Mashkan-shapir
Iraq

Good Choices

The Institute was approached by the Dalton School in New York City to build an interactive teaching package focusing on a 2nd or 3rd millennium Mesopotamian urban center for use in the School’s 5th grade classes.

Mashkan-shapir was chosen, because:

  • the site is essentially a single-period site, thus having no superimposed rebuilding phases and little architectural change from the time of its time of greatest extent
  • it has been completely surveyed and studied.
Both of these conditions are unlike the situation at most of the other cities of this era in the region.

The Institute was chosen to fulfill the tasks because of its expertise and long history of accurately and precisely interpreting archaeological data and then turning that interpretation into innovative educational tools.

Goals

The Dalton School laid out two primary goals:
  1. To have the Institute create of a series of reconstructions of the city that could be used in conjunction with elementary school instruction on ancient Mesopotamia.
    The School wanted a 3D computer model of the existing remains of the city, digital re-creations of some of the key districts for use in their 5th grade classes, and a presentation in a package suitable for installation on PCs and Apple computers that allows students to navigate through the selected areas of the city and link off to background text and images about those sectors.

  2. To envision what a city of the early 2nd millennium may have looked like, and how that might (or might not) differ from traditionally held opinions about the look and operation of such emerging urban centers.
    The uniqueness of the essentially single-period settlement made it an ideal site for excavation and then for attempts at digital reconstruction. The city did appear to be typical in that it had a circuit wall and few city gates, a clear temple platform, and large residential areas. What was not expected before detailed site exploration was that the city had lots of empty space between the line of the city walls and the occupation areas inside, that there were so many canals and large harbors within the walls, and that the city was thus probably more lush and full of water than we normally expect from settlements of the ancient Near East. The city seems to have been built to focus more on water traffic and commerce than on transport by roadway, given that many of the residential areas and interior roads align themselves to the major canals or congregate around the harbors.

It became our task to visualize these urban features so that students, scholars, and, eventually, the general public could appreciate the layout and circulation of Mashkan-shapir in ways that would help change our conception of southern Mesopotamian urban centers, which were apparently not the dry, dusty, and stark settlements of traditional histories of the land.

Reference
Page Created: October 5, 2004
Page Updated: January 1, 2012
URL:
Page Author: The Institute for the Visualization of History