Some cities do not soften out under fire and conquest they fade away as rivers cease to flow. The remains of one of the last foundations of Alexander of Macedon in the southern part of Iraq are the rise of the land in a low terrain, which became the location of Alexandria on the Tigris, the future name of the city Charax SpASinou. Since time immemorial, researchers had regarded the city as definite, though vaguely located, somewhere off the head of the Persian Gulf. It has not been until recently that noninvasive fieldwork can match text to terrain with the necessary degree of accuracy to determine the location of the site at Jebel Khayyaber, on the border of today Iraq and Iran.
The history of the city is preserved in fragments of classical literature, one of which is a passage of the Pliny the Elder. He wrote that the first town had been established by Alexander the Great, and with the soldiers of his army who were invalided and left there, and that Alexander had ordered it to be named Alexandria. Subsequent kings repaired following ravaging floods and the Charax SpASinou name stuck to the location following a king who was attributed with restructuring the terrain by building embankments and raised areas to protect the area. Pliny made an effort too at repairing its geography: a village between the Tigris on the right and the Eulaeus on the left, on some artificial mound, upon a division of rivers. It was a handy drawing, and no map.
In the case of the modern archeology, it was not a question of where to dig, but how to dig in a vast and changed floodplain, in a responsible manner. The first clue came many decades ago, as John Hansman studied some pictures of the Royal Air Force and realized that there was a huge enclosed wall. However, ground access was still restricted many years. Once systematic work was resumed, the method was based on technologies appropriate in areas where excavation is either slow, dangerous, or merely untimely.
What seemed on the surface as a small ridge, was to turn out to be a contrived urban bulk: a city wall over a kilometer long, in places eight meters high. At that point, teams reconstructed the city into view by an overlaying survey campaign. Scholars covered an area of over 500 square kilometers recording pottery fragments, brick pieces, and industrial debris, which mapped neighborhoods and areas of activity. Drones took photographs of thousands of images that created a terrain model; the magnetic signature of the walls, streets and furnaces buried was then sensed by the magnetometers without the spade being turned.
The plan which results is like a port constructed to receive movement of human beings, merchandise, water and heat. Below this, there are broad streets and big housing blocks in grid pattern, temple grounds in neighborhoods, and workshops characterised by kilns. Canals and harbor basins denote laboring waterfronts, not ceremonial sides. One area is distinguished by unusually large house blocks, even larger than those of most other similar cities at the time, and an area without a street system indicates a managed area, which in urban archaeology is often construed as a palace complex or garden district. There were various street directions, four in the present analysis, indicating construction periods and change of concerns as the city grew, adjusted and patched up. It was trade infrastructure, but not mere settlement.
Around 300 BCE to 300 CE long-distance exchange was strengthened around the Indian Ocean and across the continent into Central Asia. A port city located on the main sea routes and river traffic could channel spices,textile, stones, metals to the main consumer markets further up the river to imperial capitals located on the Tigris. Satellite views of the area also reveal canals and large farms fields which are the type of fertile hinterland required to sustain a large population as well as maintain workshops in production.
Its degradation was an engineering issue authored at landscape scale as well. It is rivers which move southwards of Mesopotamia, fill channels, and cause shorelines changes, as silt drags the Gulf further away. The landscape studies show that the Tigris shifted towards the West by the third century of the Common Era and the harbor was left more and more isolated by the main stream, and the shore was pushed further away. With the waterways that had caused the city to be efficient becoming less and less dependable, the economic logic was undermined and the urban structure that has come to mark the city started to dry up.
Another way of the city coming back today is not so dramatic as unburying, but a re-measuring of space. Noninvasive mapping has brought Alexandria on the Tigris back to the geography of the ancient world, not as a myth located “somewhere near” a river intersection, but as a designed city whose walls, grids, and canals continue to define the fine crests of the desert.
