Archaeologists make dark discovery about ancient slave labor in Iraq

New testing confirmed archaeologists' theory that a system of thousands of canals and ridges across a floodplain in southern Iraq indicated slave labor in the region.

The massive agricultural system was initially believed to have been built by slave labor, which was proven by further testing by an international team of archaeologists who found the construction spanning several centuries.

It starts around the time the slave rebellion began in the 9th century AD.

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Enslaved people in the region are referred to as "Zanj," a medieval Arabic term for the East African Swahili coast. However, there are differing theories about their actual origins in Africa.

The enslaved people carried out a famous large-scale revolt in Iraq in 869 AD under the Abbasid state, known today as the “Zanj rebellion.”

The rebellion lasted for more than a decade until the Abbasid state regained control of the region in 883 A.D.

Many descendants of formerly enslaved people reside in the southern port city of Basra, located in modern-day Iraq.

According to Jaafar Jotheri, an archaeology professor at the University of Al-Qadisiyah in Iraq who partook in the research, "their history has not been actually written or documented very well in our history."

"So that’s why this (finding) is very important, and what is next actually is to protect at least some of these huge structures for future work. It is minority heritage," Jotheri added.

Jotheri joined a team of researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands, the University of Basra in Iraq, and Newcastle and Durham universities in the United Kingdom.

Researchers reviewed recent satellite imagery and older images from the 1960s that showed the remains of more than 7,000 massive manmade ridges across the floodplain.

Published in the journal Antiquity, the report said that the scale of the agricultural system indicated the "investment of human labor on a grand scale."

Researchers used radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating to analyze the sites.

The ridge crests date back to between the late ninth and mid-13th century A.D., situating their construction during the period when slave labor was in use in the area and providing evidence that the use of slave labor likely continued for several centuries after the famous rebellion.

Their findings demonstrate “that these features were in use for a substantially longer period than previously assumed and, as such, they represent an important piece of Iraqi landscape heritage,” the researchers wrote.

The finding comes at the time of a resurgence of archaeology in Iraq, a country often referred to as the “cradle of civilization,” but where archaeological exploration has been stunted by decades of conflict that halted excavations and led to the looting of tens of thousands of artifacts.

In recent years, the digs have returned, and thousands of stolen artifacts have been repatriated.