An international team of researchers has confirmed the rediscovery of the lost city of Alexandria on the Tigris in Iraq. Founded by Alexander the Great (356 BCE–323 BCE), whose brief empire stretched from Greece to the Indus River and encompassed swathes of Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, it was a vital trading center until the 3rd century CE.
News of the find was announced in January by the University of Konstanz in Germany, whose chair of Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology Professor Stefan Hauser leads the archeological initiative documenting the site.
Alexandria on the Tigris (later renamed Charax Spasinou) was one of several major cities founded by the Macedonian general, the most famous of which is Alexandria in Egypt, today the country’s second largest metropolis. Unlike its Egyptian counterpart, however, it was lost to time; by the third century CE the Tigris River, which connected it to maritime shipping, had shifted westward, and the settlement was largely abandoned.
In the mid-20th century, researcher John Hansman, reviewing aerial photographs, made the connection between vestigial structures in an area known as Jebel Khayyaber and a description of Alexandria on the Tigris written in the first century CE by Pliny the Elder. War and political instability, however—including the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s—made further research impossible for decades.
It was not until 2014 that a team of British researchers, traveling in armored vehicles under tight security, were granted access to review the site. By 2016, Hauser had joined them in what was formally named the Charax Spasinou Project.
Working conditions remained dangerous and difficult, and until recently the team conducted only non-invasive research, including surface surveys—always under armed guard—and drone photography, which revealed the outlines of a massive, planned metropolis. A subsequent magnetometric analysis made it possible to identify four major sections of the city: an extensive residential area, a river port with workshops, a monumental palace, and, on the city outskirts, an irrigation system for agriculture.
“We then realized that what we had before us was the equivalent of Alexandria on the Nile,” Hauser states. Future excavations are planned.
