Archaeologists find early Islamic battle site in Iraq using 1970s spy satellite images

Battle of Al Qadisiyyah marked spread of Islam to Persia in the 7th century and has huge cultural significance in Arab world

Researcher Dr Jaafar al Jotheri explores the site of the Battle of Al Qadisiyah. AP

Archaeologists have located the site of an important 7th-century battle in southern Iraq by using Cold War satellite imagery to “wind the clock back” to trace its whereabouts.

The Battle of Al Qadisiyyah, which took place in Mesopotamia in 637AD, was decisive in the defeat of the Sassanid Empire and marked the spread of Islam from its Arabian heartland into ancient Persia.

The pivotal battle remains part of the core curriculum for students of Arabic history. Despite this, modern scholars only knew of its approximate location until now. A joint team of archaeologists from Durham University in the UK and the University of Al Qadisiyyah in Iraq stumbled across the site while undertaking a remote sensing survey to map the Darb Zubaydah, a Hajj pilgrimage route from Iraq’s Kufa to Makkah in Saudi Arabia.

Location of the Al Qadisiyyah survey area in south-western Iraq. Photo: Modis imagery courtesy of Nasa, figure by WM Deadman

While mapping the route, the team noticed that a site some 30km (20 miles) south of Kufa in southern Iraq’s Najaf province, had features that closely matched the description of the Al Qadisiyyah battle site described in historic texts. The team were able to use formerly classified images of the region from the 1970s, which gave a clearer image of the area's landscape before it was significantly altered by modern agriculture and urban sprawl. A survey on the ground confirmed the findings and convinced the team that they had correctly identified the site.

The key features were a deep trench, two fortresses and an ancient river that was reportedly once forded by elephant-mounted Persian troops, said Jaafar Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at the University of Al Qadisiyyah who is part of the team that made the discovery. The survey team also found pottery shards consistent with the time period when the battle took place.

“The amazing thing about this spy imagery is that it allows us to wind back the clock 50 years,” one of the authors of the study, Dr William Deadman, told The National. “There has been an incredible amount of agricultural and urban expansion in the Middle East over that period, and so being able to see how the landscape would have looked prior to all this taking place makes finding sites a lot easier.”

Spy satellite imagery showed how the region looked in the 1970s. Photo: United States Geological Survey.

Dr Deadman said the battle was a “pivotal” moment in the early conquest of Islam across the region, and that hopes the research will inspire more research into Sasanian and early Islamic archaeology in Iraq, a topic which he described as “incredibly rich but under-researched”. He said Cold War-era satellite images are commonly used by archaeologists working in the Middle East because the older images often show features that have been destroyed or altered, and so would not show up on present-day satellite images.

Dr Deadman said he is extremely confident that the historical evidence points to this being where the battle took place, and that the team plans to begin excavations at the site in the coming year. “The exact location of the battlefield is a bit more tricky as there is nothing visible on the imagery to locate it,” he said. “However, the historical descriptions do allow us to narrow down the most likely location to a very small area, and we hope that future field survey will pinpoint the battlefield exactly if it still survives.”

The findings also enhanced understanding of the Darb Zubaydah Hajj road between Iraq and Makkah, a 1,000km routeway which is more than 1,000 years old and a contender to become a Unesco World Heritage Site.

A desert area with features that closely match the description of the Al Qadisiyyah battle site described in historic texts. AP

The discovery was made as part of a wider project. The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project (Eamena) is a collaboration between the universities of Oxford, Durham and Leicester, and is funded by Arcadia. The findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.

It also comes during a resurgence of archaeology in Iraq, a country often referred to as the “cradle of civilisation”, but where archaeological exploration has been stunted by decades of conflict that halted excavations and led to the looting of tens of thousands of artefacts. In recent years, the digs have returned and thousands of stolen artefacts have been repatriated.