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.
