The Dura-Europos website in modern-day Syria is known for its distinctive state of preservation. Like Pompeii, this historic metropolis has yielded many nice discoveries, and serves as a window into the world of the traditional Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman durations. But regardless of the prominence of Dura-Europos in Close to Japanese scholarship, there’s one other metropolis, just some miles down the Euphrates river, that presents a long-neglected alternative for research. A brand new paper within the Journal of Close to Japanese Research, entitled “The Historical Metropolis of Giddan/Eddana (Anqa, Iraq), the ‘Forgotten Twin’ of Dura-Europos,” identifies town of Anqa as a close to mirror picture of Dura-Europos, of the identical measurement, comparable composition, and probably equal worth to students of the area.
Anqa is situated simply throughout the Syrian border from Dura-Europos, within the present-day Al-Qaim district of the Anbar Governorate in Iraq. Its stays embody an figuring out inform mound, on the northern finish of the positioning, a polygonal interior wall circuit, and a big outer defensive wall, or enceinte. Located at some extent the place the Euphrates floodplain drastically narrows, town would have managed motion between the populous part of the valley upstream and the commerce route downstream linking Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, and Babylonia, giving it nice strategic and financial significance. Nonetheless, the positioning was ignored fully by archaeologists till the 1850 publication of a British Center Euphrates expedition survey. A extra thorough research of the positioning was carried out within the late Nineteen Thirties by Aurel Stein, together with aerial images of the standing constructions, however even after these forays, there was little want to be taught greater than the geographical location of this twin metropolis to Dura-Europos.
One motive for the disparity in curiosity between Anqa and Dura-Europos, posits article writer Simon James, is the historical past of British and French colonial intervention within the area. In 1920, because of the San Remo convention, Iraq was seized for British management, and Syria for French. As James writes, the “new political, army, and administrative boundary created a barrier to analysis and understanding of the sooner historical past of the area as a complete.” But whereas Dura-Europos and another websites in Iraq and Syria have suffered from looting, destruction, and civilian loss of life as a consequence of battle within the area, Anqa has remained comparatively untouched. As additional archaeological inquiry is carried out, Anqa could proceed to supply helpful perception into the historical past of the Center Euphrates. And moreover, as strategies of digital scholarship deliver thinkers collectively “regardless of political borders,” the follow of finding out websites like it might even, within the phrases of Simon James, assist “handle the implications of colonialism in archaeology.”
