The Assyrian king Sargon II ruled in the eighth century BC and established his capital, Dor-Sharukin, i.e. Sargon Castle in northern Iraq, which is now located in the Nineveh Plain near the city of Mosul.
On Sunday, a joint mission of Italian archaeologists and archaeologists from the Directorate of Antiquities in Dohuk in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq announced the discovery of antiquities dating back to the reign of King Sargon II (721-705 BC) and his son Sennacherib who succeeded him.
Excavators have found industrial wine presses dating back to the Sennacherib era at a site near the village of Khans in Dohuk, explains archaeologist from the Italian University of Udine Bonacossi and co-director of the Italian expedition, Daniele Morandi Bonacossi.
He added in a statement to AFP, “It appears that it was an industrial winery. We found 14 facilities that were used during the squeezing of grapes to extract juice and then turn it into wine,” adding that this is the first discovery of its kind in Iraq.
At the Faida site near Dohuk, the excavators also discovered a nine-kilometer-long irrigation canal that began to be built during the reign of Sargon II. “12 enormous murals” were engraved on its edges dating back to the end of the eighth century BC and the beginning of the seventh century, each of which is five meters wide and two meters long.
It is believed that King Sargon II or his son Sennacherib ordered its carving.
Iraq is a country rich in archaeological sites from north to south, where the civilizations of Mesopotamia flourished from the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. It constituted the first civilizations to depend on an economy based on agriculture with innovations in the field of irrigation, and the cradle of the first written law and the first cities.
But the antiquities of Iraq were looted by wars and crises, especially after the US invasion in 2003, and then after the control of ISIS in 2014.
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