The Sumerian Tablet That Maps Where 90,000 Hid Underground — And What's Still Down There

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]A 4,300-year-old clay tablet, oblong and unusually thick, sits in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, [music] catalog number YM92471.

[00:00:10]Most visitors never see it. The tablet is held in the museum's protected [music] storage alongside other objects that survived the 2003 looting and were quietly returned during the following decade. It is not on the public display floor. The reason is not its fragility.

[00:00:25]The tablet is in excellent condition.

[00:00:28]The reason is what it depicts. [music] The front face of IM92471 is a map. Not a city plan, not a temple diagram, a subsurface map drawn in fine cuneiform across a grid system that scholars [music] have known how to read since the 1940s, but have rarely chosen to publish in full. The map shows a network of underground passages, chambers, and connecting shafts [music] extending across an area of approximately 100 square kilometers beneath what is now [music] southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. The reverse face records a population. 90,000 individuals drawn from 23 named settlements [music] are listed as having descended into the network in a single coordinated movement. The tablet records the date of the descent. It records the duration of their stay underground.

[00:01:11][music] It does not record the date of their return. The list of returnees on the lower reverse is significantly shorter.

[00:01:17]The tablet was excavated from the temple archive at Eshnunna in 1937 by [music] an Iraqi-American joint expedition led by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. It was one of approximately 12,000 inscribed objects recovered from the site over three excavation seasons. The expedition's initial cataloger identified IM92471 as a fragmentary cartographic text, religious category, and assigned it [music] to long-term storage. The classification stuck. The map was assumed to depict an imagined underworld, a religious diagram of the realm of the dead, not a physical location. This interpretation appeared in the only published reference to the tablet, a 1952 monograph on Mesopotamian sacred geography. The monograph is cited fewer than a dozen times in the subsequent academic literature. The map was not re-examined for 67 years. Dr. Alexander Volkov at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago accessed the high-resolution digital scans of IM92471 in 2019 [music] during a project on Mesopotamian quantitative records. He was searching for examples of population accounting.

[00:02:24]The reverse [music] face returned a match. The list of 90,000 individuals is structured [music] as a census, not a religious list. Each entry includes a name, a settlement of origin, an age category, and a profession. The format is identical to the secular census records [music] used by Sumerian city administrators for grain distribution and military levies. Volkov turned the tablet over and re-examined the front face. The cartographic grid on the front uses a coordinate system common in Mesopotamian land surveys. The coordinates correspond to real geography. Volkov ran the grid against modern topographic data for the upper Tigris basin. The map aligned. The passages depicted on the tablet correspond to real subterranean features in the Anatolian carbonate platform, a region known to contain extensive natural cave systems, [music] and more notably, dozens of man-made underground cities, some still being discovered today. Volkov published his analysis in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 2021. The academic [music] response was silence. No rebuttal, no follow-up survey, no proposal for ground-truthing [music] the coordinates. The paper exists. The grid alignment exists. The census exists. The map has not been formally compared against the underground cities of Cappadocia, the closest known analog, [music] by any subsequent published study. To understand what Volkov found, it helps to read the map as the Sumerians drew it. The network depicted on IM92471 consists of three layers. The upper layer is described as the layer of the living, a series of large chambers connected by passages wide enough for two people to walk abreast. [music] The chambers are labeled by function. There are sleeping halls, food storage halls, water collection chambers, animal enclosures, and what the cuneiform terms a chamber for working stone, standard provisions for a long-term refuge. The middle layer is described as the layer of waiting. The chambers in this layer are smaller, more numerous, and individually addressed. The cuneiform labels them with sequence numbers rather than functional names. They are not described as having any specific purpose. The lower layer is described differently. The Sumerians used a single phrase for the lowest layer of the network. The phrase translates as the layer that was here before [music] us.

[00:04:34]The chambers on the lower layer are drawn with thicker lines than the layers above. The thicker lines in standard Sumerian cartographic convention indicate features that the surveyor did not construct but found already in place. The descent took place in the third year of a famine the tablet records as having begun without visible agricultural cause. Crops failed in regions that had not experienced drought. The famine spread across three growing seasons. Then something else began. The tablet describes it as the shadow at noon, a phenomenon in which the sun's light was visibly diminished at full daylight without any storm or cloud cover. The shadow at noon lasted for what the tablet records as 40 days.

[00:05:12]During those 40 days, the 23 settlements coordinated the descent. 90,000 people, organized by settlement and profession, moved into the network in waves. The descent was completed two days before the shadow lifted. The tablet records that when the shadow lifted the surface settlements were intact but empty. The houses still stood. The grain silos still held what little grain remained.

[00:05:32]The fires had gone out. Everyone who could descend had already descended. The Atra-Hasis, the Babylonian flood narrative held in the British Museum and dated to approximately 1700 BCE, contains a passage that scholars have always read as referring to the flood survivors. The passage describes a group of people who survived a great calamity by going below the surface of the earth.

[00:05:52]The standard interpretation has been that the passage is a textual variant of the Noah style boat narrative with the underground refuge serving as a metaphor. Volkov re-examined the passage in light of IM92471.

[00:06:05]The Atrahasis text uses the same word for descent that the tablet uses. The new detail here is the trigger. The Atrahasis specifies what the people were hiding from. The text describes a presence that came down. The presence is not named. The text describes it only by its movement. It descended from the sky to the land. It moved across the land.

[00:06:25]It went where there was warmth and where there were people. The underground refuge was effective because the presence did not or could not follow the people below ground level. The Cappadocia underground cities of central Anatolia, principally the sites known today as Derinkuyu and Kaymakli, are the closest known archaeological analog to the network depicted on IM92471.

[00:06:47]Derinkuyu is the deepest known underground settlement in the world, reaching approximately 85 m below the surface across at least 18 documented levels. It includes ventilation shafts, water wells, food storage, livestock chambers, and rolling stone doors that could be closed from inside but not from outside. The site was rediscovered in 1963 when a Turkish farmer demolished a wall in his basement and found a passage leading downward. The official archaeological dating places construction at approximately the 8th to 7th century BCE, but the dating is based on the most recent occupation layers.

[00:07:20]The structure itself is undated at lower levels because no organic material has been recovered from those levels for radiocarbon analysis. The lowest levels could be much older. The new detail here is capacity. Derinkuyu alone could shelter approximately 20,000 people.

[00:07:35]There are at least 200 other underground cities documented in Cappadocia at varying scales. The combined capacity of the known network easily exceeds 90,000.

[00:07:44]The combined capacity of the unknown network in regions of the Anatolian platform that have not been systematically surveyed is unknown. The Hopi tradition documented by Frank Waters in 1963 includes a teaching about the people who survived the previous world's destruction by entering the earth. The Hopi described the survivors of the third world as having traveled into the body of the mother, a phrase the elders specified as meaning literal underground passage. The survivors lived below the surface for what the tradition describes as a long time, sustained by the warmth of the earth and by ant people, beings the Hopi describe as having helped them survive. The new detail here is contact. The Hopi tradition states that the survivors were not alone underground. They encountered beings who lived there permanently. The beings shared knowledge of food sources, water sources, and which [music] passages to use and which to avoid. When the survivors finally returned to the surface, some chose to remain below.

[00:08:37]Their descendants, according to the Hopi, are still there.

[00:08:40]Ground-penetrating radar surveys of the southeastern Turkish and northern Syrian regions conducted [music] between 2014 and 2021 by joint European geological expeditions have identified numerous anomalies [music] consistent with large-scale subterranean voids. Many of these anomalies have not been investigated due to the security situation in the surveyed regions. A partial list of identified void clusters has been published. The published list includes 37 distinct subsurface complexes within the area covered by Volkov's grid alignment. The complexes range from small caverns of perhaps a few hundred square meters to formations spanning several square kilometers at depths between 40 and 110 meters below the current surface. The published surveys have not been compared against the cuneiform map on IM92471 by any team operating in the public scientific literature. The depth profile of the radar anomalies is unusual.

[00:09:32]Natural cave systems in carbonate rock tend to form in roughly horizontal strata, following the bedding planes of the rock as groundwater dissolves softer layers. The anomalies identified in the surveyed region do not follow this pattern. They are organized vertically with chambers stacked in three distinct layers separated by intact rock walls.

[00:09:50]The vertical organization is consistent with deliberate construction rather than natural formation. The lowest layer of voids between 90 and 110 m deep shows a particularly anomalous signature. The radar returns from this layer suggest chambers with smooth interior surfaces and consistent dimensions, features that natural cave formation does not produce.

[00:10:10]The lowest layer matches the description of the layer that was here before us on IM 92471.

[00:10:16]The Sumerian surveyors who drew the map described that layer as found, not constructed. The radar suggests they were correct. Someone made those chambers. The Sumerians did not. Here is what keeps researchers up at night. The map on IM 92471 records 90,000 individuals descending into the network. The lower reverse of the tablet records returnees. The standard reading of the cuneiform list is that approximately 41,000 individuals are named as having returned to the surface after the shadow at noon lifted and conditions on the surface stabilized. 41,000, not 90,000. The discrepancy is 49,000 individuals. The tablet provides no explanation for the discrepancy. The list of returnees ends abruptly without summary, without commentary, and without any mention of the missing population. The standard interpretation has been that the remaining 49,000 died during the underground period from disease, accident, or supply failure.

[00:11:09]Volkov ran a structural analysis of the returnee list against [music] known Sumerian census conventions. He found that the list is incomplete in a specific way. The list does not include any individual whose profession was recorded on the original census [music] as belonging to the lower levels. The carvers of stone, the diggers of new passages, [music] the keepers of the deep chambers, the individuals who maintained the lower layer, none of them returned, or none of them were listed as returning. The professions that worked closest to the layer that was here before us do not appear on the returnee list at all. The second detail concerns the duration recorded [music] on the tablet. The descent lasted 40 days. The return is recorded as having begun, but no end date is given for the return. The cuneiform phrase used for the duration of the underground stay translates more directly as the time below was long enough that the children born below were old enough to ask questions about [music] the surface. A generation, possibly longer. The descent took 40 days. The return is not closed. [music] The Sumerians who wrote IM 92471 did not know when the return would end, because at the time the tablet was written, the return had not yet finished. There were still people coming up. [music] There may have been people who would never come up. The third detail concerns a phrase that appears only once on the tablet in the margin beside the depiction of the lower layer.

[00:12:24]The phrase has been translated in various ways. The 1952 monograph rendered it as the ancient sleepers, treating it as a religious reference.

[00:12:31][music] Volkov's revised translation reads the phrase as those who were already living below, with the verb form indicating ongoing residence at the time of the Sumerian descent. The 90,000 did not enter an empty network. The network was already inhabited. A 2018 paper published in a Turkish geological journal, but not widely circulated, described an unusual atmospheric finding from one of the Cappadocia sites. Air samples taken from the deepest accessible chamber at the Derinkuyu complex showed elevated concentrations of [music] trace gases inconsistent with surface atmospheric mixing. The gases included compounds typically associated with biological metabolism in concentrations that suggested ongoing metabolic activity somewhere within the closed system. The paper's authors proposed several explanations, including the possibility of an undiscovered bacterial colony deep in the carbonate.

[00:13:21]The paper was not followed up. Air sampling at deeper, less accessible chambers has not been authorized. The sites remain accessible only to control tourist visits along established routes.

[00:13:31]The deeper passages are sealed. The official reason given for the sealing is visitor safety. The unofficial reason, according to a guide interviewed by a Turkish documentary crew [music] in 2020, is that previous attempts to map the lower levels resulted in equipment malfunctions and the disappearance of two members of an earlier survey team in 1989. The disappearances were never officially confirmed. The records of the 1989 expedition are not in the public archive. IM92471 [music] sits in the protected storage of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad today. The tablet is not on public display. The map on its front face has been digitally scanned, but has not been published in high resolution by the museum. Dr. Volkov offers a translation of the final line of the tablet that differs from any previously published reading. The final line on the lower reverse beneath the truncated list of returnees has been translated for 70 years [music] as may the gods watch over those still below.

[00:14:26]Volkov reads the verb form differently.

[00:14:28]The line [music] in his translation is not a blessing. It is an observation.

[00:14:32]The line reads, those still below are being watched, not by the gods. The Sumerian phrase does not include [music] the word for gods. The phrase says only that the watching is happening and that the watching is being done from below.

[00:14:44]From below, the 90,000 descended, descended. 41,000 came up, came up.

[00:14:49]49,000 are unaccounted, unaccounted. The map shows where they went, where they went. The map does not show where they are now, now.