NARRATOR: The lost city of Kish in modern day Iraq,
the mysterious metropolis at the heart of the cradle
of civilization.
Legends tell of the powerful kings who ruled these lands.
They are some of the first kings in history.
This is an incredible story.
Kish changed the path of history forever.
NARRATOR: A saga of divine power, war, and conquest.
Why does this site have such legendary status?
What can these scorched ruins reveal about
the origins of royalty as we know it?
Kings write, "I have built this, I have done this,
I have conquered this," solidifying their right in
stone and in clay.
NARRATOR: Today, after decades of conflict in this area,
archaeologists have rare access to investigate this
lost city's buried secrets.
They head deep into ancient caves.
This is probably 10,000 years at least.
NARRATOR: Launch a high-resolution drone.
That's really interesting when you see that with the drone.
NARRATOR: And put ancient technology to the test.
To discover the truth about Kish,
we digitally rebuild this revolutionary city,
from its monumental ziggurats
to its war-torn palaces.
We unearth hundreds of human skeletons
and clues of a shocking betrayal
to explore the lost world of the Sumerian kings.
The Iraqi desert -- over 5,000 years ago,
the world's first cities are born here in Mesopotamia,
the land between two rivers.
Legends tell of all-powerful kings
ruling over these vast lands,
the kings of Kish.
Now, 60 miles south of Baghdad,
investigators head into the desert to hunt for the ruins
of the king's capital.
Kish is described as a mighty city.
At its height, it's a sprawling metropolis
that spans 25 million square feet.
In the east sits a fortified palace for
the king's throne, and beside it, a colossal temple complex.
A labyrinth of streets packed with mud
brick houses encircles these impressive landmarks.
In the west is another giant temple complex.
Kish is a legendary capital fit
for some of history's first kings.
Do any of its impressive structures survive?
And can the ruins reveal the truth
about the legends of Kish?
Decades of conflict have kept
archaeologists away from this region.
But now, a pioneering team is on a quest to
explore enormous mounds that could conceal
the king's legendary capital.
Investigators Jeff Allen and Ammar al-Taee
have rare access to the site of Kish.
Our cameras have been granted
special permission to follow them.
Jeff has spent 27 years protecting
ancient sites in war-torn regions,
and Ammar works for the Iraq State Board of Antiquities.
They search for clues of ancient
structures among the sun-scorched ruins.
The first step to understanding the story of Kish
is to look at the evidence that's around us here.
NARRATOR: This vast site is made up of more than 40 mounds
that sprawl across an area
larger than the country of Monaco.
The only way to survey every inch is from the air.
Ammar launches a drone-mounted, high-definition camera
to capture the topography of the landscape in
digital detail.
JEFF: Wow, this is an amazing archaeological site.
-It's enormous. -AMMAR: Yeah.
JEFF: And really what impresses me are these mounds here.
AMMAR: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Two giant mounds, each over 40 feet tall,
stand out among the ruins.
When I see these, I get the impression that one of these
could have been a ziggurat, a pyramid-like structure
rising towards a temple at the top.
NARRATOR: Ammar uses the drone footage to create an accurate
3D model of each mound on the site.
JEFF: Mm-hmm.
NARRATOR: The first mound soars 46 feet high.
It has a clear square shape at its base
and what looks like a tower on top.
NARRATOR: The distinctive profile is proof
this is once a ziggurat,
an iconic temple monument reaching up toward the heavens
and visible for miles around.
Mesopotamian cities typically center around a ziggurat,
like this one
still visible in the nearby city of Ur today.
But the second mound in Kish is more mysterious.
Ammar and Jeff inspect their 3D model.
It's a staggered shape, kind of steps down, yes.
NARRATOR: This mound is 44 feet tall, and its profile reveals
a more gradual uneven slope, which is also consistent with
a ziggurat ruin,
proof of a second ziggurat in Kish.
But right next to this second ziggurat,
they spot yet another intriguing mound.
NARRATOR: It's 26 feet tall,
with a similar staggered profile.
These adjacent mounds reveal something extraordinary
in Kish.
NARRATOR: This discovery of a double ziggurat is remarkable.
It gives Kish a total of three ziggurats, more than any usual
Mesopotamian city.
The enormous size of the city,
plus the fact that it had three ziggurats, suggests to me
that it was an important place.
NARRATOR: The evidence is that Kish matches
the legendary descriptions.
These mounds are once towering temples.
Their cores survive to this day.
Jeff and Ammar want to know how such
a monumental city rises up in the middle of the desert.
Ammar uses experimental archaeology to investigate.
He wants to recreate Kish's bricks.
At a nearby site,
his team experiments with ancient techniques
and materials.
They combine mud and water
and add straw to thicken the mixture.
Then they use a square mold to
shape it and create bricks with uniform dimensions.
NARRATOR: They dry in the hot desert air,
and the result is bricks that hold
together just like the ones that Kish.
Each mud brick can bear 1,700 pounds of weight.
That's strong enough to support the towering ziggurats.
But their ancient recipe reveals the city's
building blocks require a lot of water.
Ammar investigates where the water could come from.
He inspects some exposed original bricks
close up and spots something strange.
NARRATOR: It's a crucial clue to how Kish grows
so large and why it has three towering ziggurats.
The first ziggurat sits at the center of
a small city on the northern bank of the river.
A mile away on the southern bank,
another city develops
with a colossal double ziggurat at its heart.
Over hundreds of years, these two small cities,
each with their own religious center, grow and merge into
the powerful, mega metropolis of Kish.
Is it home to legendary kings?
Stephanie Dalley looks for clues at
the prestigious Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
She is one of just a few people
in the world who can read cuneiform,
the earliest writing system ever discovered.
This cuneiform-covered prism is the 3,800-year-old
Sumerian King List,
a rare record of the world's earliest cities
and their rulers.
Stephanie has special access to examine
the Sumerian King List up close.
She searches for evidence of kings in Kish.
STEPHANIE: This is the first column,
and then that's the second column.
In this list of kings here,
you get the kingship was in Kish.
NARRATOR: The ancient text identifies 39 kings of Kish.
One stands out -- Etana.
Here, we've got Etana.
So he's Etana the Shepherd, who ascended
to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries.
NARRATOR: Legends written in clay reveal
further clues to this divine intervention.
According to these legends,
the gods choose Etana to rule as king of the earth,
but his pregnant wife cannot give birth to their royal heir.
The one known remedy is the birth plant,
which Etana must bring down from heaven.
Instructed by the solar god, Shamash,
Etana rescues an enormous maimed eagle languishing in a pit.
The eagle carries Etana into heaven to retrieve
the birth plant and secure his royal line.
The Sumerian King List states
Etana reigns an impossible 1,500 years.
Can an intriguing discovery underneath
Kish's double ziggurat shed light
on the truth within these myths?
And can hidden inscriptions reveal if the king
of Kish wields ultimate power over neighboring city states?
NARRATOR: The ancient city of Kish,
home to some of the first kings in history.
But their stories mix fact and fiction.
They do have enormous inconsistencies.
NARRATOR: Stephanie Dalley discovers more potential
mythmaking in the Sumerian King List.
It says the flood came over the earth.
Then kingship was in Kish.
NARRATOR: Evidence of a great flood in Kish would
help establish the reliability of the King List
and bolster its claim about the rise of royalty here.
Archaeologists dig beneath the remains
of the twin ziggurats
and unearth mysterious buildings 20 feet down.
They find a central street lined with houses and alleyways
and human skeletons buried in the homes
underneath the floor -- on top of these ruins lies
a one-foot-thick layer of sediment
filled with pottery fragments and fish bones.
It's evidence of dramatic destruction in Kish.
Could this prove the flood is real?
Today, the ruins beneath the ziggurats are protected.
So now, archaeologists must look for clues elsewhere.
Iraqi-American Mark Altaweel investigates
a remote spot 180 miles away in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Modern conflicts have meant
this area has often been off-limits to archaeologists,
but now, Mark has rare
access to explore its subterranean secrets.
He examines a dark and treacherous
cave concealed beneath the Zagros Mountains.
Mark treks through the darkness for over half a mile.
This cave is a time capsule
that may hold clues to the flood myth.
This is a speleothem.
It is a kind of growing stalagmite.
If you can see, there's water at the very top
and it's dripping.
NARRATOR: The dripping water contains minerals, which
gradually deposit on the cave floor.
Over time, they build up into tall stacks called speleothems.
Mark ventures deeper into the cave.
This is probably 10,000 years at least, given the height.
NARRATOR: The minerals inside these speleothems contain
secrets of the last 10,000 years.
You can retrieve different kinds of chemical data,
which allows you to reconstruct things
like rainfall, ancient rainfall.
This is how we learn about Iraq's ancient climates.
NARRATOR: More rain means more drips,
but a drought means no drips.
So speleothems are an historic record of rainfall.
Mark's team collects samples from the speleothems
and takes them back to the lab.
Then they analyze the minerals'
molecular fingerprints and turn them into data
to reveal the rainfall levels over time.
So you had a very different situation than you do today.
NARRATOR: The data shows that a lot of
rain falls on ancient Iraq,
but the level of rainfall
indicated by these spikes is inconsistent.
The flood story really is, in many ways,
symbolic of the volatility of water in Iraq.
It is a region that can be quite wet
one year and quite dry another year.
So you can foresee with this kind of data,
for instance, you have this all
of a sudden spike of rainfall occurring.
Maybe it was this spike that could have
led to the inspiration of the flood story.
NARRATOR: Mark's data adds to
the destruction layer beneath Kish's ziggurat.
Together, they suggest a great flood at Kish.
The data could explain why the Sumerian King List
claims that kingship in Kish follows the flood.
It reveals a dramatic spike 5,500 years ago,
exactly when the first cities are founded in Mesopotamia.
MARK: All of a sudden, you have basically the wettest period
in Iraq's history,
and it so happens to coincide with the rise of urbanism.
It creates an opportunity, effectively, to develop city.
NARRATOR: But with this thriving civilization comes a problem.
MARK: How do you deal with this sort
of complex issue of organizing people to manage
years of plenty and years of perhaps drought.
NARRATOR: The Euphrates floods so frequently
that ancient Mesopotamians develop an intricate
irrigation system to harness its immense power.
During the yearly summer flood,
they channel water from the river into farmland,
where it helps produce bountiful harvests.
Mesopotamian farmers also developed complex reservoir
systems to regulate water levels during
the floods and store huge quantities of water
for the dry season.
Control of water is the key
to the growth and success of cities.
Leaders who do it well amass
resources and power, and royalty is born.
MARK: So I think the flood story makes a lot of sense.
Certainly, I can see why monarchy evolves out of this.
NARRATOR: The kings of Kish may owe their rise
to the floodwaters,
but the ancient King List describes
them ruling over other Mesopotamian cities.
Is there any truth to this account?
Could a discovery of military propaganda in Kish's
royal palace reveal clues?
NARRATOR: The once flourishing city of Kish
and its powerful kings rise out of dramatic floods.
But the legends say that the kings of
Kish wield power far beyond the city's borders.
Quite often, legends are based on truth,
but over thousands of years, they become twisted.
NARRATOR: Jeff and Ammar want to find
out if there is truth to the legends.
They launch their drone and look for clues of kings at Kish.
Ammar identifies the faint outline of a floor plan.
NARRATOR: These are the remarkable ruins
of an ancient palace.
Kish is home to one of
the earliest royal palaces ever discovered.
Built around 4,600 years ago,
the palace of Kish is
a highly sophisticated and fortified building.
The archaeologists who uncover its ruins imagine that
the palace once has soaring
layered defensive walls and platforms from where soldiers
can launch volleys of projectiles.
Inside the royal wing is a mysterious limestone carving.
It shows the king wielding an ax
and taking prisoners captive.
Is this evidence of a powerful
king of Kish dominating his neighbors?
Sebastien Rey is an expert
on the intricate rivalries of Mesopotamia.
He investigates Lagash,
an ancient city state 130 miles southeast of Kish.
He suspects this site could unlock vital clues
about the extent of Kish's power.
Over 100 years ago, French archaeologists
unearth a curious layer of destruction here.
The French pioneers,
when they opened their excavations,
they found many relics, many objects.
NARRATOR: Now, at the same spot, Sebastien's team
is excavating the ruins of a mysterious temple.
This was the temple dedicated to the main god,
the chief god at the heart of the sacred precinct of Lagash.
NARRATOR: They dig deeper for missing puzzle pieces
that the previous excavators did not find.
New discoveries, together with the objects
uncovered 100 years ago,
allow them to piece together the full story
of what happens here.
Sebastien examines some of the objects
unearthed in Lagash.
He has special access to
the original report from the 19th century excavations.
This is one of the most important objects.
So the two pieces of the stelae were
broken off, and we can see the impact.
NARRATOR: This fragment of stela shows a God
holding a net full of enemy soldiers.
The destruction line literally breaks the area
where the God is holding the net,
and this was done in a symbolic way to free
the soldiers trapped inside the net.
NARRATOR: This break is no accident.
It's carefully crafted by an enemy of Lagash
who wants to cut their soldiers loose.
Sebastien thinks the identity of Lagash's enemy
could be revealed by another intriguing object.
This ancient text is an historical
account of a war in Mesopotamia
that rages from around 2600 BCE.
The text tells of this conflict, going back
to the time of a king of Kish, Mesilim.
NARRATOR: King Mesilim of Kish brokers
an agreement between Lagash and Umma,
neighboring city states who are fighting over
disputed territory.
King Mesilim erects a stone stela to mark a new border.
But Mesilim's peace plan takes a strip of land away from Umma.
Feeling short-changed, Umma breaches the agreement
and blocks the canals
that provide water to Lagash downstream.
Unable to reconcile the dispute,
the cities slip into a war that spans many decades.
The Umma-Lagash border conflict is
the very first conflict known in history.
NARRATOR: Throughout the long war,
both cities claim they are enforcing
the will of King Mesilim.
The reverence paid to Mesilim is
vital evidence of Kish's far-reaching power.
SEBASTIEN: It seems indeed that at the very beginning of
the 3rd millennium, Kish exercised a form of control over
most of Mesopotamia.
We believe that the Sumerian cities
at that time formed a league.
Kish was the overlord of this league.
NARRATOR: Legends of another king of Kish could shed
light on how Kish rises to this overlord status.
According to ancient inscriptions,
King Enmebaragesi of Kish conquers neighboring Elam.
Then, in a city far to the south of Kish, Nippur,
Enmebaragesi builds a temple dedicated
to the God, Enlil.
Enlil is the most powerful god in the Sumerian pantheon,
the supreme embodiment of authority.
By building this temple, Enmebaragesi claims
divine authority, not
just as king of the city of Kish,
but over the entire region.
The tales of Enmebaragesi and Mesilim showed
that the early kings of Kish
exert military and diplomatic power
over a huge area.
This marks a turning point in Mesopotamian history.
Now, one king, the king of Kish, is the king of kings.
Can a groundbreaking discovery in Kish
reveal the true influence of these kings?
And can macabre graves shed light
on a threat to Kish's power?
NARRATOR: Discoveries in the ancient city of Kish
are shedding light on how their pioneering kings
change our world.
JEFF: Kish changed the path of history forever,
like no city state had ever done before.
NARRATOR: 30 feet below ground, archaeologists make
an extraordinary discovery in Kish,
a two-wheeled wooden chariot, preserved for millennia by
the desert sand.
Surrounding it,
the skeletons of oxen and people.
The excavators also unearth a four-wheeled
chariot with donkey and human skeletons.
The remains of a sentry guard the tomb.
They are some of the earliest wheeled vehicles
ever discovered.
They date to the era of Kish's great kings.
Who are the people buried here?
Paul Collins is an expert in Mesopotamian burials.
There's no other find in Mesopotamia
that compares with them.
The early excavators, when they were discovered in the 1920s,
imagine that they might belong to the princes of Kish,
but it remains a debated question of exactly
what these graves represent.
NARRATOR: Paul is on a mission to find out what
these unique chariot burials can reveal about kings in Kish.
He has special access to analyze a precious
clay model of a chariot unearthed
in Kish's royal palace.
This perfect miniature, handcrafted around
4,400 years ago,
reveals how these early chariots are used by Kish's kings.
PAUL: At the very front is a container for the spears,
which you would then hurl at the enemy as the vehicle
trundled over the land.
NARRATOR: Chariots are the chosen weapon
of kings for thousands of years,
and they are buried with them, too.
Kish's kings are quick to adopt
another great innovation of this era -- writing.
Lara Bampfield is an expert
in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions.
She investigates how writing develops.
She draws the sign "ki."
It represents the word "place" in the Sumerian language.
It's all pictographic at this point.
It's a very rudimentary form of a sign.
NARRATOR: Lara thinks that kings drive the development
of these basic signs into something revolutionary.
She draws to later versions of the "ki" sign in cuneiform.
LARA: These inside four lines have become the inside wedges.
As we move into later variations of the script,
we have a much clearer impressed version on the clay.
NARRATOR: Lara's drawings reveal these pictographic signs
evolved into the world's first writing script, cuneiform.
Lara thinks it develops for political reasons.
Writing is definitely a form of power, and this is very
much seen in Mesopotamia, where kings write scripts
across monumental structures.
"I have built this, I have done this,
I have conquered this," almost highlighting and solidifying
their right in stone and in clay.
NARRATOR: Under the influence of kings,
writing develops into complex literature
that records victory, legend, and the world's first history.
Innovations like writing and chariots are
at the heart of the kings' success,
and the huge reach of the kings of Kish
allows writing to be rolled out across the region.
The ancient Mesopotamians developed
writing and arithmetic.
They're the first to divide the circle into
360 degrees and invent the hour, minute, and the second.
These innovations allow their kings to organize their
work force and mass produce at an unprecedented scale.
Mesopotamians are among the first civilizations to
harness wheel technology.
Kish's kings used chariots to fight wars
and parade their power.
These kings adorn their capital with
new, impressive styles of art and writing,
immortalizing their rule.
Many of these Mesopotamian technologies
are cornerstones of modern civilization.
The kings of Kish use all their tools to
create and secure a society bent to their rule.
But a macabre discovery in Kish may be
a sign of trouble ahead for these early kings.
What can the ruins of
the royal palace reveal about Kish's fate?
NARRATOR: Kish --
the ruins of the city's
three enormous ziggurats still tower over the desert.
But Ammar al-Taee's investigation of the city
reveals that other landmarks are almost completely missing.
Only a handful of bricks remain.
NARRATOR: He heads to the spot where Kish's royal palace
once stands and sees only desert sand and shrubs.
Excavations inside the palace's footprint shed
light on why so little survives.
15 feet below ground,
archaeologists discover 162 human skeletons.
They are all buried in a half fetal position,
with grave goods scattered around them.
Weapons lie by their side -- axes, knives, and blades.
Hidden beneath these graves,
excavators find the shocking ruins of the palace.
Burn marks on the walls suggest
it has been razed to the ground.
Is this evidence of a catastrophe at Kish?
Paul Collins wants to find out why people are buried here.
He has special access to examine
a weapon unearthed in these graves.
Paul instantly recognizes the shape.
So this is an ax head, very typical in shape,
where you have the cutting blade
emerging out of this cylinder of metal, which was
hafted onto a wooden stick.
NARRATOR: But this ax head is a miniature,
much smaller than the axes used as weapons at this time.
It could be it was intended for use on
the journey by the dead person to the next world.
NARRATOR: Ancient Mesopotamians are buried with symbolic weapons
like this so they are armed in the afterlife.
Their burial location on top of
the palace site is deeply meaningful.
These people are honoring the great heritage of
Kish's kings.
Long abandoned, but the memory of this great
palace continued to echo down through the generations.
NARRATOR: The burials spanned decades
after the palace is abandoned.
Stephanie Dalley investigates what happens at
Kish to lead to this tragic scene.
She examines the Sumerian King List again for answers
and spots a strange detail about a man named Sargon.
STEPHANIE: With Sargon, who comes into the King List,
it says that he's a cup bearer to a king in Kish.
NARRATOR: He is entrusted with serving wine
at the king's table.
But later on the list, Sargon is named
as a king himself.
This reveals a shocking twist in Kish's story
in around 2350 BCE.
King Ur-zababa of Kish
sends his cup bearer, Sargon,
to broker a peace deal with Lugal-zage-si,
an ambitious young king from the south,
but Sargon betrays Ur-zababa.
He forms a new alliance with Lugal-zage-si.
Together, they conquer Kish and burn the palace to the ground.
Sargon is emboldened by his rise to power and rebels
again -- he amasses an army,
defeats Lugal-zage-si in battle,
and conquers his territories.
Sargon declares himself the ruler of a new superpower,
the Acadian empire.
He is the first emperor in history.
Sargon's new imperial rule is brutal and bloody.
The surviving citizens of Kish memorialized their great kings
and buried their dead on the remains
of the destroyed palace.
The burials prove that Sargon's takeover
and the destruction of the palace
do not erase the memory of Kish's powerful kings.
But if the mighty city of Kish is razed to the ground,
what are these buildings that still stand on the site today?
And why does the title "King of Kish" live on?
NARRATOR: Kish's royal palace is razed to
the ground and the king of Kish usurped.
But Ammar's investigation shows that life in
the city continues into the 2nd millennium BCE.
Ammar hunts for clues of what happens to
Kish and its kings after the palace is destroyed.
The 46-foot ziggurat ruin is a bold red color,
but the surrounding land and the ruins
of the other ziggurats are earthy brown.
Ammar believes the discovery of this ancient kiln
nearby could explain this stark difference.
NARRATOR: Ammar suspects the red bricks for
the ziggurat could be made in kilns like these.
He works with a brickmaker, Achmed Hamza,
to put his theory to the test.
They build their own miniature
kiln based on the ancient design.
The 30 mud bricks inside have been baked
for seven hours and then left to cool.
NARRATOR: The kiln-baked red bricks are
stronger than the simple mud bricks
across most of Kish.
Their presence on the ziggurat is striking evidence
that a later civilization rebuilds this monument.
Ammar finds more evidence of a later reconstruction at Kish.
NARRATOR: Ammar searches for clues of the new builders.
He finds evidence that the temple ruin next
to the crumbling ziggurat is also a later construction.
[speaking foreign language]
NARRATOR: King Nebuchadnezzar rules a mighty empire
from his capital, Babylon,
once the greatest city of the ancient world, with its own
mighty ziggurat and the legendary hanging gardens.
He rules from 605 BCE,
long after Kish is abandoned.
Stephanie Dalley believes King Nebuchadnezzar is attracted
to the ruins of Kish for a very particular reason.
The patron god of Kish was the war god Zababa.
Now, the oracles of a war god are specially useful,
because when you're setting off for battle,
you need to know if it's safe to do so.
And so the oracle was very much sought after.
NARRATOR: King Nebuchadnezzar honors Zababa by rebuilding
his ziggurat,
and Kish becomes a vital accessory
to the mighty Babylonian Empire.
STEPHANIE: Kish became a military base for Babylon.
NARRATOR: Kish and its kings become
a symbol of ultimate rule in Mesopotamia.
The legendary capital of Kish rises
from the riverbeds of the mighty Euphrates
to become one of the first cities in the world.
The kings of Kish are among the world's first kings.
They embody an idea of monarchy
that reverberates through millennia to today.
They build one of the earliest royal palaces ever discovered
and conquer foreign lands to create the world's first empire.
And with writing and arithmetic,
they create a legacy for us 5,000 years
after the civilization they build returns to dust.
[dramatic music playing]