The construction could correspond to verses in the epic poem that say Gilgamesh was buried near the city in the Euphrates. Van Ess says the team also found a man-made construction in the midst of what was once the riverbed of the Euphrates. The course of the Euphrates has varied many times over the millennia, leaving the site dry today. Uruk's canals were filled with water from the Euphrates River, which passed near the city in ancient times. for me, the more astonishing thing is that they used water canals to move through the city and not big streets or something else. "With our work, we are now able to show that there were indeed gardens. The archaeologist says that the expedition's partial mapping of the city has now confirmed much of the poem's general description of its layout and added new details that were previously not known. But all the other features, that is, that one-third of the city is a garden, and one-third is a sanctuary (for temples), is so general it could be true for other cities, too." "The problem of the poem is that, despite the fact it deals mostly with the city of Uruk, it doesn't describe it quite clearly. According to the poem, Uruk was very wealthy and bustling with trade, with distinct areas for temples, gardens, and homes. based on older oral, or now lost written, versions. Van Ess says the city is described in very general terms in "The Song of Gilgamesh," which scholars mostly agree comes to us from the end of the third millennium B.C. Today, its ruins lie under many centimeters of desert sand with no new construction above them. until the end of the third century A.D., when it finally declined and was abandoned. It thrived from the beginning of the fifth millennium B.C. The city, located some 100 miles north of Basra, covers some 5.5 square kilometers. One reason Uruk has remained so mysterious is the ancient city's vast size, which dwarfs efforts by archaeologists to learn about it through excavations. She told our correspondent by phone from Berlin that the location of Uruk has long been known but that much about the city - including how its neighborhoods were laid out - is still poorly understood. The archaeologist in charge of the project is Margarite Van Ess. The site the team chose is the well-known city of Uruk, immortalized in a famous Sumerian epic poem - "The Song of Gilgamesh." The poem, which today is the earliest surviving work of literature, tells the story of a Sumerian hero, Gilgamesh, whom many researchers believe may have been one of Uruk's early kings. The sensitive instrument is able to detect the presence of man-made objects beneath the soil and reveal the remnants of walls, canals, and residential districts. The institute sent a team of researchers to make a partial map of a buried Mesopotamian city using a magnetometer. That is the case with an expedition sponsored this past winter by the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut (German Archaeology Institute) in Berlin. At times, the expeditions continue to produce startling results. Prague, (RFE/RL) - Little archaeological work has been done in Iraq over the past decade due to the ongoing international crisis over Baghdad's weapons programs and the economic effects of sanctions.īut periodically, foreign academic institutes continue to carry out field work among Iraq's ancient Mesopotamian sites, which include the vestiges of some of the world's earliest cities. German archaeologists working in Iraq have made a partial map of the ancient site of Uruk and discovered that some of its features are just as described in a famous Sumerian epic poem - "The Song of Gilgamesh." The findings come as archaeological work has virtually stopped in Iraq over the past decade due to the crisis between Baghdad and the international community.