5,000-year old 'cultic space' discovered in Iraq dates to time of the world's first cities

An aerial view of an excavated building.

Archaeologists in Iraq have unearthed the remains of a 5,000-year-old building that may have been a temple from the Uruk period, when the first cities in the world were taking off.

The buried "monumental" structure was discovered in September at the Kani Shaie archaeological site in the northern Sulaymaniyah Governorate, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq, according to a statement.