
Zakho was founded on a prosperous trade route led by ancient merchant caravans (University of Tübingen)
The majority of the empire's population were Hurrians - like the people of northern Mesopotamia - who settled in what is now Syria and northern Iraq, and spoke a language of the same name, "Hurrian."
The infrastructure built during the Mitanni period - and found by archaeologists - includes a palace for the local governor, city fortifications to protect against any invading forces, and a huge public storehouse for trade goods and agricultural harvests, all made of mud brick.
All this seems to have been possible thanks to the good relations that the local king had with the emperor. According to Walzner, Zakhiku was a vassal state of the larger empire, whose capital was in present-day northeastern Syria.
The king's palace was more elegant and larger than the houses, featuring thicker walls, larger rooms, and even sidewalks made of baked, not just dried, mud bricks, sealed with bitumen - made from oil - for insulation and protection from water.
Because so few ruins of the Mitanni Empire, including its capital, have been found, the current excavations provide new knowledge about the culture. “Zakhiku is so important because it opens a fascinating window into the shape of Mitanni cities,” says Walzner.
Clay messages
One of Zakheko's main landmarks is the storehouse, which has rooms measuring 6 metres (20 feet) wide and 8 metres (26 feet) long and containing piles of wheat and barley, as well as imported metals and timber.
Farmers would transport their crops and harvest to the warehouse, and state workers would monitor it, according to Walzner.
The massive size of the rooms dedicated to the general agricultural harvest indicates that the city was active and densely populated.
Mesopotamia has long been known as the oldest region where wheat was first cultivated about 10,000 years ago, and bread was the staple food for the people of Zakhiku, often eaten with vegetable soups and stews, according to Walzner.
The ancient inhabitants also raised sheep, goats, cows and pigs, which provided a source of milk as well as meat, which was prepared and preserved for special occasions.
The Hurrian language was not unknown outside the region, and scribes working in public offices throughout the province—such as in city palaces or in storehouses—were educated in Akkadian, the most widely spoken language at the time, and the lingua franca of the ancient Near East during the late Bronze Age, the period from 3300 BC to 1200 BC.
Akkadian is an ancient Semitic language (it shares its ancestors with Arabic and uses a triliteral root) that was known in Mesopotamia and its later Babylonian dialect became the language of speech and correspondence until about 5 centuries B.C. It was written in cuneiform script on tablets of wet clay, says Walzner. Craftsmen made square tablets measuring 15 x 15 centimeters. While the clay was wet, scribes would carve and engrave their writings on anything from a record of a harvest and newly stored crops to information about another kingdom before placing them in the sun to dry.
Then came the earthquake
The Mitannian city of Zakhiku met its devastating end when an earthquake struck sometime between 1400 BC and 1300 BC, according to Walzner, causing the walls around the inhabitants to collapse.
With the buildings so badly damaged, it was impossible to rebuild Zakheko and restore it to its former glory, and if there were survivors, they were displaced and abandoned.
Around 1300 BC, the Assyrians of Mesopotamia settled in the same city, building their homes amid the ruins and using structures that were still standing from the Mitanni period as supporting outer walls.
“They created new life in the city, and it was really cool to see things start to grow again,” says Walzner.
Beyond these supposed Mittani-period buildings, cuneiform tablets dating from after the earthquake can tell archaeologists more about the city's succession of rulers and its changing regime.
The Assyrians abandoned Zakhiku only 50 years after their arrival, between 1270 BC and 1250 BC, and decided to build their new regional capital, Old Mardaman, 25 kilometres away in the Mesopotamian plains, in what is now Basitki, a village in the Iraqi province of Dohuk.
The benefits of the commercial center that Zakhiku had provided to its inhabitants in the Tigris River Valley for about 600 years were lost, as the Assyrians, who were very careful planners, wanted to exploit the famously fertile soil of Mesopotamia.
The move to Basitki was for economic and strategic reasons, according to Walzner, given that agricultural areas were smaller along the Tigris compared to fields in the plains that would yield greater economic profits.
Last February, Walzner and his team of archaeologists halted the excavations as the dam's water level rose again and Zakheko disappeared under the water once again.
Dr. Bex Jamal al-Din, director of antiquities at the Dohuk Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage, which is collaborating with the archaeologists, told Al Jazeera that the excavation indicates that the area had a strong influence on the Mitanni Empire. However, he acknowledges that the discovery of this history comes at the expense of the country’s water needs.
“We do not hope that the water (in Mosul Dam) will recede again because of its importance to that area,” he says, concluding, “but if that happens, we will definitely start excavations again, and the results will be useful for the history of the area.”
Source: websites