The palace site, known as Kemune, was until recently covered by water from a reservoir, according to archaeologists.
The Middle East has been home to numerous civilizations over the course of its long and tumultuous history. While the region's past is well-studied, one of these societies we know very little about—the so-called Mittani Empire, which stretched from the Eastern Mediterranean to east of modern-day northern Iraq during the 15th and 14th centuries B.C.
The palace site, known as Kemune, was first discovered in 2010. Until recently it was covered by water from the Mosul Dam reservoir. However, last autumn, these waters receded in the face of a drought. A joint German-Kurdish team was then able to investigate the remains for the first time. Kemune is thought to date to the time of the Mittani Empire.
These excavations revealed a palace building, which would have once stood on an elevated terrace, majestically overlooking the river valley. Made of mud bricks, the palace contains huge walls, which in some places are up to 6.5 feet high. "We have also found remains of wall paintings in bright shades of red and blue," Ivana Puljiz, another researcher involved in the project from the Tübingen Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies , said in a statement."In the second millennium B.C., murals were probably a typical feature of palaces in the Ancient Near East, but we rarely find them preserved. So discovering wall paintings in Kemune is an archaeological sensation.
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