Skeleton of the "Giant King" Uncovered in Iraq — What Archaeologists Found Next Will Shock You

In 2003, archaeologists found a sealed city under the Iraqi desert and shared news that should have shocked the world, the burial place of a king who knew everything. Three weeks later war stopped the dig. What is still buried in those walls? They had been digging in southern Iraq, working the dry flat land south of the modern city of Nasiriyah, following survey information that pointed to a spot that matched the ancient city of Uruk. Uruk is not a made-up city. It is one of the most important urban centers we know about from archaeology, the world's first real city by most definitions. It was home to a population of maybe 50,000 people at its biggest around 3000 BC. It was the city that gave Mesopotamia its name for the whole region of Iraq. The German team had been carefully studying the land around Uruk, mapping things under the ground with ground-penetrating radar and satellite images. What the radar showed them under the desert surface was a city, not the remains of a city. A city kept in amazing condition by the dryness of the southern Iraqi desert, sealed under the dirt that had piled up on it across 5,000 years of being left alone. Houses, gardens, fields and canals ran between the living areas in a pattern that the team's plant expert, Georg Fassbinder, described in press materials that spread briefly before everything changed as a kind of Venice in the desert. A city lay out of amazing skill, kept whole under the ground. And on the edge of the site, separate from the living areas, different in its shape and the way it was placed, the radar showed something that matched a very specific description that had existed in written form for nearly 4,000 years. It looked like the burial place described in the Epic of Gilgamesh. I want to be careful here about what the team actually said and what the evidence actually showed, because this story has been twisted in both ways, made too simple into a claim that Gilgamesh's tomb was found, and also dismissed as fringe speculation with no real basis in archaeology. The truth is more interesting and more frustrating than either side. What the German team found, confirmed by Fassbinder to the BBC in April 2003, was a site that matched the written description closely enough to be taken seriously. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest story written down in human history and coming before Homer by 1,500 years, describes the burial of Gilgamesh in specific ways. The river was moved aside. The tomb was built in the riverbed. The river was put back in its place. The burial place was sealed under flowing water, hidden, protected and kept safe. The radar data at the Uruk site showed a structure on the edge of the old canal system whose shape was a match for exactly this kind of building. A burial chamber placed where a river channel had been, surrounded by signs of old water engineering. Was it Gilgamesh's tomb? The team did not claim that. What Fassbinder said was that the site matched the description in the Epic and that digging was the obvious and necessary next step. Digging never happened. Three weeks after the announcement, the United States invaded Iraq. I want to talk about the timing directly and honestly, because the timing is where the story most easily gets twisted. The United States invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003. The German archaeological announcement had spread in early April 2003. The order is actually the opposite of the most telling. The invasion began before the announcement was widely shared, not after. What is true is that the invasion made digging impossible. The unsafe conditions, the moving of universities and research groups, the breakdown of the Iraqi systems that had helped international archaeological work. All of it ended. The chance to follow up on what the radar had shown. Whether that matters depends on what you believe about the site. If it was an amazingly well-kept ancient urban complex that matched the described burial place of the most famous king in Mesopotamian history, then yes, the stopping of that work by a military invasion matters and that fact deserves to be said clearly. Important things were not found. Important questions were not answered. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is what happened. But to understand why those unanswered questions matter, you need to understand who Gilgamesh was and what the Epic says about him. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a real ancient text. Clay tablets holding parts of it have been found at several sites across Mesopotamia, with the most complete version, the standard Babylonian version, put together from 12 tablets found in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the 19th century by the British archaeologist Austin Henry Layard. Layard shipped thousands of tablet pieces to the British Museum. George Smith, working as an engraver at the museum, taught himself cuneiform and spent years putting the pieces together. In 1872 he read a passage that he recognized right away, a flood story older than Genesis, telling about a survivor who built a boat, let birds go to find land and came to rest on a mountain. Smith reportedly ripped off his clothes and ran around the room. What he had found was the written tradition that gave the biggest story in Western religion. Written in Akkadian on clay tablets that were already old when the Bible was written. The Epic of Gilgamesh did not borrow from Genesis. Genesis borrowed, through a long chain of written sharing and cultural contact, from Mesopotamia. The Sumerian flood story was older. The Sumerian survivor Utnapishtim in the Akkadian version, Ziusidra in the older Sumerian, was the original. Noah came later in a literary family line that runs from the river valleys of Iraq to the Hebrew Bible to the building of Western civilization. But the flood story is just one part of a longer story. The Epic of Gilgamesh is mainly about a king. Gilgamesh ruled Uruk. The Sumerian king list the clay prism in the Museum at Oxford that lists the kings of Sumer before and after the flood, includes him. He is listed as the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk after the flood, with a reign of 126 years. His father is listed as a demon. His mother is the goddess Ninsun. By the king list, he is a historical figure placed in the same document that lists real Sumerian kings confirmed by archaeology. The Epic describes him differently from the official record. It says he was two-thirds divine and one-third human. It says his body was amazing, his good looks described in ways that suggest a physical presence beyond normal humans. It says he had knowledge that no other human being had. He had seen the secret things, had been to the ends of the earth, had come back from distances no other man had traveled, and had written on a lapis lazuli tablet everything that he had learned. A lapis lazuli tablet. Written stored. The Epic says this tablet was sealed in Uruk. Not hidden by accident, but carefully kept. The building tradition of foundation deposits, objects buried on purpose in the foundations of buildings to be kept forever, has been documented through archaeology all over Mesopotamia. Foundation deposits have been found. They hold objects. What they hold, the text says, was Gilgamesh's record of everything he knew. What did Gilgamesh know? The Epic describes his journey to the ends of the earth looking for immortality after the death of his friend Enkidu. He passed through the mountain of the sun, the tunnel through which Utu, the sun god, traveled by night from west to east. He crossed the waters of death. He found Utnapishtim, the flood survivor, the one mortal granted immortality by the gods, living at the edge of existence. He learned from Utnapishtim. He found the plant of rejuvenation at the bottom of the sea. He lost it to a snake. He returned to Uruk. What he brought back was not the plant and not immortality. What he brought back was the knowledge that only he, of all human beings, had gotten through that journey, and he wrote it down on lapis lazuli and sealed it in the walls of his city. Now I want to talk about what happened in Baghdad in the same weeks that the German team's discovery was being talked about, because the two stories meet in ways that deserve careful looking at. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad held around 170,000 objects at the time of the invasion. One of the most important collections of Mesopotamian history in the world. It had artifacts spanning 10,000 years of human civilization in the region, from Neolithic tools to Babylonian official records. Among its holdings were objects that had never been fully studied, sorted, or written about. Artifacts whose importance was known to experts but whose content had not been fully looked at. In the days after Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the museum was robbed. Around 15,000 objects were taken, including pieces from the locked basement storage rooms, areas that needed keys and special knowledge of the building's layout to reach. The careful nature of the theft was noted by investigators, including Colonel Matthew Bogdanoz, who led the later military investigation. Bogdanoz recorded that the pattern of theft pointed to several actors with different levels of access and different goals. Some thefts were just for the moment. Display cases were smashed. Easy-to-see objects were taken. Others were aimed at specific items taken from locked places, reached with clear inside knowledge of what was there and where was kept. Bogdanoz was careful not to say too much beyond what he knew. What the investigation showed was that the pattern was not just random looting. Some part of the theft looked organized and specific. What was specifically taken and by whom was not figured out. I am not saying that the Iraq Museum was robbed to get Mesopotamian technology or ancient knowledge or any of the more dramatic ideas that have been attached to the invasion. What I'm saying is that a collection of priceless historical importance was left unguarded at a moment of military action, that the theft that followed showed signs of organized targeting along with random looting, and that the objects taken have not been fully tracked down. Among the things that were in that museum, Sumerian medical tablets, astronomical records, official documents from periods not yet fully studied, and objects from foundation deposits of ancient Mesopotamian buildings whose contents had not been fully examined. Foundation deposits like the ones in the walls of Uruk. The site that the German radar survey found was never dug. It was a kept city under the southern Iraqi desert and a structure on the edge of the old canal that matched the burial description in the epic. The team left. The invasion went on. The museum was robbed. The tablets that had been coming out of Iraqi soil for over a century kept spreading into private collections, illegal markets and institution collections around the world. Many of them stayed untranslated. Was Gilgamesh real? The kingless says he was. The city he built, Uruk, is real and documented. The walls he built, described in the epic's opening lines as something a future traveler could check, have been found. The foundation deposits in those walls have been located, though not all have been opened. The written lapis lazuli tablet, the epic says he sealed inside those foundations has not been found. Was the structure the German team's radar found the burial place described in the epic? The team thought it matched closely enough to dig. They never got the chance. What was in the Iraq museum that was specifically taken by organized actors during the robbery? The investigation showed that something was targeted. It did not figure out what. What would we find if the foundation deposits of Uruk's walls were fully opened and examined? We do not know. The tablets already recovered from Uruk and nearby represent only a small part of what the site likely holds. The city is huge. The digging work done over more than a century has covered only a portion of it. What is certain is this. The oldest story in human history describes a king who knew things no other human being knew, who wrote what he knew on lapis lazuli, and who sealed that record in the foundations of the city he built, a city that still exists, partly dug in southern Iraq. In 2003, a German archaeological team found what appeared to be the kept remains of that city and a structure matching his described burial place. Three weeks later Iraq was invaded. The dig was abandoned. The museum was robbed. Gilgamesh looked upon the walls of Uruk and is described in the epic as saying to the person who will one day stand where he stood, inspect the foundation. Examine the brickwork. Climb the wall. Look at the foundation deposit of lapis lazuli. The city is there. The walls are there. The foundation deposits have not all been opened. The oldest story ever written describes a man who saw the secret things, knew everything and made sure it would survive. Whatever he put in those walls is either still there or it is not. And we stopped the one chance we had to find out what it was. If you found this video valuable consider giving it a like. If you enjoy stories about ancient civilizations, lost knowledge and history, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know someone who loves archaeology or ancient mysteries, feel free to share this with them. If you have any questions or thoughts, leave them in the comments.