Something Is Still Buried Where Nobody Has Been Allowed Since The Persians Arrived

When Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC, he was celebrated as a liberator who respected every temple and every god. But within a few generations, the oldest sacred sites of Sumer went silent.
At Eridu, the world's first city, eighteen temples were built on the exact same spot over thousands of years, each one carefully sealed inside the next.
The Sumerians believed this ground sat directly above the Abzu, the hidden realm of Enki where the knowledge of civilization was kept.
Excavators reached the deepest layers in the 1940s, closed the dig in 1949, and the site sat untouched for the next 70 years.
So what did the builders believe was beneath them, and why has the deepest part of Eridu never been reopened?
#archaeology #history