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calendar   Thursday - December 19, 2019

The Original Bridge Post

And you thought your favorite old bridge was old. Ha!

The Bridge At Girsu River

image

From the very dawn of recorded history. The town of Tello in southern Iraq, a bit northwest of Basra, was once the Sumerian city of Girsu. 4,000 years ago. There was a river. They wanted to get across it whether it was the rainy season or not. So they built a bridge. Out of bricks. It’s still there.

What looks like the fallen remains of both sides of an arch bridge are actually the arced brick abutment walls and their supporting buttresses. The bridge, probably wooden planks, spanned between them. The arced flairs of the abutments would work to channel water when the river was high.

The bridge at Tello was built in the third millennium BC, making it the oldest bridge still in existence. This remarkable survival will be preserved by a team of British Museum archaeologists and Iraqi heritage professionals who are being trained to protect ancient sites that have suffered damage at the hands of Daesh (or the so-called Islamic State). Restoring the 4,000-year-old bridge will be a potent symbol for a nation emerging from decades of war.

Built for the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, the bridge was only rediscovered in 1929. Described at the time as an ‘enigmatic construction’, it has been variously interpreted as a temple, dam and water regulator. Recent studies using 1930s photographs as well as recently declassified satellite imagery from the 1960s, alongside new research at the site, have confirmed that it was a bridge over an ancient waterway and that it is (at the time of writing) the earliest-known bridge in the world. Since the excavations nearly 90 years ago, the bridge has remained open and exposed, with no identifiable conservation work to address its long-term stability or issues of erosion, and no plans to manage the site or tell its story to the wider world.

From other pictures it’s plain that this bridge was quite wide, albeit not very long. Easily as wide as a modern 4 lane highway.

The British Museum will train a group of female archaeologists to help restore the world’s oldest bridge with the hope of bringing tourists back to Iraq.

The ancient Sumerian structure at the entrance to the 4,000-year-old city of Girsu in southern Iraq will be used as a training site for the eight women from Mosul.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 12/19/2019 at 11:17 PM   
Filed Under: • Archeology / AnthropologyArchitectureBridges •  
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