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Thousands of clay tablets have been rescued from smugglers over the past few years, all bearing witness to a lost Sumerian city that was home to a mysterious ancient cult. The tablets show that looters must have discovered the site, and archaeologists are now racing to find it before it is completely ransacked.

Irisa臐rig was a flourishing city that reached its zenith about 4000 years ago. 鈥淚t was the capital of a major province of the Neo-Sumerian state,鈥� says Manuel Molina at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, who has spent much of his life searching for it.

The city is also historically important. It was on a trade route to Iran, so received important envoys from across the region, and was frequently visited by Sumerian kings. One set of tablets recovered from smugglers , who managed her own large estate. This changed historians鈥� views of the role of Sumerian women in society. The city is also thought to have been the centre of a cult that worshipped the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag.

If the city were discovered, it could reveal a wealth of information about how these ancient people lived and the beliefs they held about their mother goddess, says Eckart Frahm at Yale University. 鈥淧erhaps even some new mythological texts related to her would be discovered.鈥�

Irisa臐rig was probably abandoned during a period of social collapse along with many other Sumerian cities. As a result, southern Iraq is dotted with ruin-mounds, known as tells, where ancient towns once stood. Irisa臐rig could be any of them.

Over the past few years, many more tablets that seem to have come from Irisa臐rig have turned up. In 2013, David Owen at Cornell University in New York聽 details of 1200 clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing that had been confiscated from smugglers, most of them originating in Irisa臐rig. In 2018, US arts and crafts firm Hobby Lobby聽 for illegally importing hundreds of stolen Irisa臐rig tablets. In August, the British Museum returned to Iraq another set of聽156 cuneiform tablets that had been confiscated from smugglers at London鈥檚 Heathrow airport.

Molina first tried to figure out the location of the city in the late 2000s, based on in the ruins of the city of Umma years earlier. The text records a journey to Irisa臐rig from Umma taken four millennia ago by a group of workers. They went on a round trip of 23 days, towing a barge upstream, loading it with barley and floating it back.

Ancient boat trip

Using these ancient texts and satellite images, Molina and landed at a location known as Site 1056, a heavily looted tell 73 kilometres north of Umma on the banks of the Tigris.

Now, Maurizio Viano at the University of Turin in Italy has taken this strategy further. 鈥淚 was not convinced by Molina鈥檚 reconstruction of the direction of the current along the canals,鈥� he says.

In 2014, inscriptions that allowed Viano to pinpoint the location of another ancient lost city called Ke拧, which is known to have been close to Irisa臐rig. Using this new information, he tried once more to plot the route between Umma and Irisa臐rig. 鈥淚 proposed a different boat route, based on a different reconstruction of the direction of water stream,鈥� says Viano.

He concluded that the lost city was not on the Tigris, but connected to it by a now-dried-up 30-kilometre canal known as the Mama-拧arrat. When Viano followed this vanished watercourse, it led to an enormous ruin-mound named Tell al-Wilaya. 鈥淭here is sufficient reason to suggest the identification of Irisa臐rig with the site of Tell al-Wilaya,鈥� he says.

There have been previous attempts to excavate the site. After it was extensively looted in the 1990s, Iraqi archaeologists visited it to recover what they could. But all documentation relating to the site during the destruction of the National Museum in Baghdad in 2003.

At the moment, security concerns mean that no excavations are planned. But Frahm, for one, remains hopeful. Maybe Irisa臐rig has now been found, he says. 鈥淢aybe it really is Tell Wilaya. It is exciting.鈥�