Archaeologists working in Iraq’s Sulaymaniyah province said they uncovered a 5,000-year-old structure at the Kani Shaie mound in September, according to Newsam.
The architectural style of the structure points to an official role, possibly as a temple or “worship space,” and that its scale could reshape views of Uruk’s influence over surrounding regions, Archaeology Magazine noted.
The University of Coimbra stated that fieldwork, under way since 2013, dated the building to roughly 3300–3100 BCE—the Uruk period—and placed it about 480 kilometers north of Uruk, far beyond the plain long considered the cradle of early urbanism.
The team found walls with pointed conical shapes and numerous baked-clay wall cones, a decorative element usually reserved for Uruk’s monumental architecture.
Researchers from the University of Coimbra, the University of Algarve, the University of Cambridge and the Slemani Antiquities and Heritage Directorate suggested the structure served as a temple or administrative center linking city-states with the highlands.
Cylinder seals associated with bureaucratic authority and a fragmentary gold pendant indicated political power and wealth at the settlement.
Uruk itself, a southern Mesopotamian metropolis housing tens of thousands between 3300 and 3100 BCE, pioneered ziggurat construction and a grid street plan that influenced later cities.
“Kani Shaie is regarded as the most important archaeological site east of the Tigris River for understanding the sequence of human occupation from the Early Bronze Age through to the 3rd millennium BCE,” said the research team, according to Youm7.
Experts told Youm7 that the newly exposed building in the Zagros foothills could prompt scholars to reconsider how early urban architecture and administrative technologies spread beyond the Mesopotamian plain.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.