Mosul battle damages major archeological sites

Damage was done at the ancient city of Nimrud (also known as Kalhu, Calah and Kalakh), southeast of Mosul on the river Tigris, and at remains of the former neo-Assyrian capital of Dur-Sharrukin, near the village of Khorsabad north of the city.

Michael Danti, Academic Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and ASOR, the American Schools of Oriental Research, who is involved in recent excavations in the Kurdistan Region along the Iraq-Iran border, calls for emergency site assessments to prevent further damage.

At the Nimrud site, the Islamic group ISIS is found to have bulldozed the so-called ziggurat mound and damaged the Ishtar Temple in September. Earth moving activity continued until Oct. 16, when Iraqi troops started their battle in the villages around it. Although the villages are liberated, the site dpes not appear to have been recaptured.

The ruins of the ziggurat were about 43 meters high; the Assyrians used these towers for making astronomical observations, while they also served other ritual and symbolic functions.

“It is part of cultural cleansing,” says Danti about the damage ISIS has done. “ISIS tries to destroy cultural diversity and is targeting the cultural memory by attacking places like Nimrud and Hatra.”

Hatra is a nearby archeological site, listed by the UN-organization UNESCO as a World Heritage site, and not yet liberated from ISIS.

Apart from intensely looting both these sites, the radicals also took what they wanted from Dur-Sharrukin, 15 kilometers from Mosul. None of the loot has been intercepted ye on the international markets, Danti says, adding that “finding it there is very difficult.”

Unlike the damage in Nimrud, the recent damage done to Dur-Sharrukin was not inflicted by ISIS but by the Kurdish Peshmerga.

After liberating the village of Khorsabad, the Kurds militarized the mount of the site just outside it, building trenches on top of the ancient city walls and military posts on top of the archeological remains of the city gates.

According to the Facebook page of Danti’s ASOR, recent satellite pictures show that “heavy machinery was used to create new earthen embankments and to dig into the existing archaeological material.”

The Peshmerga did notice that they were onto something, when during the work artifacts kept surfacing – so many that they contacted the Directorate of Antiquities in Akre, after which its director arrived and drove away with a pick-up full of artifacts.

The images on Facebook show figural relief sculptures, cuneiform inscriptions, and decorative elements. “They struck into intact archeological deposits,” says Danti. “What we saw was mainly used for the decoration of the walls.”

For archeologists, 2,700-year-old Dur-Sharrukin is an important site, he explains, because it was a newly planned city, a completely new capital that because of the timely death of its builder and ruler Sargon II (722–705 BCE) was never really used. 

Sargon had moved his capital from Nimrud to the Khorsabad site, but his son then moved it to Nineveh, the ancient site in Mosul that still remains under ISIS control.

While Nimrud and Nineveh are “remodeled and changed by different rulers, Khorsabad was made to the vision of Sargon what a capital should look like. It is a snapshot, and because of what we know it is easy to date the finds.”

The site has been excavated several times, which led to the finding to the famous human-headed winged bulls, or Lamassu, that are now in the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago, while many of the ornaments that lined the walls are held by the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London.

Danti does not think that the Peshmerga had any intention of damaging a major archeological site, “as the Kurds are known for the preservation of their heritage. It’s never easy for any military force, and I think it was a matter of bad communication.” 

He hopes to find some Kurdish colleagues willing to go and check out the site soon, and to help the Peshmerga minimize the damage.

An emergency assessment is then needed, both in Khorsabad and Nimrud, he says, “just like you assess a patient. So you can decide how to prevent further damage, and when the patient needs treatment.”

For Nimrud, he points out that as the damage is already done, there is no need for anyone taking any risks now, knowing that ISIS usually mines these sites: “We have some time to make sure nobody gets hurt.”