Recently recovered FarShores file
Strange slabs of rock-hard material found in the ruins of ancient Mesopotamian cities were apparently man-made, showing more sophistication and collaboration than expected, scientists reported yesterday [June 25].
The discovery, announced in the current issue of Science, "suggests there was a lot more interaction between craftspeople than we had really thought," said archaeologist Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "This stuff could only have been made if there had been interactions between metallurgists and potters." She explained: "Mesopotamia was a great place to develop civilization because it was extremely rich, if you used irrigation. But it has no stone whatsoever; it's all silt. Even pebbles have to be brought in from long distance. There is no timber, and no metals."
What Stone and her colleagues discovered is a man-made substitute for natural grinding surfaces. She said the artificial rock was created more than 4,000 years ago by baking local soils at very high temperatures, fusing the grains into a material very similar to a type of volcanic rock called basalt.
The man-made rock was previously unknown to science. It was found between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the ancient city of Mashkan-shapir, where 15,000 people once lived. It is 50 miles southeast of present-day Baghdad. Digging was under way at Mashkan-shapir because "we were interested in understanding how urban life was organized" thousands of years ago, Stone said.
The man-made rocks were discovered by field workers between 1987 and 1990 but were not analyzed scientifically until now. Researchers have not returned to digs in Iraq since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The field team expected to find evidence of ceramic and metallurgic crafts, "but in the course of this, we ran onto some very large blocks of material that looks like basalt, kind of black and bubbly. What's queer about them is that they have one original surface that is kind of bubbly, and they all have one very flat, clean surface on one side. So it didn't seem to us there's any way this could be happening naturally."
Samples also were tested by geologist Donald Lindsley at Stony Brook. From samples of Iraqi soil, Lindsley re-created the rocks, mimicking the ancient slabs, Stone said. As a result, she said, "we think they (the ancient Mesopotamians) were smelting local soils, treating them like they were metallic ores."
While metallurgists would have been accustomed to bringing things to high temperatures and separating ores out, potters would have been adept at handling clays. Talents of both would have helped in creating the artificial rocks. It had been assumed, Stone said, that tasks such as metal-working or ceramics had been kept separate. "We had thought of them all passing on their knowledge from father to son within families, without a lot of cross-fertilization," Stone said. Now it seems, she said, they must have been working together
