DURHAM, ENGLAND—According to a CNN report, the site of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah has been discovered in Iraq using historical accounts and declassified images taken by American spy satellites in the 1970s. William Deadman of Durham University and his colleagues were using the materials to map archaeological sites in the Middle East when they decided to search for the lost battlefield. Fought in A.D. 636 or 637, the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah marked the victory of an Arab Muslim army over forces from the Sasanian Empire, which ruled modern-day Iran between A.D. 224 and 651. The Arab Muslim fighters drove the Sasanians out of the region, Deadman explained, allowing the expansion of Muslim territory beyond Arabia. The researchers used information from historical texts to plot areas of interest on the satellite images, and then took a closer look at farmland in the Najaf Governorate where the circles overlapped. They soon spotted traces of a fort and the double-wall feature recorded in the sources. “I couldn’t believe it,” Deadman said. Archaeologists in Iraq investigated the features on the ground and confirmed the findings, noting that the military outpost at al-‘Udhayb appears to have been quarried, while much of the six-mile wall has been destroyed or repurposed as fencing. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. To read about a 6,000-year-old city in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan that eventually fell under Sasanian and Muslim rule, go to "Erbil Revealed."
