One of the last acts by Alexander the Great before dying at the tender age of 32 might have been dedicating a Greek temple to honor ancient gods and confirm his own divine status. This is according to archaeologists from the British Museum working in the ancient city of Girsu in southern Iraq who have unearthed a 4,000-year-old Sumerian temple. The later Greek inscriptions, extremely cryptic and tough to gauge, had made no sense to the archaeology team, until now.
Girsu, also known as Tiris, was an ancient Sumerian city located in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq. The city flourished during the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods of Sumerian history, roughly between the 26th and 21st centuries BC. Girsu was a significant city of the Sumerian civilization, the first in the world, and played a crucial role in the development of early Mesopotamian culture.
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The unearthing of the temple indicates that individuals living during Alexander’s time possessed awareness of the site’s ancient history. This abandoned site, dormant for millennia, hints at the existence of accurate historical knowledge and cultural memory within ancient societies, which have traditionally been seen as ‘primitive’.
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