Imagine finding the localisation of a historic battle hiding in spare sight . Sounds like a moving picture , right ? Well , in this sheath , it would be a undercover agent movie — because an external team of archaeologists claims to have done on the button that by analyse declassified undercover agent satellite images .
archaeologist from Durham University and the University of Al - Qadisiyah in Iraq claim to have discovered the site of the Battle of al - Qadisiyyah , a hugely important early Islamic battle that change the class of Iranian account . Taking an interdisciplinary approach , the team identified the localisation in Iraq by cross - referencing historical text , New aerial exposure , on - the - ground evidence , and declassified 1970s American spy artificial satellite mental imagery . Their findings were issue in a written report on November 12 in the journalAntiquity .
“ This discovery provides a geographical location and context for a battle that is one of the founding story of the expansion of Islam into innovative daytime Iraq , Iran and beyond , ” Durham University ’s William Deadman said in the university’sstatement .
Close-up declassified spy satellite image of al-Qadisiyyah taken in 1974; the eroded mudbrick settlement and surrounding walls are visible.Image: US Geological Survey
The Battle of al - Qadisiyyah took place between Arab Muslims and the IranianSasanian Empirein the 630s CE . The Arab Muslims were victorious , and their winner would pave the direction for the Islamic seduction of Mesopotamia , Persia , and beyond , according to the subject area . Until recently , however , the exact localisation of this of the essence battle was a mystery .
The archaeologists discovered the battle ’s presumed location while conducting a removed survey of theDarb Zubaydah , a diachronic pilgrim’s journey road between Kufa in Iraq and Mecca in Saudi Arabia . ethereal mental imagery from Google Earth and Bing Maps revealed a 6.2 - mile ( 10 - kilometer ) two-fold paries feature between a solid fortress on the desert fringe and a large village on the mete of the southern Mesopotamian floodplain . The team , go by Deadman , then got ahold of U.S. declassified spy orbiter image of the same arena , confirming the features .
“ Captured in 1973 , these images show the country prior to much modern agricultural and urban exploitation , ” the investigator write in the field of study . In other words , the sites were even clearer in the old satellite figure of speech . The archaeologists from the University of Al - Qadisiyah in Iraq also carried out an on - the - solid ground view to document the finding directly .
outfit with this data , the researcher then compared the archeologic observations to description in 9th , 10th and fourteenth - century CE source about the Battle of al - Qadisiyyah . They close that the fortress and settlement may be two previously unidentified waystations along the Darb Zubaydah , called al-’Udhayb and al - Qadisiyyah , respectively .
“ The agreement between textual reference to the locations of al - Qadisiyyah and [ al-’Udhayb ] and the archaeological grounds [ from the ] airy images is noteworthy , ” the researchers notice in the study .
In fact , one of the aforementioned 10th - century texts also provides a on the face of it reliable description of the placement of the famous struggle itself , allowing the archaeologists to tentatively position its location between a trench and an ancient now - ironical river in the vicinity of the settlement of the same name—18.6 mile ( 30 kilometers ) to the south of Kufa .
The study pass away to show that sometimes the good way to give away what hides beneath our very foundation is by get a bird ’s eye view — or , in this case , a undercover agent satellite ’s view .
Archaeologyspy orbiter
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