Cold War spy satellites

Ander Izaguirre is the author of Return to the country of Elkano. It is a book that mixes travel chronicle with adventure narration. The story begins in Guetaria, where he returns after touring the Basque country by bicycle, taking as the backbone of history the figure of Juan Sebastián Elcano, considered the first person to complete a complete circumnavigation of the world.

An idea is repeated several times in the book: the world has always been much more connected than we think. The starting point, in this case, is something that happened more than 500 years ago. What could the life of a person who crossed the planet five centuries ago be like when there are still people today who do not go beyond the borders of their country or their hometown?

In its pages it talks about the connections between empires and geopolitical struggles to control trade routes. Sometimes, it is difficult to understand how in those days a person could travel thousands of kilometers and metropolises could trade with each other.

But, personally, I find it much more complicated to imagine JUlius Caesar traveling along the Nile or Cleopatra living in Rome on the edge of the new year count with its Julian calendar. We are talking about a handful of years prior to the supposed birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Imagine if we go back further.

As much as 4,000 years. That is, around the year 2,000 BC In two leaps we have begun to ask ourselves how our world could be interconnected just 500 years ago to how it would be more than 4,000 years ago.

And to that question, some archaeologists believe they have found an answer.

A river highway in Mesopotamia

And our colleagues Motorpassion They bring us the story of one of those discoveries that will delight history fans.

For many years it has been known that mesopotamian cities They have been using an intricate system of tunnels and water management for their irrigation for thousands of years. The invention was so effective that by adding all the conduits that have been active at some point, it is believed that it may have the same distance as there is between the Earth and the Moon, according to National Geographic.

These tunnels were used, as we say, to move water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers but also to serve as a refuge for the inhabitants of these cities, both from the scorching heat of the desert and from possible enemy invasions.

This has been, until last year, what was thought. And using spy images and the use of LiDAR, research has continued to advance until making sense of a new use of these channels. According to the researchers who have developed Identifying the preserved network of irrigation canals in the Eridu region, southern Mesopotamia, published by the University of Cambridge, These canals would also serve as a river highway to trade between towns.

In the 1960s, the United States launched a spy satellite project called CROWN. These satellites took photographs of the terrain in the middle of the Cold War and the declassified file has allowed researchers to detect subtle changes in the terrain that are impossible to detect from the ground.

The photographs revealed small differences in the vegetation, which shows commercial roads and passenger traffic for millennia. But using LiDAR, researchers have also managed to bring to light some cities that were hidden, as was the case of an extension near Abarkuh where those famous canals were discovered.

The great discovery, however, has been to verify that these canals were not only used to transport water through complex hydraulic systems or to cool the environment. Everything indicates according to the latter research which were also used to move goods, resources and wealth between city-states such as Ur, Uruk, Lagash or Eridu.

With this discovery, it is considered that we are facing one of the oldest and most extensive logistics networks in history and the key to understanding how grain, copper, wood or precious stones were traded then thanks to flat-bottomed ships that would move through these canals and not only through the visible bed of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Photo | Semhur and Ali sabih kadhim

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