CHICAGO (Reuters) - Bronze Age residents of what is now modern-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey traded and traveled more widely along a network of highways than previously thought, archeologists studying newly released U.S. spy photographs said on Monday.
Around 5,000 years ago, wheeled wagons navigated along wide dirt roads that extended dozens of miles across the fertile prairies of northern Iraq and its neighboring states, and probably to the Mediterranean Sea, the research showed.
"We assumed that these ancient sites were pretty parochial, but in fact they were tied together by well-traveled highways," said University of Chicago archeologist Tony Wilkinson, who coauthored a paper on the findings to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Antiquity.
Domesticated agriculture was already well established by the Bronze Age period under study, having emerged thousands of years earlier further south in Mesopotamia where the physical evidence of trading routes disappeared long ago in the wetter soils.
To the drier north, remnants of the spoke-like system of roads were still readily visible when the satellite photographs were snapped in the Cold War-era 1960s and 1970s by U.S. spy agencies searching the region for Soviet-made weapons. Thousands of photos have been declassified in recent years.
The detailed aerial views made it possible for the archeologists to map the extensive network of roads linking Bronze Age towns that housed as many as 20,000 residents each.
Smaller byways that split off from the larger roads were likely used by ancient herders to direct their livestock past cultivated fields to the pastures beyond. Where the roads fade out provided clues to the amount of land under cultivation and the size of the region's agrarian economy, Wilkinson said.
Users of the ancient highways may have even been taxed, Wilkinson said, just like modern-day toll roads.
Cuneiform texts written by the Akkadians, a ruling dynasty in southern Iraq, give the names of stopping places along the ancient roads.
"You get written itineraries for this period of the Akkadians who were constantly staging (military) campaigns through this area to the Mediterranean Sea. They even campaigned through to Cypress," Wilkinson said.
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