French archaeologists discover new Sumerian temple in southern Iraq

Something to keep an eye on..


[link to www.azzaman.com]



The Antiquities Department says French archaeologists have recently unearthed a new Sumerian temple in the southern Province of Dhiqar.

The department’s information officer, Abdulzahra al-Talaqani, said a team of French excavators did a short season of digging at al-Rafaai, the district where the Sumerian temple was found.

Details are sketchy but Talaqani said the department would provide by December “the engineering details that will elucidate (the temple’s) archaeological significance and its contents.”

Dhiqar, of which the city of Nasiriyah is the provincial capital, is Iraq’s richest in archaeology. It is the birthplace of the Sumerian civilization, the first to invent writing and civilized government some 5,000 years ago.

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