CHICAGO: Bronze Age inhabitants of what is now modern-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey traded and travelled more widely along a network of highways than previously thought, archeologists studying newly released US spy photographs said on Monday.

Around 5,000 years ago, wheeled wagons navigated along wide dirt roads that extended dozens of kilometres across the fertile prairies of northern Iraq and its neighbouring states, and probably to the Mediterranean Sea, the research showed.

“We assumed that these ancient sites were pretty parochial, but in fact they were tied together by well-travelled highways,” said University of Chicago archeologist Tony Wilkinson, who coauthored a paper on the findings to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Antiquity.

Domesticated agriculture was already well established by the Bronze Age period under study, having emerged thousands of years earlier further south in Mesopotamia where the physical evidence of trading routes disappeared long ago in the wetter soils.

To the drier north, remnants of the spoke-like system of roads were still readily visible when the satellite photographs were snapped in the Cold War-era 1960s and 1970s by US spy agencies searching the region for Soviet-made weapons. Thousands of photos have been declassified in recent years.

The detailed aerial views made it possible for the archeologists to map the extensive network of roads linking Bronze Age towns that housed as many as 20,000 residents each.

Users of the ancient highways may have even been taxed, Wilkinson said, just like modern-day toll roads.

Cuneiform texts written by the Akkadians, a ruling dynasty in southern Iraq, give the names of stopping places along the ancient roads.—Reuters