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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) It is here, in today's desert plains of Mesopotamia,

that the first cities appeared 3,500 years before our era.

When in the 19th century we discover the remains of their gigantic palace,

it is a shock.

There are the origins of writing

and the traces of an urban revolution

that allowed the emergence of the first cities.

But we still do not know almost everything about these cities

that are too vast to be explored

when, in the second half of the 20th century,

the region is closed to archaeologists.

Because the heart of ancient Mesopotamia,

this cradle of our civilizations,

is today Iraq.

Ravaged for more than 30 years by a succession of conflicts

that culminated with the occupation of the north of the country

by the fanatics of the Islamic State.

The violence of the aggression it suffered

has suddenly recalled the universal scope of this heritage

and triggered a movement of solidarity of unprecedented magnitude.

Dozens of teams from all over the world

have been reinvesting since 2019 all the major sites of the country

to try to save what can still be.

These researchers rely today on the tools of an archaeology of the 21st century

that have never been used on these sites.

And what they discover is beyond all hope.

Mysteries of the creation of the first Sumerian cities,

to the extent of the Assyrian capitals,

the testimonies of this essential page of our history

are still buried in the ground of Iraq.

After decades of silence

and the fever of a country in full reconstruction,

the Mesopotamian cities are today beginning to reveal their secrets.

In the middle of the 19th century,

at the heart of the Ottoman Empire,

European archaeologists discover the first traces of Mesopotamian civilizations.

They fascinate visitors to the museums of Paris, London or Berlin.

On the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates,

the sites of dozens of cities,

much older than those of the Greeks or the Romans,

are little by little identified.

Their exploration reveals the remains of gigantic palaces and temples

built in hollow bricks.

And tens of thousands of texts

inscribed in the oldest writing of humanity,

the cuneiform.

A chapter totally forgotten in human history suddenly reappears.

More than 5,000 years ago,

in the south of Mesopotamia,

the Sumerian civilization gave birth to the first cities of humanity.

And with them appeared the first states, the first kingdoms.

3,000 years later,

another civilization, that of the Assyrians,

built gigantic fortified capitals there.

The first megacities in the world.

It is one of the last Mesopotamian civilizations

to occupy the region before its invasion by the Persians.

Originating from the city of Ashur,

north of Mesopotamia,

the Assyrian kings have dominated for nearly five centuries

the entire Fertile Crescent

and constituted the first real empire that the earth bore.

These warlords with unlimited resources

were also great builders.

In less than three centuries,

they have endowed their empire with three new successive capitals.

Kalku, Dursharoukine and Nineveh,

the largest cities in the world at their time.

These legendary sites are all located in northern Iraq

around the modern city of Mosul,

several times killed in recent history.

In 2004, during the second Gulf War,

then from 2014 to 2017,

when the Islamic State made its capital in Iraq,

it was then the epicenter of many atrocities,

including the destructions

that scandalized the international community.

This is where the looting of the Assyrian jewels

of the city's museum was staged.

From the liberation of Mosul in 2017,

the Kalku-Dursharoukine and Nineveh

The team from this museum

got involved in an unimaginable undertaking.

The reconstruction of five monumental statues,

destroyed with an explosive,

then with a pickaxe,

before the departure of the terrorists.

We fight with time.

We do everything we can to go back in time,

to reconstruct these pieces,

bring them back to life

and bring life back to this sublime museum.

Touched by the resilience of the Iraqis,

the Louvre Museum

got involved in this incredible project.

It was symbolically fundamental

not to let anyone think

that we could destroy,

impunely,

multi-millennial works

and that we would stay there.

Danielle Ibled leads the team of specialists

sent on the ground.

We were commissioned by the Louvre Museum

to set up a team of restaurateurs

used to work on this kind of problem,

large-scale poles.

The idea was to come to Mosul very regularly

to train and especially

accompany the team of the museum.

This is gypsy albatross.

It's a fairly tender stone

which breaks quite irregularly

and which poses us a lot of problems

in terms of reassembling.

But for the Iraqis,

this reconstruction work is above all

a work of memory,

a legacy for the future.

Their choice, as I understand it,

is to say that it is precisely

a symbolic restoration

and that it is therefore very important

to keep track of what happened to them.

So we will have in the open Mosul Museum

works that will be

structurally reformed

but not to the point

of hiding their injuries.

Like its museum,

the city of Mosul is in full reconstruction.

It is in this frantic context

that the Italian-Iraqi team

of Niccolo Marchetti

of the University of Bologna

was one of the first to respond

to the call of the authorities

of the Iraqi heritage

to intervene right in front

of the old city of Mosul

on the site of the ancient Nineveh.

Last capital of the Assyrian Empire,

Nineveh is a legendary city

that has made the dreams of generations

of archaeologists.

In 1847,

under the main hill of the site,

the British host Henry Layard

discovered the ruins of a gigantic palace.

These walls were decorated

with three kilometers of low-relief frieze

illustrating the conquests

of the king Sennacherib,

who ruled the Assyrian Empire

around 700 BC.

Then, a little further,

the remains of the palace

of his grandson Assurbanipal,

one of the last great Assyrian rulers.

It contained its famous library

with nearly 30,000 cuneiform texts

that constituted

one of the most important bases

of knowledge on Mesopotamia.

For nearly a century,

archaeologists have regularly

come to explore this citadel

and enrich the museums of their findings.

Of this huge hill,

only a few remains remain

devastated by decades of abandonment,

looting

and recent destruction.

But they actually represent

only a small part of the site.

Because Nineveh is a very old city

whose king Sennacherib

multiplied the area by four

when he made it his capital.

The ruins of its 12-kilometer-long rampart

now delimit a site

more than 7 square kilometers

still largely unexplored.

But a terrible threat

now weighs on this exceptional site.

In the 19th century,

when it was discovered,

it was isolated

on the eastern bank of the Tigris,

opposite Mosul.

Over the last decades,

the modern city has developed

around it and has even already

penetrated inside,

definitively condemning it

to almost a third.

What remains of the site of Nineveh

is the only unbuilt space

in the heart of a city

of 4 million inhabitants,

of which nearly 900,000

found themselves homeless

at the end of the war.

I had dreamed,

a bit like everyone else,

to come and search Nineveh.

But I imagined it as it was

in the 19th century.

Today, it is a postmodern experience.

Working in the heart of a city

on fire, which confronts you

every day with immediate problems

very difficult to solve,

it is very challenging.

But that is also why we are here.

To try to protect the site

from the pressure of the modern city,

Niccolo Marchetti

and the University of Bologna

proposed to the University of Mosul

as well as the authorities of the heritage

and the city to join forces

around an ambitious project,

to make the site an archaeological park

that could constitute

an important tourist attraction

for Mosul.

Several monumental gates

of the ancient city,

rebuilt by the Iraqis

in the 1960s,

made the inhabitants proud

before being razed by Daesh in 2014.

In order to make the park project

accepted by the population,

it was by the restoration of one of these gates

that the team began its work in 2018.

The Hadad Gate,

in the name of the god of thunder,

of the Assyrians.

To start this search of a particular kind,

the largest crane in Mosul

was requisitioned

in order to clear the concrete slabs

of the modern reconstruction

that had collapsed on the remains

of the Assyrian Gate.

Once the pile of earth and gravel

an excellent surprise awaited the archaeologists.

The arch of 10 m high

through which the king Sennacherib

entered his capital

was still standing.

Despite the destruction

and the attempts to make it disappear,

the gate remained intact.

This makes it a unique monument in the world.

The team then managed

to reopen access to the site

through this gate

without damaging the original Assyrian arch.

The restored Hadad Gate

and its unique arch in the world

will constitute, in the heart of Mosul,

the entrance to the future

archaeological park of Niniveh.

Inside the building,

the search brought to light

a series of raised slabs,

or orthostates,

which bordered the walls.

Their study revealed the presence of inscriptions

which, after 3,000 years,

made the words of the king's builder resonate again.

All these slabs

carry an inscription,

but upside down,

because it was intended for the gods,

not for humans.

This inscription says,

I, Sennacherib,

king of Assyria,

king of the four parts of the world,

have built the walls of Niniveh

and I have named them

terror of my enemies.

In 612 BC,

the fall of these walls

and the destruction of the city

by the armies of Babylon

marked the end of Assyrian civilization.

A little further on this rampart,

the work on a second door

reveals a magnificent work

still totally unknown.

A large stone channel

which crossed this wall

more than 30 meters wide

to bring water into the city.

Built at an angle

relative to the axis of the rampart,

this channel is 42 meters long.

The engineers of Sennacherib

had remarkable construction techniques.

The blocks are perfectly adjusted.

There is no space between the stones.

To supply water

its huge capital,

Sennacherib had built

five centuries before the Romans

a huge network of canals

including several monumental ducts.

It will of course be in the future

a great tourist attraction.

It is a monumental work

and of great interest.

These discoveries,

carried out in the urgency

of the beginning of the work,

feed all the hopes for the future.

Because for researchers,

the real stake

is what the gigantic city

that extended inside this wall could reveal.

It represents 700 hectares.

It is an unimaginable area.

This is why we have opened

construction sites in different sectors.

To try to quickly have

a first glimpse of the organization

of this city, the team decided

to take part in 11 huge trenches

opened to bulldozers by DAESH

in different places of the site

to store fuel and cereals.

Near the Adad Gate,

three of them showed signs

of the presence of construction

just below the surface.

We had seen in the section

of the trench traces of tiled soil,

walls and tiles.

So we decided

to search this area

where there was clearly

a very complex construction.

We must be here,

in the domestic part

of a monumental building.

On the other side of the trench,

the search met

another imposing building.

Near the city gate,

composed of numerous rooms,

it is undoubtedly a public building

and it quickly delivered

an exceptional finding.

We found in this area

and also here

and in this part too

a huge amount of tablets.

It was a really unique experience,

a euphoric moment

because you can spend

a whole life as an archaeologist

without ever discovering an archive.

It does not really happen

every day,

so a library

was really overwhelming.

This collection

of a hundred tablets

is the first to be discovered

in Nineveh since the 19th century.

And the nature

of these documents

is also unusual.

These are not administrative documents,

but scholarly texts,

literary, religious,

magical.

The most extraordinary thing

is that most of them are not copies

but unique, new texts

composed in the last years

of the Assyrian Empire.

All these original texts

are currently being studied

but new findings already give

clues about the nature of the building

where they were found.

Today we think

that this place was a scriptorium

like those of the medieval monasteries,

the place where the tablets

were concretely engraved.

And that too is a unique discovery.

Each new site is a window

that opens on this gigantic city

of the first millennium.

In the northeast corner of the site,

the extension of two other trenches

suddenly illuminates a new day

a vast area without any relief,

traditionally considered

as a garden sector

or a shepherd of the ancient city.

We have set up two buildings

separated by this small street

or rather alley.

These are structures of domestic

and handcrafted housing.

As you can see, there are channels,

benches.

We can see these lattices

and benches suggesting

a domestic production.

Despite the metallic pollution

of the site that hinders their interpretation,

first geomagnetic surveys

confirm that the entire area

was in fact occupied

by a dense neighborhood

of popular housing

of the ancient city.

We can see many buildings

and also the streets

surrounding these buildings.

On a scientific level,

we collect an incredible amount of data.

Until now, we only knew

the palaces of the citadel.

We are now beginning to have an idea

of the city's organization.

As the work progresses,

it is the entire structure

of the city of Sennacherib

that gradually reveals itself,

while sometimes delivering

fleeting first glimpses

of the daily life of its inhabitants.

Under a layer of ash

due to the fire of the building

during the fall of the city,

Claudia's team discovered

a series of small precious objects

perhaps lost by inhabitants

who tried to escape

to escape the armies of Babylon.

It is a figurine representing a demon,

not Zouzou.

It is undoubtedly the fire

that allowed its preservation.

In October 2022,

another team of archaeologists

engaged in the restoration

of a third gate of the ancient city

destroyed by Daesh,

the Mashki Gate,

saw its efforts rewarded

by a discovery that dazzled

the international community.

The reconstruction work is very important

to the revival of tourism in Iraq,

but above all,

we are here to defend cultural memory,

cultural diversity

and freedom of expression.

That's what Daesh was trying

to destroy here,

and we are fighting

against these attempts

of cultural cleansing.

By digging out

an unknown room

where they thought

they would find the staircase

leading to the rampart,

they rediscovered the emotions

of the first explorers

of the 19th century.

We were digging down

from the surface

and we traced the top of these slabs

that we thought were identical

to those in the hall

and that have no designs on them.

But as we began to dig down

with the right lighting,

we could see that there were

mountain shapes on several

of these slabs.

At first we thought

it was our imagination,

but as we took away

the slope of the destruction

in 612 B.C.,

Omar began finding

the two bows of his archers

and then the hand

and the arm,

and immediately his eyes lit up.

He said,

Michael, come over here.

And we looked in between

and we saw that it looked

as if it were brand new.

As we dug lower and lower,

with each swipe of the trowel,

we could see that these reliefs

were incredibly well preserved,

certainly well preserved

for the palace of Sennacherib.

I visited the British Museum

when I was doing my studies

in Great Britain.

I saw low reliefs,

but from afar,

because there was an electric alarm.

And I couldn't get close.

Now I can sit right in front

and touch them with my hand.

What I feel,

there are no words to describe it.

As an archaeologist,

I would never have imagined

one day discovering low reliefs

in Syria,

especially those of Sennacherib.

It's really a dream come true.

Like a phoenix reborn from its ashes,

it's all the Assyrian archaeology

that is reviving today.

The real question now is

what will we find in the room

which is further south?

This year, we want to open

a first sector of the site to the public.

It is essential

because if we don't do this,

we won't be able to show

how much this project should benefit

the whole community.

Despite the destructions

it has suffered,

and even if an important part

of the site is now lost,

Ninive promises

fabulous discoveries

for the decades to come.

It has everything to teach us

about the last moments

of Assyrian civilization

and the degree of sophistication

achieved by Mesopotamian urbanism

at the time when Rome

had just been founded.

But Ninive is not the only site

to have preserved the memory

of the incredible capitals

built by the Assyrians

in the first millennia.

Just 15 km north-east of Mossul,

another gem of this heritage

also benefits from this great return

of Mesopotamian archaeologists.

Located practically

on the Kurdistan border,

on the lands of the village of Korsabad,

Dur-Sharoukine is the first

Assyrian site discovered

in the 19th century.

The French consuls in Mossul,

Paul-Émile Botta and Victor Place,

revealed the remains

of a huge palace

remarkably preserved.

When the bulls with human heads

and the winged genies

protecting their monumental doors

were exhibited at the Louvre,

they aroused extraordinary enthusiasm.

A world still totally unknown

to the public,

like that of researchers,

was suddenly revealed.

It is the initial nucleus

of the collection of oriental antiquity

of the Louvre.

It is the beginning

of Mesopotamian archaeology,

more broadly of oriental archaeology.

It is thanks to these vestiges

and the inscriptions they bear

that we will, in just ten years,

decipher the Assyrians.

These texts taught us

that Dur-Sharoukine was a unique city

of its kind,

born of the dream of King Sargon II,

the father of Sennacherib.

A gigantic new town

he built in 707 BC

to make it the capital

of the empire he was conquering.

This ideal city,

designed to be the center of a world

led by the Assyrians,

was built in just ten years,

using the resources

of all the provinces of the empire.

But apart from these texts,

Dur-Sharoukine remains

essentially an enigma.

Abandoned by the French in 1855,

the site was only reinvested

70 years later by the researchers

of the Oriental Institute of Chicago.

They resumed the search

of certain sectors

of the gigantic palace of Sargon

and brought to the United States

some spectacular statues and bas-reliefs.

They opened the lower terrace

of the citadel,

where they put up a temple

and two new smaller palaces.

But the city itself

remains unexplored.

And from 1935,

the permanent tensions in the region

permanently prohibit

access to archaeologists.

In 2014,

its occupation by the Islamic State

right on the front line

separating it from the Kurdish Peshmerga

suddenly puts it back

at the center of attention.

It is feared that it suffered

the same destruction as the other

great Assyrian sites of Kalku and Nineveh.

In December 2015,

by sending a drone

from the positions of the Peshmerga,

a team specialized in the digital conservation

of heritage sites

manages to fly over Korsabad.

From the thousands of images

taken by this drone,

it calculates,

thanks to a photogrammetry program,

a real digital copy

of the site in 3D.