After translating a caboodle of 3,200 - year - honest-to-goodness clay tablet establish hide in a assemblage of ceramic jugs in what is now mod - sidereal day Iraq , archaeologist agnize they were sit around on the ancient lost imperial city of Mardaman . consume your spirit out , Indiana Jones .
archeologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany first get along across the 92 clay tablets in the summer of 2017 at a website in current - day Bassetki , the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan in Iraq . Many of the tablet were left crumble and damaged after laying in ceramic vas for thousand of years in the baking desert , so their first task was to reassemble them to their original form .
“ They may have been hidden this way curtly after the surrounding construction had been destroy . Perhaps the information inside it was meant to be protect and preserved for posterity , ” lead researcher Professor Peter Pfälzner excuse ina statement .
The next vault was to painstakingly translate the tablets from Cuneiform script , one of the earliest organisation of penning . The tab were find to escort back to approximately 1250 BCE , when the metropolis was part of the Middle Assyrian Empire .
To the surprise of researcher , the deciphering of the tablets let on that the present - daytime town of Bassetki , where the pad of paper were describe , was in reality the website of the ancient majestic city of Mardaman . Many sources have explicate how crucial this northern Mesopotamian metropolis was between 2200 and 1200 BCE , however , no one has ever actually been able-bodied to situate it until now .
older Babylonian sources explain that Mardama , as it is also known , was the centerpiece of a great kingdom that was eventually conquered in 1786 BCE and integrate into the Upper Mesopotamian imperium under Shamshi - Adad I. Just years afterward , the city then enjoy a abbreviated but prosperous time period as an sovereign kingdom , which was promptly destroyed by the Turukkaeans of the Zagros Mountains in the magnetic north .
“ Mardaman certainly rose to be an influential metropolis and a regional land , found on its place on the trade routes between Mesopotamia , Anatolia and Syria , ” added Professor Pfälzner . “ At fourth dimension it was an adversary of the not bad Mesopotamian powers . So the University of Tübingen ’s succeeding mining in Bassetki are certain to yield many more exciting discoveries . ”
