TEHRAN – A submerged city, estimated to date some 3,400 years, has emerged from a reservoir on Iraq’s Tigris River after months of extreme drought.

Earlier this year, a team of German and Kurdish archaeologists uncovered the ancient settlement from the Mittani Empire when water levels fell rapidly.

Sources say the city was once located on the banks of the Tigris River and is believed to have been the city of Zakhiku, an important center for the Mittani Empire, which lasted from around 1550 to 1350 BC.

“Around 3,800 years ago, traders in the ancient city of Zakhiku would wait for wooden beams, cut down from the forests in the mountains in the north and east of Mesopotamia – spanning what is today Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Turkey, Iran, and Syria – to float down the Tigris River,” Al Jazeera wrote on Nov. 15.

Zakhiku was a prosperous city in its heyday. From the same mountainous regions in what is present-day Turkey and Iran, merchants transporting metals and minerals such as gold, silver, tin, and copper would travel by donkey or camel to Zakhiku.

Evidence suggests that Zakhiku was founded around 1,800 BC by the Old Babylonian Empire that ruled Mesopotamia between the 19th and 15th centuries BC. With only water and soil in the area, Zakhiku was established to take advantage of the traffic of caravans and a flourishing trade route in the Near East, which includes the present-day Middle East, Turkey and Egypt.

The ancient city disappeared altogether in the 1980s, when– as part of the Mosul Dam project, built under the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein –it was flooded and submerged. As the water levels fell, the ancient town emerged earlier this year, this time as a haven for archaeologists and history buffs.

AM