"A 3,400-year-old palace has emerged from a reservoir in the Kurdistan region of Iraq after water levels dropped because of drought." Source: CNN.
"The discovery of the ruins in the Mosul Dam reservoir on the banks of the Tigris River inspired a spontaneous archeological dig that will improve understanding of the Mittani Empire, one of the least-researched empires of the Ancient Near East, the Kurdish-German team of researchers said in a press release."
The Mitanni Empire (~1500-1300 BC) is known only through "Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian sources, as well as inscriptions from nearby places in Syria." (Wikipedia) This is truly a lost civilization:
According to Livius, "If ever the cliché 'forgotten empire' could be applied to an ancient state, it must be Mitanni, which is, in fact, hardly more than a name and a handful of archaeological and linguistic hypotheses ... It is almost certain that the heartland of Mitanni was situated somewhere along the upper Khabur in Mesopotamia, the country between Euphrates and Tigris. The capital of Mitanni, Waššukanni, and the important cities Kahat and Taide have not yet been identified, but it is reasonably certain that they must be sought somewhere in the southeast of Turkey or east of modern Syria."
Comment: The re-emergence of this ancient palace is like something out of a story by H.P. Lovecraft. It'll be just our luck if archaeologists exploring the site discover a trapdoor leading to the underground lair of some hideous Great Old One that will proceed to destroy the planet.
Note: "During the later part of the Early Dynastic period, the inhabitants of Ur expended considerable energy to construct tombs for their deceased elites," according to the Penn Museum. "Though we do not know their identities with certainty, written evidence suggests that these elites were the city-state’s kings and queens, who may have fulfilled a number of important roles in life. We do not know whether the burial pits were dug and tomb chambers constructed before the death of their occupants or whether they were hastily prepared afterwards, the more likely alternative. But the considerable wealth in the tombs, including the animals and attendants buried with Ur’s kings and queens, testify to the power or pretensions to power of these elites and their ability to intimidate."
Note: "Excavations from 1922 to 1934 were funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania and led by the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley. A total of about 1,850 burials were uncovered, including 16 that were described as 'royal tombs' containing many valuable artifacts, including the Standard of Ur [see next video]. Most of the royal tombs were dated to about 2600 BC. The finds included the unlooted tomb of a queen thought to be Queen Puabi—the name is known from a cylinder seal found in the tomb, although there were two other different and unnamed seals found in the tomb. Many other people had been buried with her, in a form of human sacrifice." (Wikipedia)
Gobekli Tepe is a prehistoric site in southeastern Turkey, "a series of circular and oval-shaped structures set on top of a hill." (Gobeklitepe.info) "What makes Gobekli Tepe unique in its class is the date it was built, which is roughly twelve thousand years ago, circa 10,000 BC."
Note: The age of Gobekli Tepe varies from source to source, sometimes by as much as a thousand years or so, but everybody agrees that it is extremely ancient.
This animation is supposed to be based on site maps, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.
"There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe. It’s estimated to be eleven thousand years old—six and a half thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure." Source: The New Yorker (2011)
Whatever its exact age, Gobekli Tepe is one of the oldest megalithic sites in the world, if not the oldest. It was apparently built during "two phases of use, believed to be of a social or ritual nature by site discoverer and excavator Klaus Schmidt, dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE. During the first phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected – the world's oldest known megaliths." (Wikipedia)
"More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known through geophysical surveys. Each pillar has a height of up to 6 m (20 ft) and weighs up to 10 tons [1]. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock. In the second phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime. The site was abandoned after the PPNB. Younger structures date to classical times."
[1] Some sources describe stones weighing up to 60 tons. I have no idea how reliable any of these numbers are.
Stone tools, at least one cave inscription and the ruins of what is thought to have been a Roman watchtower have been found on the site.
The site covers an area of around 1000 feet, I think, but it could be much larger than that (?) According to Wikipedia, only about five percent of the complex has been excavated. I don't know how accurate that is now, but new structures are still being discovered. Note: I'm not sure if the Wikipedia article on Gobekli Tepe reflects the finds described in the next video.
Video from 2018.
The purpose of the site is still unclear. Schmidt, the German archaeologist who led the excavations at Gobekli Tepe (1996 - 2014), argued that the megalithic complex was a "Stone Age mountain sanctuary," possibly for some kind of prehistoric cult of the dead, a pilgrimage site that drew people from all over the region. "Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse from food hunted and cooked or otherwise prepared for the congregants." (Wikipedia)
Most of the sources I've seen echo Schmidt's conclusions, describing Gobekli Tepe as a temple. I'm not sure if this has ever been proven conclusively, however. Wikipedia states that "[t]he details of the structure's function remain a mystery."
Almost everything about Gobekli Tepe is a mystery. For example, it's still unclear who built the complex. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he inhabitants are presumed to have been hunters and gatherers who nevertheless lived in villages for at least part of the year," but if that's accurate they obviously weren't ordinary hunter-gatherers who were just starting to shift into a more settled existence. It would have required a lot of engineering knowledge to quarry, shape, transport and position these massive stones.
"Construction techniques vary but in the most elaborate there is a ring of T-shaped monolithic columns with a pair of larger, carved T-columns at the centre up to five metres tall. These not only supported a roof (for at least some of their life) but also represented abstracted human figures that were part of a belief system that is not yet understood. They are sculptural as well as structural, with animal figures in relief. " Source: The Art Newspaper.
Ordinary hunter-gatherers wouldn't have had the skills required to construct Gobekli Tepe. Whoever they were, they obviously had previous experience building megaliths. According to Wikipedia, " [i]f indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups, which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization, or, as excavator Klaus Schmidt put it, 'First came the temple, then the city.'"
The next video describes one researcher's theory that Australian aborigines (or a people descended from them) built the complex.
Video from 2017.
This is an interesting theory, though not exactly mainstream. If Australian aborigines or their descendants built Gobekli Tepe, why aren't similar megalithic structures found in Australia? As it turns out, this is an extremely murky question. There are a few stone circles and alignments in Australia -- see the Megalithic Portal for details -- and one site has been called "Australia's stonehenge," but it was apparently "all but destroyed" around 1940 and "the exact location has never been disclosed for fear the little that remains could be trashed," according to news.com.au (2015). That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that the site actually exists, to say the least. Ancient Origins made a short documentary about "Australia's stonehenge," mostly notable for the fact that the video doesn't actually show any standing stones. Their 2017 article about the alleged site seems to fall into the "lost ancient exotic high technology" category.
We may never know who built Gobekli Tepe or why. The site is so mysterious that it acts like a magnet, attracting all kinds of speculation. According to Wikipedia, this fantastic megalithic complex "appears to raise more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers," but if nothing else it proves that prehistoric humans were a lot more advanced than commonly believed.
"Containing six lines of cuneiform script, and roughly the size of an adult thumb, [this tablet] was donated to the [Cambridge] University Library in 1921 but then lost to sight for many years before its rediscovery in 2016, during research for the Curious Objects exhibition, held as part of the University Library’s 600th anniversary." Source: Cambridge University Library.
"The full translation of the laconic text runs as follows: 18 jars of pig fat – Balli. 4 jars of pig fat – Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at ?) the city of Zabala. Ab-kid-kid, the scribe. 4th year 10th month."
Note: The words Balli, Nimgir-ab-lah, etc., are thought to be personal names. According to Cambridge, "[t]he man named Balli turns up regularly in other texts from the same area during the same period of history, and seems to be an official in charge of a wide range of oils: from pig fat and butter to sesame oil and almond oil."
This clay tablet is apparently the oldest written object held at Cambridge. A 3D animation and more information about the tablet can be found here.
"The royal lion hunt was a very ancient tradition in Assyria and the wider region of Mesopotamia. The earliest depiction of a ruler hunting lions is found on a carved basalt monument that dates to before 3000 BC. It shows two bearded figures wearing diadems (a type of crown) who can be identified as ‘priest-kings’. One kills a lion with a spear and the other shoots at a lion with his bow and arrow. In Assyria, the lion hunt was an important symbol of royalty and the Assyrian royal seal showed a king slaying a rampant lion." Source: British Museum.
"The Assyrian kings hunted lions for political and religious purposes, to demonstrate their power. To get the lion out of his cage and onto the Syrian plains, a servant would raise a door and start running. Then the lion would get beaten by dogs and beaters, so that the lion would go to the king. The king would kill the lion from a chariot with his bow and arrow or spear. Sometimes the king would kill it on foot with a sword. He would do this by holding it by the mane and then thrusting the sword into the lion's throat. Then, when the lion was killed, the king would pour a Liquid over it and give a speech to the cities(?) god to thank him, so the lion's evil spirit wouldn't come back and haunt him. Expert spearmen and archers would protect the king. Sometimes the king would invite some nobles to accompany him." Source: Wikipedia.
Comment: I wouldn't want to be the servant who had to raise the door of the lion's cage and start running, or one of the beaters who drove the lion in the direction of the king. There must have been numerous fatalities during these hunts. Also I find it hard to believe that anyone could just walk up to a presumably enraged lion, grab it by the mane and drive a sword into its throat without getting mauled in the process. Lion hunts go wrong even when the hunters are using rifles.
"Literacy was not widespread in Mesopotamia. Scribes, nearly always men, had to undergo training, and having successfully completed a curriculum became entitled to call themselves dubsar, which means 'scribe'. They became members of a privileged élite who, like scribes in ancient Egypt, might look with contempt upon their fellow citizens." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.
Note: In the beginning, Mesopotamian scribes were primarily involved in the recording of financial and government transactions and they were usually anonymous, but this changed as time went by and and the first literature began to appear.
"Some scribes signed their names to tablets as early as 2600 BCE. Generally, the authors of literary texts remained anonymous; however a catalogue from Nineveh listed authors and editors of some well-known compositions such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Later scribes listed their lineage, giving the names of their fathers and even earlier ancestors." Source: Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat.
"A collection of 5,000-year-old antiquities looted from a site in Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and then seized by the Metropolitan police from a dealer in London, will be returned to Baghdad this week." Source: The Guardian.
"It comes after experts at the British Museum identified not just the site they came from but the temple wall they were stolen from.
"The eight small pieces had no documentation of any kind to help the police, but the museum experts could literally read their origin. They included cone-shaped ceramics with cuneiform inscriptions identifying the site as Tello, ancient Girsu in southern Iraq [see next video] one of the oldest cities on earth recorded in the earliest form of true written language."
Excavations in Sumerian Girsu.
"Tello, the modern Arabic name for the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, is one of the earliest known cities of the world together with Uruk, Eridu and Ur. In the 3rd millennium BC Girsu was considered the sanctuary of the Sumerian heroic god. It was the sacred metropolis and centre of a city-state that lay in the south-easternmost part of the Mesopotamian alluvium [soil or sediment]. Pioneering explorations carried out between 1877 and 1933 and the decipherment of the cuneiform tablets discovered there revealed to the world the existence of the Sumerians who invented writing 5,000 years ago and may have developed a primitive form of democracy or polyarchy well before the ancient Greeks." Source: Archaeopress.
"A major work illustrating the imperial art of the Akkadian Dynasty, this victory stele celebrates the triumph of King Naram-Sin over a mountain people, the Lullubi. The Akkadian king led his troops over the steep slopes of the enemy territory, mercilessly crushing all resistance. The conqueror's victory march is coupled with the personal ascension of a sovereign who could now claim equal footing with the gods." Source: The Louvre.
Notes: Akkad was the capital of the Akkadian empire. According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, "no one knows where the city of Akkad was located, how it rose to prominence, or how, precisely, it fell; yet once it was the seat of the Akkadian empire which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia. It is known that Akkad (also given as Agade) was a city located along the western bank of the Euphrates River possibly between the cities of Sippar and Kish (or, perhaps, between Mari and Babylon or, even, elsewhere along the Euphrates). According to legend, it was built by the king Sargon the Great (who ruled 2334-2279 BCE) who unified Mesopotamia under the rule of his Akkadian Empire and set the standard for future forms of government in Mesopotamia."
"Akkadian" was the term used "until 1869 for the language now known as Sumerian," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed., revised). "[It was the] term used since 1869 for the East Semitic language that is also known by its northern and southern dialects as Assyrian and Babylonian. The language is first attested from personal names of the mid-3rd millennium when it began to supersede Sumerian. It was written on clay, stone, and waxed writing boards in cuneiform script."
"About 5,000 years ago, the Mesopotamians buried two 12-year-olds — a boy and a girl — and surrounded their slender bodies with hundreds of bronze spearheads and what appears to be eight human sacrifices, a new study finds." Source: Live Science.
"The eight human sacrifices were positioned just outside the tomb, located at the site of Basur Höyük in southeastern Turkey, the researchers said. The team determined the age of six of the human sacrifices and found that the victims ranged in age from 11 to 20 years old."
Note: Basur Höyük is a Bronze Age cemetery in Turkey. According to the Natural History Museum, "[t]he site dates to 500 years before the famous Royal Cemetery of Ur, a luxurious series of tombs that form the resting place of Mesopotamian rulers."
Note: "Human sacrifice has long been associated with the rise of hierarchical centralised societies. Recent excavation of a large cist tomb at third-millennium BC Başur Höyük, in Turkey, shows that state formation in Mesopotamia was accompanied by a fundamental change in the value of human life within local ritual economy. Osteological analysis and study of the grave goods have identified some of the dead as human sacrifices. This was indeed a retainer burial, reflecting the emergence of stratified society at a time of instability and crisis." Source: "Radical ‘royals’? Burial practices at Başur Höyük and the emergence of early states in Mesopotamia" (Abstract), Antiquity Journal, Cambridge University Press. (Access required to read full article)
Notes: "To date, nearly 200 Acheulean(1) [a type of prehistoric stone tool industry] sites of Middle Pleistocene age [app. 781 - 126,000 years ago] have been recorded in Saudi Arabia. They occur with highest frequency in the central, western and southwestern provinces, and are fewer in the east toward the Gulf coast. They consist of artifacts found on the descending surface of alluvial fans - delta-shaped deposits of material left by rivers of bygone times - or on terraces, exposed by wind or water erosion, overlooking a wadi, spring or Pleistocene lake ... Where water was in plentiful supply, a dozen or more sites could appear, although not all were necessarily occupied at the same time. Usually, we believe, these sites were inhabited only temporarily, as transient stations to shelter residents for a few weeks." Source: "Early Mankind in Arabia," Aramco World.
(1) "From geological dating of sedimentary deposits, it appears that the Acheulean [stone tool industry] originated in Africa and spread to Asian, Middle Eastern, and European areas sometime between 1.5 million years ago and about 800 thousand years ago." Source: Wikipedia.
It sounds like these early hunter-gatherers passed through the region during their migrations, following river beds or moving from oasis to oasis, but the picture is still unclear. "Encompassing a landmass greater than the rest of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean combined, the Arabian peninsula remains one of the last great unexplored regions of the ancient world," according to the Cambridge University Press. I believe the earliest known period is the Mesopotamian Ubaid period (6500-3800 BCE), which covered a larger area than just Arabia.