In 2024, researchers used Cold War spy-satellite images to identify a possible site of a pivotal seventh-century battle in Iraq

In a U.S. Defense Department archive, a stack of photographs was once so highly classified that looking at them the wrong way could end a career. Now, they are on a university server, and they have helped solve a mystery that has haunted the Iraqi desert for nearly 1,400 years. According to a 2024 study titled “Locating al-Qadisiyyah: mapping Iraq's most famous early Islamic conquest site,” published in the journal Antiquity, a group of researchers, led by archaeologist William Deadman of Durham University, managed to identify the possible location of an ancient battle that determined the historical fate of an entire region using Cold War-era American spy satellite images. It is a discovery that sounds like the synopsis for a Dan Brown novel.

The battle that nobody could quite locate

The battle of al-Qadisiyyah was fought approximately around 636 or 637 AD. It was a battle between an Arab Muslim army and the Sassanid Empire, the ancient Persian kingdom whose territorial integrity and geopolitical standing had lasted for four centuries prior to the clash. The Arab Muslims' victory and the Sassanid Empire's collapse initiated the Muslim conquest of Persia, which is also notable for the entire region's religious conversion to Islam. The battle itself, its outcome, and its impact on the region were all known to history. However, its precise location, despite centuries of historical research, has eluded historians and archaeologists until recently.

An accidental find with a patriotic edge

A 2024 Durham University statement on the discovery explains that the reason why the team of archaeologists, including Deadman, had scoured the desert around modern-day Iraq for an ancient battlefield was not because of its strategic historical relevance, at least not directly. The goal, stated Deadman himself, was to chart the Darb Zubaydah, one of the historic routes connecting Kufa, Iraq, to Mecca, for the UNESCO World Heritage Fund.

However, while reviewing the declassified 1970s American spy satellite images, along with modern satellite imagery and ancient records, Deadman and his colleagues noted a suspicious set of two sets of six-mile-long double walls and a fortified settlement roughly 30 km to the south of Kufa, Iraq. The location matched most of the historical descriptions for the battlefield. Further corroboration came from the University of Al-Qadisiyah, whose researchers were also able to confirm the site's location through on-the-ground surveys.

Why it is more surprising than it may appear

It is not the first time that declassified Cold War-era American reconnaissance satellite images have helped to identify potential ancient sites. Photographs of regions long-gone or altered by modern agricultural practices and warfare, as well as the shifting coastlines, have been used to chart hundreds of potential ancient sites in the Middle East. These satellites, part of programs like the Corona and Hexagon reconnaissance systems, took years to develop and were expensive to build, but their declassification decades later opened up a second life for the imagery in projects like the al-Qadisiyyah survey.

The fact that they may have eventually been turned to more useful purposes, such as reconstructing the lost history of an entire region, is perhaps too late for the disappointment to be justified. It is clear that they are trying to be cautious about describing it as such, but the discovery does indeed show us yet again how history may not always be discovered by spectacular excavations and old parchments, but by the simple act of someone looking where no one has bothered to look before.