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In 2022, a team from the University of Catania resumed the archaeological work at the site of Tell Muhammad, a 2nd millennium BCE settlement located in the southern suburbs of the modern city of Baghdad, marked by the presence of a sacred area dated to the Old Babylonian period. Tell Muhammad has a long stratigraphic sequence that starts during the Ur III period, at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, and ends during the Kassite period (ca. XVIth-XIIIth century BCE). 

The long history of research started in the middle of the XIXth century when F. Jones and A. H. Layard dicovered a series of objects among which the two copper-alloy hollowed mace-heads with the inscription “E.GAL ha-am-mu-ra-bi” (i.e., the palace of Hammurabi). These finds confer to the site a probable Old Babylonian presence during Hammurabi’s kingdom. Excavations carried out by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage between 1978 and 1985 brought to light a sacred area, as well as hundreds of cuneiform tablets probably dated to the end of the Old Babylonian period. Included in this collection are tablets with chronological references to the ‘Fall of Babylon’, dated to 1595 BCE.

In addition, a primary objective of the project will be to create an archaeological park that will aim at protecting the site from Baghdad urban expansion initiated last century and start a process of restoration of the preserved architecture and for the final creation of a participatory park that will promote a general historical knowledge of one of the most important periods in Mesopotamian.