But Torun says the aqueduct is something entirely new and exciting.
“If you water this, it will go further and accelerate. They knew all the important factors and they knew what they were doing.
“We haven’t seen any other examples like this in ancient Mesopotamia. If you look at the walls of the bridge, they slope outwards. This increases the flow even more, but as far as we know , no one knew about this until the 20th century.”
The Girsu Channel even has a “sharp drop” in its center, a feature found in modern waterways that facilitates the Venturi effect, and which the Sumerians were likely aware of.
There is evidence that this structure was built on top of an earlier structure that followed the same design, suggesting that water acceleration technology was known to the Sumerians for thousands of years before it was thought to have been created. doing.
But climate change and river flow changes in Mesopotamia during the second millennium BC were too powerful for Sumerian ingenuity to contain.
Inside the temple complex, white bands can be seen in the soil layer made from consecrated ashes that the Sumerians scattered on sacred sites believed to have been forsaken by the gods, marking the site of the abandonment by the inhabitants of Girsu in 1750 BC. There is. City.