Is it true that a battery dated from at least 220 years BC was discovered in an Iraqi Village?

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You all are going to think I've fallen off the deep end, but I'm currently reading a book that I thought was about Freemasonry, but is actually about aliens having begun human civilization. Now, I half think this is hilarious, but I can't help wondering about some of the more unbelievable "facts" presented at the end of the book. So I'm going to post several questions based on "facts" presented in the book. Please feel free to give evidence or alternate explanations against these facts, because I really don't want to become a nut who thinks aliens kept humans as slaves, genetically modified us, and mined our planet millions of years ago.

Yes and the UN inspectors were so excited they forgot to tell anyone that it was possibly part of a weapon of mass destruction.... And if that wasn't bad enough someone saw the word battery and thought it was a gun battery of heavy artillery about to fire and the whole thing got out of hand...

Apart from that, what are we to understand from the word used, 'battery': a voltaic pile, a NiFe battery, an acid battery like a car battery, what?

Well now I'm off answering my own question. According to this BBC article, they do appear to have been batteries, but no one knows what they could possibly have been used for:

From the beginning of the article: "Iraq has a rich national heritage. The Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel are said to have been sited in this ancient land.

In any war, there is a chance that priceless treasures will be lost forever, articles such as the "ancient battery" that resides defenceless in the museum of Baghdad.

For this object suggests that the region, whose civilizations gave us writing and the wheel, may also have invented electric cells - two thousand years before such devices were well known."