ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Maysan police announced on Thursday the discovery of 400 ancient wells in the province, believed to date back to the first millennium AD.
The police said they have secured the site located in the al-Tayib district to prevent theft and damage to the wells.
"It is estimated that the wells were built in the Sassanid era, similar to wells in the Kurdistan Region used for irrigation," Mortaza al-Arjaai, an archaeological site inspector told
Rudaw.
The site, located approximately 75 kilometers east of Amarah city, Arjaai explained, was historically used to transport water to nearby cities via channels dug alongside the wells.
The police added that an archaeological and artifact protection team, sent from the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani, inspected the site to make recommendations for further surveys.
The last remaining Sassanid imperial structure is the Arch of Ctesiphon, located 30 kilometers south of Baghdad. It is also the largest brick-built arch in the world which was constructed around 540 AD; in the same millennium that the wells were built.
The arch has been undergoing renovations as part of efforts to restore it to its former grandeur. In 2021, then-Iraqi Culture Minister Hassan Nazim told AFP that previous repair work had been poorly executed, leaving the structure vulnerable to rain damage.
Iraqi antiquities and archeological sites were subjected to looting and vandalism after 2003, the most severe of which was in 2014 when ISIS occupied large swaths of Iraqi territory, destroying and illegally selling thousands of artifacts in the global market through intermediaries.
In recent years, Iraq has made significant efforts to recover and repatriate these lost antiquities.
Hastyar Qadir contributed to this report.
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