Beirut - The systems of thousands of ridges and canals in the floodplain of southern Iraq have long been considered as remnants of large-scale agricultural systems built by slave labor.

Now, the international team of archaeologists has found new evidence to support the theory.

The team conducted tests to determine the date of construction of some huge soil structures and found that they spanned centuries, beginning in the famous slave rebellion in the 9th century AD, with the results published in the journal Ancient.

Today, the enslaved people of that era are called "Zanj", which is medieval Arabic on the Swahili coast of East Africa, although there are actually different theories about most people in Africa.

They carried out a massive uprising under the Abbasid State in 869 AD, and today they are known as the "Zanj Rebellion". The rebellion lasted for more than ten years

The descendants of these enslaved people now live in the modern southern port city of Basla in Iraq.

Although they are part of the structure of modern Iraq, “their history is not actually well written in our history,” said Jaafar Jotheri, professor of archaeology at the University of Arcadisia in Iraq, who is part of the research team. Researchers from Durham University and Newcastle University in the UK, Radbud University in the Netherlands and Basra University in Iraq also participated in the competition.

"That's why (discovery) is very important, in fact, to protect at least some of the huge work structures for future work. It's a minority legacy," he said.

The researchers first reviewed recent satellite images and older images from the 1960s, showing the remains of more than 7,000 large artificial ridges in the Shaṭṭal-Arab floodplain.

The report says the size and size of the network suggest that “artificial investment is a large-scale investment.” Sites were selected throughout the system and analyzed with radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dates.

All four ridge crests were sampled between the dates and the mid-13th century AD, in which the period of slave labor was used in the region, which was their construction and provided evidence that the use of slave labor may have lasted for centuries after the famous rebellion.

"Their findings suggest that "these characteristics have been used longer than previously assumed, so they represent an important part of Iraq's landscape heritage," the researchers wrote. ”

The discovery came during the archaeological period of the Iraqi Revival, a country commonly known as the “cradle of civilization,” but archaeological exploration has prevented decades of conflict, thus stopping excavations and leading to the robbery of thousands of artifacts.

In recent years, excavations have been restored and thousands of stolen cultural relics have been repatriated.