Lost Site of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah Found Using Spy Satellites

Islam was a religion which owed its rapid success to conquest. From 622 AD and led by Muhammed himself, Muslim armies swept across the Middle East and unified Arabia into a single entity.

The greatest adversary they faced in their sweep eastward was mighty Persia. This ancient and venerable culture of fire worshippers had dominated the region for more than a millennium, ruled for the last four centuries by the house of Sasan.

This Sasanian Empire was the second longest lived in Persia’s long history, but they too would fall to the Islamic armies, their culture subsumed and their religion, known as Zoroastrianism, crushed. One of the most decisive battles over the Sasanians occurred in 636 AD and is known as the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah.

Muhammed did not live to see the battle. Instead it was the Rashidun Caliphate, the first Islamic caliphate founded in his name, which carried out his vision and conquered the Persians on that day. We know of the battle from the various Arabic accounts of this crucial early Islamic victory.

But we have never been able to find the battlefield, until now. Using declassified spy satellite images, a team from the University of Durham have pinpointed the long-lost site of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, as published in Antiquity.

The team, led by Durham University archaeologist Dr William Deadman, had not initially set out to search for the battlefield. They were using 1970s US satellite imagery to identify key points along the Darb Zubaydah pilgrimage route, one of seven such routes in Arabia and dating back 1,000 years to the Abbasid Caliphate, the third Islamic caliphate.

Reviewing the satellite imagery the team realized that ancient sites and features were clearly visible from above. They were able to identify the remains of a distinctive 9.5km long double wall. At one end was a large military outpost with three layers of defenses on the edge of the desert, and at the other a Mesopotamian town.

This feature, the outpost (known as al-’Udhayb) and the town all corresponded with the historical sources describing the location of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah. A key source, from the Muslim scholar Al-Tabari, describes the Sasanian and Arab drawing up facing each other on the bank of a river and “at the wall of Qudays, with the moat/canal behind.”

The age of the satellite imagery was crucial to finding the site. Modern agriculture in the decades since the photographs were taken has destroyed much of the original double wall and obscured the ancient geography of the area.

Without these old, outdated photos, it is possible that the battlefield would never have been found at all.