Russian scientists will create the world's first BIM model of an ancient city in Iraq

Russian archaeologists have embarked on a unique project that will create a BIM model of an ancient city in southern Iraq. Ilya Arkhipov, Deputy Director of the Institute of Classical Oriental and Antiquity, Associate Professor, Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Humanities of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, said this on September 16 at the Izvestia News Center during a press conference on the topic: "BIM model of an ancient city in Iraq: the world's first project by Russian scientists."

According to him, this is the first Russian-Iraqi project of this scale, allowing to study the city as a whole, and not just individual excavations.

"The data from previous expeditions, even Soviet ones, do not give a complete understanding of how the city lived, how the street network was arranged, where monumental buildings and residential buildings were located," said Arkhipov.

The city, with an area of about 61 hectares, allows us to explore the features of ancient urbanism, including the reconstruction of the hydraulic system that provided water for drinking and watering fields. According to the expert, many cities in Southern Iraq at that time were similar to Venice, with a network of canals through which people and goods moved.

The project is based on aerial and geomagnetic survey data, which makes it possible to reproduce the entire street network and infrastructure of the city. Arkhipov stressed that there were few similar projects on the study of ancient cities in general, the last major analogue was carried out by American archaeologists in the 1980s at Mashkan Shaper.

The creation of a BIM model also makes it possible to clarify the chronology of the city and its historical context. The expert noted that the city could have existed during the period of the change of powers — from the kingdom of Larsa to Babylonia during the time of Hammurabi, and then become part of the so-called kingdom of Primorye, about which very little is known.

"If the dating is confirmed, it will be the first city of the Primorye dynasty, which will answer many questions about the political history of the region and the chronology of events that still remain the "dark age," the expert noted.

Russian scientists plan to use the model not only to study the urban and hydraulic features of the city, the expert said, but also to compare it with archaeological finds and textual sources in order to get the most complete picture of the life of the city more than three and a half thousand years ago.

Earlier it was reported that in the Pskov region, it was possible to restore a pot found in 2023 at the Vvedenskoye excavation site in the Pskov region. The vessel was cracked due to the pressure of the earth's mass. The pot has been collected, and now visitors to the exhibition of archaeological finds at the Archaeological Center of the Pskov region will be able to inspect it.

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