Archaeologists Find 3,000-Year-Old Sword So Well Preserved It ‘Almost Still Shines’
The hilt of the recently discovered Bronze Age sword, which was extraordinarily well-preserved Archäologie-Büro Dr. Woidich / Sergiu Tifui
A rare sight greeted archaeologists excavating a gravesite in the southern Bavarian town of Nördlingen last week: Nestled near the grave’s occupants was a 3,000-year-old sword.
The weapon barely shows its age. It has remained so well-preserved that it “almost still shines,” says Bavaria’s State Office for Monument Protection in a statement, per Google Translate.
The weapon sports an octagonal bronze hilt that was cast over the blade, which few smiths were skilled enough to make at the time, according to Live Science’s Laura Geggel. Only two manufacturing regions were known to have made swords of this kind: one near the excavation site in southern Germany, and the other in northern Germany and Denmark.
The octagonal hilt was cast directly over the blade of the sword, something only certain smiths were skilled enough to do. Archäologie-Büro Dr. Woidich / Sergiu Tifui
The sword shows no wear and tear indicating use in battle, but archaeologists say “its center of gravity made it suitable for use as a real weapon, and it was capable of being used to slash opponents,” reports Newsweek’s Jess Thomson.
Bronze swords first emerged around 1600 B.C.E. and were used until roughly 600 C.E., as Smithsonian magazine’s Alex Fox wrote in 2020. Researchers say that the Bavarian artifact dates to the end of the 14th century B.C.E.
The archaeologists say that swords like this one are quite rare, particularly because “many middle Bronze Age graves were looted over the millennia,” per Live Science.
Archaeologists have previously unearthed Bronze Age swords in burial plots in Europe, including an ornate bronze sword with an ivory and gold hilt found during excavations in Greece in 2015.
The sword was unearthed alongside the bodies of a man, woman, and child. Archäologie-Büro Dr. Woidich / Sergiu Tifui
Given the soft nature of bronze, historians have previously wondered whether such blades served a ceremonial purpose, rather than a practical purpose on the battlefield.
A few years ago, scientists even staged sword fights in order to learn more about how the Bronze Age weapons could have been used effectively in battle, despite being much easier to damage and harder to repair than their iron successors.
The newly unearthed weapon was found alongside an assortment of Bronze Age artifacts, as well as three individuals—a man, a woman, and a child—all of whom were buried around the same time. Researchers don’t know how the three were connected, or whether they were related.
“The sword and the burial have yet to be examined so that our archaeologists can classify this find more precisely,” says Mathias Pfeil, head of the monument protection office, in the agency’s statement.
Researchers can say, however, that the sword’s condition is “extraordinary,” adds Pfeil. “A find like this is very rare.”
Greek Farmer Stumbles Onto 3,400-Year-Old Tomb Hidden Below His Olive Grove
A covered coffin from the Minoan times was found in Ierapetra, Crete, Greece.
The untouched Bronze Age tomb and the skeletons inside will hopefully provide archaeologists with information about the mysterious Minoan civilization.
In an extraordinary example of being in the wrong place at the right time, a Greek farmer just made a startling archaeological discovery. A 3,400-year-old Minoan tomb was uncovered in an unnamed farmer’s olive grove near the city of Ierapetra on the Greek island of Crete.
According to Cretapost, the farmer was attempting to park his car underneath an olive tree when suddenly the ground beneath him began to sink.
The farmer pulled his car out from under the tree and noticed that a huge hole which measured around four feet wide had opened up where his car had been sitting.
When he peeked into the hole, the farmer knew he had stumbled upon something special. He called the local heritage ministry, Lassithi Ephorate of Antiquities, to investigate.
The four-foot wide hole accidentally made by the farmer ultimately led to the Minoan Bronze Age tomb.
The archaeologists from the ministry excavated the hole. What they found next was unprecedented.
The pit was approximately four feet wide and eight feet deep was divided into three sections, and very apparently was a tomb.
In the first section, archaeologists uncovered a coffin and a variety of artifacts. The following niche held a second coffin, 14 Greek jars called amphorae, and a bowl.
According to Smithsonian.com, the archaeologists identified that the tomb was Minoan and of the Bronze Age due to the style of the coffin they found. The artifacts — funerary vases and the two coffins— were well-preserved despite their extremely old age.
The eight-foot-deep pit contained two coffins and several artifacts.
The tomb was sealed off by a stone wall and only after thousands of years of wear and tear did it deteriorate enough to buckle under the weight of the farmer’s car.
“Soil retreat was a result of the watering of the olive trees in the area as well as a broken irrigation tube,” Argyris Pantazis, the Deputy Mayor of Local Communities, Agranian and Tourism of Ierapetra, told Cretapost.
“The ground had partially receded, and when the farmer tried to park in the shade of the olive, it completely retreated.”
Pantazis also said that the fact that the tomb was untouched by thieves for millennia makes it an ideal site for archaeologists to learn as much as possible about the two people buried in the tomb and life for the Minoan civilization.
A look inside the coffin of one of the two Minoans buried in the 3,400-year-old tomb.
According to Forbes, the skeletons date back to the Late Minoan IIIA-B period in archaeological chronology, also known as the Late Palace Period.
So far, not much information is known about the Minoan civilization and their way of life, save for their labyrinth palatial complexes, showcased in classic myths like Theseus and the Minotaur.
Researchers also believe that the Minoans met their end because of a string of devasting natural disasters. Most other details of the Minoan’s history remain unclear.
Further analysis of the skeletons and artifacts in the tomb in Crete will hopefully help archaeologists fill in some blanks and answer questions about the mysterious Minoan civilization.
Stunned Couple Finds Viking Buried Under Floor While Renovating Home
When the couple removed the floor, they began to find stones and pieces of iron. Archaeologists believe they are from the Viking Age.
A Norwegian couple made an unusual historic discovery during renovations of their home. First, they found a number of Viking-era artifacts, and then archaeologists declared that they had found a Viking grave, right there, under their floor. Experts have carried out a survey of the site and the grave is being hailed as a very significant find.
The couple made the find while tearing up some floorboards in their family home in Seivåg near Bodø in Northern Norway. They were laying insulation when they came across some strangely shaped rocks.
Naturally, they were curious, and then they saw something round glinting in the light. They knew that it had to be pretty old because the house had been built in 1914 and the floorboards had not been moved since. But they were not prepared for what they had actually found. The house has been in the same family for over a century.
Viking Burial Under the Boards
Based on the shape of the object “they first believed it was the wheel of a toy car” according to The Local. The couple only later realized that what they had found could be something historic.
After some further digging, the couple found an iron axe head and some other metallic objects, that were all obviously old. ‘It wasn’t until later that we realized what it could be” Mariann Kristiansen, one of the owners of the house, told The Local.
Viking ax head, a representation of the find at the Viking burial site in Norway
The couple contacted the local authorities and experts from the local Nordland county government came to inspect the finds. Martinus Hauglid told the couple that they had most likely found a grave from the Iron Age in Norway. This was the era when the Vikings ruled in Scandinavia and terrified most of the known world.
The archaeologist told The Local that the couple had found an “ax dated between 950 and 1050 AD”. They also found a bead of glass, which was revealed to be blue, and dates from the same period.
A glass bead was among the first objects discovered in the Viking grave.
Viking Cairn
It is believed that the stones found underneath the flooring came from a burial, and were likely part of a cairn. In this type of burial, a mound of stones and rocks is erected over the deceased which was a very common burial practice in the Iron Age.
A number of similar cairns were found in the Lendbreen Mountain Pass in Norway when a glacier melted. This was an important trade route in the Middle Ages.
Martinus congratulated the couple on their find and stated that they had done a good job by reporting things so soon. The archaeologist said that it was the first instance of a Viking grave being found under a private dwelling in his 30-year career.
Archaeologists investigated the grave. Forbes reported that under Norwegian Law any human artifacts or “activity before 1537 are automatically preserved”. The items found by the couple were transported to a museum for conservation and safekeeping.
These stones formed the top of what archaeologists believe is a Viking burial cairn.
End of the Viking Age
Martinus was quoted by Forbes as stating that the finds under the floorboards date back to a time “when Norway transitioned to Christianity to become one kingdom”. This was the time when kings like Olaf Tryggvason, attempted to dominate the many chiefdoms and create a centralized state.
Some of these monarchs sought to impose Christianity on the pagan Norse as part of their efforts at state-building and this led to many civil wars. The grave is helping researchers to better understand this crucial period in Norwegian history which saw the demise of the Viking Age.
It appears that the original builders of the house, over a century ago, were not aware that they were building a private residence on a grave. It is quite possible that they unearthed items and simply discarded them. This raises the possibility that some Viking-era grave goods were lost or destroyed during the construction of the family home.
Viking-era grave goods are displayed at the National Museum of Iceland.
People ‘finger painted’ the skulls of their ancestors red in the Andes a millennium ago
A close-up of an adult male cranium with applied hematite-based pigment that covers a fracture that occurred before the individual died.
Up to a millennium ago, the Chincha people in what is now Peru decorated their ancestors’ remains with red pigment, sometimes finger-painting their skulls as part of a ritual intended to give the dead a new kind of social life.
In a new investigation, researchers analyzed hundreds of human remains found in the Chincha Valley of southern Peru. Dating to between A.D. 1000 and 1825, the skeletal remains they studied were found in more than 100 “chullpas,” large mortuary structures where multiple people were interred together. The team’s goal, detailed in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, was to investigate how and why red paint was applied to many of the bones.
What they discovered, however, was that different kinds of red paint were used and that only certain people were painted after death.
The use of red pigment in funeral rituals dates back thousands of years in Peru and is related to a prolonged process of dealing with deceased members of society. “Death was not the end,” the researchers wrote in the study. “It was a pivotal moment of transformation into another kind of existence, and a critical transition from one state to another, providing the basis for further life.”
The researchers took samples of red paint from 38 different artifacts and bones, 25 of which were human skulls. Using three scientific techniques — X-ray powder diffraction, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and laser ablation ICP-MS, techniques that essentially analyze elements within a substance — they identified the composition of the red pigments.
Red paint on 24 of the samples came from iron-based ochres like hematite, 13 came from mercury-based cinnabar, and one was a combination of the two.
Further chemical analysis showed that the cinnabar was imported from hundreds of miles away while the hematite likely came from local sources. These differences may reflect elite and non-elite uses of the different kinds of paint, the study authors said.
This figure shows traces of red pigment found on the inside and outside of a disarticulated non-adult cranium. This suggests that pigmented hands held the cranium during painting.
Most of the individuals whose bones were painted were found to be adult males. However, the bones of women and children, as well as those of several people with healed traumatic injuries and people whose skulls were modified as babies, were also painted.
By examining the skulls, the researchers figured out how the red paint was applied. “We know that Chincha peoples used textiles, leaves, and their own hands to apply red pigment to human remains,” study first author Jacob Bongers, an anthropological archaeologist at Boston University, told Live Science in an email. Thick vertical or horizontal lines of paint on skulls are consistent with someone using their fingers for application.
“Finger painting would have been critical for forming close relationships between the living and the dead,” Bongers said. “The red pigment itself brings to light this living-dead relationship as well as social differences for others to see.”
Benjamin Schaefer, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Illinois Chicago who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that this research “makes an important and exciting contribution to understanding the ritual economy of death in the Andes. The living hand-painting the dead after death offers an intimate and dynamic glimpse into social identities in the Chincha Valley.”
Material and skeletal remains with red pigment: a) shell container, b) ceramic figurine, c) textile, d) modified bird, e) worked bone wrapped in yarn.
One aspect of the process that Bongers and colleagues have not figured out yet is when the red paint was applied. While it is clear to them that the bones were painted after the individuals had been skeletonized, the actual act of painting might have been a response to colonization.
“Some painted bones, especially crania [skulls], were removed and placed over other graves, presumably to ‘protect’ the dead,” the researchers wrote. By integrating theories rooted in Andean concepts of death and cosmology with the scientific analysis of painted skeletons, they further suggest that transgressions against the dead, such as looting, would have required correction by the living. “We hypothesize that individuals reentered disturbed chullpas to paint human remains that had become desecrated after the European invasion,” the researchers wrote.
“Their research provides a roadmap for others to follow,” Celeste Gagnon, a bioarchaeologist at Wagner College in New York who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email, “to create work that fulfills a unique promise of anthropology: bringing together humanistic and scientific understandings of the past.”
A 1,000-year-old wall in Peru was built to protect against El Niño floods, research suggests
The ancient earthen wall runs for 6 miles (10 kilometers) across the desert and two dry river beds near Trujillo in northern Peru.
An ancient desert wall in northern Peru was built to protect precious farmlands and canals from the ravages of El Niño floods, according to new research.
Many archaeologists had suggested that the wall, known as the Muralla La Cumbre and located near Trujillo, was built by the Chimú people to protect their lands from invasions by the Incas, with whom they had a long-standing enmity. But the latest research affirms a theory that the earthen wall, which stretches 6 miles (10 kilometers) across the desert, was built to hold back devastating floods during the wettest phases of northern Peru’s weather cycle.
These phases are now known as El Niño — Spanish for “The Boy,” a reference to the child Jesus — because they bring heavy rain to the region around Christmastime every few years.
Archaeologists have found distinctive layers of flood sediments only on the east side of the ancient wall.
Although El Niño brings drought to some other parts of the world, it brings heavy rains to Ecuador and northern Peru. El Niño floods are thought to have occurred there for thousands of years, and they would have been a serious danger to the Chimú, Gabriel Prieto, an archaeologist at the University of Florida, told Live Science.
“The annual rainfall there in a regular year is very low — almost no rain at all,” he said. “So when the rainfall was very high, that caused a lot of damage.”
Ancient kingdom
Radiocarbon dating of the lowest layers shows the wall was started in about A.D. 1100, soon after a large El Niño flood.
The Chimor kingdom of the Chimú people emerged around A.D. 900 in the territories once occupied by the Moche people; as a result, the Moche period is sometimes called “Early Chimú.”
According to the “Encyclopedia of Prehistory” (Springer, 2002) the Chimú worshipped the moon — instead of the sun at the center of Inca worship — and they were independent until they were conquered by the Incas in about 1470, a few decades before the arrival of the Spanish in South America.
Today, the Chimú are known mainly for their distinctive pottery and metalwork, as well as for the ruins of their capital, Chan Chan, which are listed by the United Nations as a World Heritage site.
Prieto has examined the 8-foot-high (2.5 meters) La Cumbre wall and found layers of flood sediments only on its eastern side, which suggests it was built to protect the Chimú farmlands to the west, beside the coast. Radiocarbon dates from the lowest layers reveal that the wall was started in about 1100, possibly after a large El Niño flood at that time, he said.
The wall is built across two dry riverbeds that flood during El Niño. Preventing flooding in the farmlands also would have protected Chan Chan, which was connected to them by a network of canals.
“I’d guess, to some degree, that the wall worked like a kind of a dam,” Prieto said. The research has not yet been published as a peer-reviewed study.
Archaeologists used to think the wall was built to keep out the Incas. But the new research suggests it may have been built to keep out floods.
Human sacrifices
Prieto previously found evidence of mass child sacrifices at Chimú sites, including the remains of 76 victims at Pampa La Cruz near Huanchaco, a few miles northwest of Trujillo. He thinks the El Niño floods that necessitated the desert wall also may have been linked to the sacrifices.
Prieto has used radiocarbon dating to determine that one of the sediment layers along the wall is from about 1450 — a date that corresponds to the sacrifice of more than 140 children and 200 llamas at another Chimú site. He thinks it’s likely that the Chimú knew the dangers of El Niño floods, which happened every few years, and that their society’s rulers took advantage of the recurring disaster to solidify their authority with sacrifices.
“The Chimú were the descendants of people who had lived in this region for 10,000 years — they knew exactly what was going on,” he said. “This was a kind of political game, I think.”
Edward Swenson, an archaeologist at the University of Toronto who isn’t involved in the research, told Live Science that Prieto’s interpretation made sense.
“The idea at first struck me as incongruous because I’ve not heard of walls against water before,” he said.
But Prieto’s research has changed his mind, although he still thinks the wall also may have served as a defense. “The old idea was that this wall was to protect the Chimú from Inca attacks, and it might have been multifunctional,” Swenson said.
Study researchers Trine Freiesleben and Jean-Claude Marquet discuss the fingerprints and where to take optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) samples so they can date the artwork.
The oldest-known engravings in Europe, discovered in a French cave sealed up for tens of thousands of years, likely weren’t crafted by modern humans but rather Neanderthals, a new study finds.
Within the cave of La Roche-Cotard 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the researchers analyzed a series of non-figurative markings thought to be made by ancient human fingers, according to a study published Wednesday (June 21) in the journal PLOS One.
The cave had been sealed up by sediments until the late 19th century. Modern excavations at the site have yielded numerous stone tools whose style is associated with the Neanderthals, suggesting they created the art.
Ancient figurative art, including wall paintings, is well-known from European sites, with drawings of horses, lions, and handprints representing famous examples of Upper Paleolithic culture dating back 35,000 years.
For decades, researchers thought that these creations were hallmarks of modern human behavior, but recently, researchers have unearthed older examples of non-utilitarian objects and art in Europe and in other areas of the world, such as a 51,000-year-old chevron-engraved bone in Germany created by Neanderthals; however, Homo sapiens are credited with a 45,500-year-old drawing of a warty pig in Indonesia and a 73,000-year-old hashtag drawing in South Africa.
Examples of engravings discovered in the Roche-Cotard cave (Indre et Loire – France). On the left, the “circular panel” (ogive-shaped tracings) and on the right the “wavy panel” (two contiguous tracings forming sinuous lines).
At the cave of La Roche-Cotard, researchers found eight panels with more than 400 traces of abstract lines and dots. The researchers call these traces “engravings” because they represent the deliberate removal of material carried out with a tool or finger. “This removal of material is neither accidental nor utilitarian,” they wrote in their study, but rather “intentional and meticulous.”
To figure out how the engravings were made, the researchers set up an experiment at a similar cave, in which one person created marks using their fingers, bone, wood, antler, flint and metal points against the rock wall.
Another person then recorded what those marks looked like and used photogrammetry methods — a technique that uses hundreds of photos to create virtual 3D models — to compare the experimental marks with the prehistoric ones.
The researchers concluded that the experimental finger markings were most similar to the prehistoric engravings.
The researchers also found no direct link between the numerous stone tools discovered in the cave and the engravings, further supporting the finding that Neanderthals created the engravings with their fingers, just as the researchers did. For the most part, the engravings on the cave wall are lines called “finger flutings,” made when someone swiped their fingers flat along the silt-covered wall, the team concluded.
To further refine the date the cave was used and figure out if the finger flutings were those of modern humans or Neanderthals, the researchers used optically stimulated luminescence of the sediments to determine when they were last exposed to daylight.
The analysis revealed that the cave closed up at least 57,000 years ago and possibly as long as 75,000 years ago.
These early dates mean it’s “highly unlikely” that anatomically modern humans had access to the inside of the cave, the researchers wrote in their study, as current evidence suggests they were not present in France until at least 54,000 years ago, whereas Neandertals appeared there around 330,000 years ago. “We conclude that the LRC engravings are unambiguous examples of Neanderthal abstract design,” they wrote.
April Nowell, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in this study, told Live Science in an email that “this study is important because it extends the antiquity of digital [finger] tracings and, for the first time, associates them with a hominin species other than Homo sapiens.”
But the significance of these engravings remains unclear. “Although the finger tracings at La Roche-Cotard are clearly intentional,” the researchers wrote, “it is not possible for us to establish if they represent symbolic thinking.”
Nowell agreed that “these tracings do not have to be symbolic any more than when someone traces their fingers in the sand on a beach.” The engravings are, however, important new information about the behavior of our Neanderthal relatives, whose culture was more complex and diverse than previously realized.
A large stone monument depicting the goddess Ishtar has been unearthed in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud
Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, working with an Iraqi excavation team, have unearthed a large stone monument depicting the goddess Ishtar in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.
Archaeologists have uncovered more monumental finds in Nimrud, one of the heritage sites severely damaged by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in northern Iraq.
Among the new relics discovered at the site are those from a 3,000-year-old temple dedicated to Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war and the goddess with the earliest written evidence.
During earlier excavations in Nimrud, the same team revealed a 2,800-year-old palace belonging to an Assyrian king Adad-Nirari III, who reigned from 810–783 BCE.
This season, the team continued working inside the palace and expanded its efforts to include the Temple of Ishtar, which burned when Nimrud was sacked by an invading army in 612 BCE.
A fragment of the stone stele depicting Ishtar inside a starburst.
Chief among their finds were fragments of a large stone monument that depicts the goddess Ishtar inside a star symbol.
“Our greatest find this season was a spectacular fragment from the stone stele that shows the goddess Ishtar inside a star symbol. This is the first unequivocal depiction of the goddess as Ishtar Sharrrat-niphi, a divine aspect of the goddess associated with the rising of the planet Venus, the ‘morning star,’ to be found in this temple dedicated to her,” Dr. Michael Danti, Program Director of the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program and archeologists at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement.
This season’s new discoveries largely focus on the splendor of Adad-Nirari III’s rule and ancient Nimrud’s affluence.
Two enormous stone column bases that the archaeologists discovered suggest the palace was grandly decorated with exquisitely carved columns.
Evidence of a sizable stone basin, which the researchers think may have served as a central heating system, was found inside the throne room.
In addition, they discovered scattered pieces of ostrich eggshell and ivory, both of which were rare and would have been extremely valuable in the early Bronze Age.
Mysterious 18-Km-Long Underground City Found In Iran: Could be At Least 6000 Years Old
In Bam village of Esfarayen county in northeast Iran, a routine road construction project has led to an exciting discovery of a vast network of underground corridors linked to the nearby fortress of Shahr-e Belqeys (City of Belqeys).
The discovery was made by workers laying a road in 2022, who stumbled upon this precious heritage from a different spot after access was blocked by the local cultural heritage directorate last year to protect it.
The expert at the Belqeys archaeological site confirmed that the total length of the corridors was 18 kilometers (11 miles), and that a bathroom and a mill were located along the extent. However, these have not been opened yet, and experts are yet to examine them.
“Last years, traces of this underground city had been discovered, but to protect it, these remains were blocked by the local cultural heritage directorate. Now we reached these ancient structures from another place, which confirms the statements of the local people,” the expert explained. “The ruins have yielded potteries estimated to belong to the Seljuk period, IlKhanid, and even earlier periods. However, an extensive archaeological excavation is needed to delve into its secrets.”
The ruined citadel of Shahr-e Belqeys is located in the northeastern part of North Khorasan province and is spread over 51,000 square meters (12.6 acres). It is the second-largest mud fortress in Iran after the UNESCO World Heritage Site Bam Citadel. Based on excavations at nearby hilltops and elevations, the citadel is believed to be at least 6,000 years old.
Ruined citadel of Shahr-e Belqys, site of the underground corridor discovery.
The fortress is considered to have flourished from the late Sassanid era (224-661 AD) to the early Islamic period in the 7th century and had been active until Nader Shah Afshar assumed power in the early 18th century. Historical evidence suggests that Belqeys enjoyed the favor of Sassanid monarchs, leading to its prosperity.
Several excavations in Belqeys have revealed the remarkable remains of the citadel, houses, irrigation channels, a cistern, and a hypostyle hall. The expert at the Belqeys site stated that the ruins have yielded potteries estimated to belong to the Seljuk period, IlKhanid, and even earlier periods, and that an extensive archaeological excavation is needed to delve into its secrets.
Iran has several underground architectural sites, including the cone-shaped underground homes of Kandovan village in north-western Iran, which resemble the “fairy chimneys” of Cappadocia in Turkey, where Bronze Age cave dwellers built famous underground cities.
The underground corridors found near Shahr-e Belqeys are similar to those built during the same period in Nushabad.
In 2018, the 3rd International Troglodytic Architecture Conference was held in Iran, bringing scores of experts and scholars to discuss subterranean architecture, technology, and culture. The discovery of the underground corridors in Shahr-e Belqeys is just one of the many exciting examples of Iran’s rich cultural heritage. It has again opened up new avenues for research and discovery in archaeology.
Another underground site in Iran is the fascinating city of Nushabad, also known as Ouyi, located in Isfahan province in central Iran. This entire city of passages and chambers is located at depths varying from 4 to 18 meters (13 to 59 feet) and dates back to Sassanid times.
Nushabad is a city named after the cold and refreshing water from a local well or spring. It was founded by a Sassanian king who passed through the area and was impressed by the water. The city was a place of refuge for people in the surrounding desert during the hot summer months.
As time passed, the underground city of Nushabad became more than just a source of fresh water and a place to escape the heat. It also served as a haven during times of war. Throughout the history of Iran, the city faced numerous invasions from attackers who would come to pillage and kill.
For example, during the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, when the invaders arrived at the above-ground city, they found it deserted as its residents had fled to the safety of Nushabad. This pattern continued until the Qajar period.
Nushabad was well equipped to serve as a refuge, with features that made it difficult for attackers to enter. For instance, the city had multiple entry points, but they were so narrow that only one person could go in at a time. This prevented an invading army from using their superior numbers to overpower those hiding in the underground city.
Additionally, there are ventilation shafts that allow airflow in and out of Nushabad, whilst fresh water is provided by the spring. This meant that refugees were able to stay in the underground city for long periods of time. It has also been suggested that there would have been some storage areas for food as well. Various rooms have also been found along the carved-out pathways of the city, and ledges have been dug out to serve as benches/beds for people.
The similarity in construction between the Shahr-e Belqeys underground corridors and Nushabad leads experts to believe that they served the same purpose. Further excavations, pending the approval of the Iranian government, will provide more insight into their architecture and use.
The discovery of the extensive network of underground corridors in Bam village is a significant finding that could shed light on the ancient history of Iran and its cultural heritage. The fact that it was discovered by accident during a routine road construction project makes it even more exciting. It will generate great interest among archaeologists and history buffs for sure.
