Archaeologists in Iraq are digging out a 3,800-year-old bridge stamped with a king’s name

One brick set into the pier of a bridge at Larsa, in southern Iraq, carries a cuneiform dedication to the sun god Shamash on behalf of “his king Sin-iddinam, king of Larsa, king of Sumer and Akkad.” The Assyriologist Dominique Charpin translated the text, and it ties the structure to a ruler who reigned from about 1849 to 1843 BC, which makes the bridge roughly 3,800 years old. Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage announced the latest results in November 2026, and excavators have so far exposed only about half of the span.

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The bridge crosses a canal some 22 meters (72 feet) wide that once ran toward the heart of the city. Most of the work lies ahead.

Fired brick over the Great Canal

The structure sits on the eastern side of Larsa, near the city center and its ziggurat, in Dhi Qar province. La Brujula Verde’s account of the announcement describes massive supports of fired brick over what excavators call the Great Canal, a waterway that a 2019 magnetic survey confirmed was a canal and not a street. Shamil al-Rumaidh, the provincial antiquities and heritage director, told Shafaq News that the bridge was built with fired and paving bricks and that the rest of it is slated for future seasons.

The pier was not built in one go. A Ukrainian outlet’s summary of the report says the structure went through several building and rebuilding phases, a sign of long use and of changes to the city’s infrastructure, and that the bridge linked the districts on either bank. The same summary says French archaeologists first identified the remains in 2019 and began excavating the piers directly in 2021, and it quotes the report’s judgment that the bridge attests to the high level of engineering technology in ancient Mesopotamia. Shafaq’s dating of the French mission’s work at Larsa runs from 2022 to 2026. Later occupants left their own mark: the excavators found that a Kassite-era pottery workshop, from roughly the 16th to 12th centuries BC, had been built over the bridge. A clay tablet recovered this season contains an account of the bridge itself and may fill in its history and purpose. No objects turned up inside the canal, and Suhail Jalub Abbas, the board’s deputy director general of investigations, visited the site as the results were released.

Sin-iddinam, king of Larsa

Sin-iddinam ruled Larsa for six or seven years, roughly 1849 to 1843 BC by the middle chronology, the most widely used dating scheme. His name is already known from other Larsa bricks. A fragment in the University of Southern California’s collection, catalogued by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, comes from the same site and names him in a text that also mentions the Ebabbar temple of Shamash, the sun god’s sanctuary in the city. The catalog lists the fragment as a 130-millimeter clay piece, and its surviving text styles him a king of Ur and Larsa, a reminder that a royal name on a brick was the standard way a Larsa ruler signed a building.

An inscribed brick dates a phase of construction, and it does not prove the bridge was begun in his reign; it records that work in his name took place. The canal network itself is older. The same report credits an earlier king, Gungunum (1932 to 1906 BC), with starting it, and Hammurabi of Babylon conquered Larsa in 1763 BC, decades after Sin-iddinam’s rule ended.

The French-Iraqi mission and the work ahead

The dig is run by a joint French-Iraqi mission directed by Regis Vallet of France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), which resumed work at Larsa in 2019 after a pause of about three decades. This was its eighth season. In 2022, when the team had about 20 members, AFP reporting carried by the Taipei Times found them brushing bricks and clearing earth from what looked like the pier of a bridge across an urban canal, and Vallet called the site a playground and a paradise for studying ancient Mesopotamia. The same report describes Larsa as Mesopotamia’s capital just before Babylon rose, at the start of the second millennium BC, a city of more than 200 hectares where the team had also identified a ruler’s residence by about 60 cuneiform tablets now held in Baghdad’s national museum. Vallet said Iraq had become stable enough for foreign teams to return since 2017, with 10 foreign missions working in Dhi Qar by late 2021.

That earlier report already mentioned the brick naming Sin-iddinam, so the inscription is not new, and the 2026 announcement is the first public account of how much of the bridge has been exposed. A separate summary notes that the Great Canal belongs to a larger system of hundreds of canals, basins and port remains around Larsa. What the buried half of the bridge looks like, and what the tablet says about it, are the open questions for the seasons to come.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.