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Reconciling the Past: A catalogue of Scattered Collections

William PESTLE, Karen WILSON, Stephen NASH, Sarah COLEMAN

Field Museum of Natural History

The ancient city of Kish, located on the floodplain of the Euphrates River, eighty kilometers south of modern-

day Baghdad, held an extraordinary position during the formative periods of Mesopotamian history. It seems

to have been the only important city in the northern part of the alluvium (Akkad), while there were several

major centers in the south (Sumer). According to the Sumerian King List, Kish was the first city to which

“kingship descended from heaven” after the great flood that destroyed the world. During the third millennium

B.C., rule over Kish implied dominance over the entire northern part of the plain, and the title “King of Kish”

bestowed prestige analogous to that of the medieval “Holy Roman Emperor” (GIBSON 1972).

From 1923 through 1933, joint archaeological expeditions of The Field Museum of Natural History and Ox-

ford University explored many of the twenty-four-square-kilometer site’s forty mounds, uncovering significant

evidence of Kish’s extremely early urbanization and its prominence as a dominant regional polity. However,

no final site report of the work of those seasons was ever published. This paper details the history, progress,

and future prospects of the Kish Project, a federally funded effort to virtually reconcile and publish, in both

print and digital formats, the expansive, and divided, collection of ancient material culture from the Mesopo-

tamian city of Kish.

Site Background The archaeological site of Kish (32° 30’ N, 44° 35’ E) is located on the floodplain of the Euphrates River in

modern Iraq, twelve kilometers due east of ancient Babylon and eighty kilometers south of Baghdad (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 – Map of Mesopotamia showing location of Kish

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The site is made up of more than forty mounds scattered over a twenty-four square kilometer area divided

by the ancient course of the Euphrates River (the Puratta) into eastern and western portions (Fig. 2). The

eastern complex (known in ancient times as Hursagkalama) is dominated by a series of mounds known as

Ingharra, while the ziggurat of Uhaimir towers over the western remains of the city.

Fig. 2 – Plan of City of Kish

The geographic situation of Kish, on the banks of the Euphrates, the region’s main riverine artery, and near

the convergence of major interregional road systems, gave its early settlers numerous advantages. Accor-

ding to the Sumerian King List, Kish was the first seat of kingship founded after the great flood, and archae-

ologists now recognize the site as one of the earliest true cities in the world, and the region’s first true

hegemon.

In the early 3rd millennium BC, the socio-political landscape of southern Iraq was characterized by the pre-

sence of a number of small competing city-states, each sustained by swathes of land irrigated by major

canals feeding from the Tigris or Euphrates, and controlled by local petty monarchs, essentially war-chiefs,

people who were able to raise an army when conflict arose with neighboring polities and had ties to a local

cult or religious establishment. It is in this highly fractious environment that Kish emerges as either a, or the,

most influential city-state in the region in the earliest part of the 3rd millennium BC a period known as the

Early Dynastic, eventually wielding control over not just their immediate environs, but the whole of the lands

of Sumer and Akkad, the first instance of the advent of regional hegemony in Mesopotamia. Sculptures and

archaic tablets found during excavations attest to the existence of a fully developed administration at the site

by the last quarter of the fourth millennium B.C. (MOOREY 1978). Within two or three hundred years, the

settlement had grown such that its rulers could then establish themselves as major political figures.

The explanation for the city’s rise likely is to be found at the intersection of geography and religion. At the

time of its primacy, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers were separated at Kish by only 30-40 miles. Thus,

control of the land of Kish afforded whosoever controlled it dominance over the rivers, and thus control of

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irrigation to fields and thus the cities downstream and the best means of moving soldiers both up and down

the rivers. Moreover, the Sumerian King List, which chronicles the various cities and individuals charged by

the gods with ruling over Mesopotamia, describes Kish as the first place at which the Kingship of the land

came to earth after the Flood. Kish’s prominence during the Early Dynastic Period set the stage for the de-

velopment of a long succession of important Mesopotamian “seats of kingship” in the area including Akkad,

Babylon, Seleucia, Ctesiphon, and Baghdad.

In both practical and religious terms, Kish is enshrined in Mesopotamian tradition as being the first city to

exercise political control over the entirety of Sumer and Akkad in the post-diluvean era. This cultural inno-

vation places the ascendancy of Kish in the middle of a long sequence of cultural innovations in greater

Mesopotamia, a region stretching from Anatolia to modern Iran, that, over a period of some 8-10,000 years,

saw the development of some of the earliest sedentary villages in the world, the domestication of a substan-

tial number of faunal and floral species including modern mainstays like barley, wheat, sheep, and goat, the

emergence of social complexity, bureaucracy, established means of political control, giving rise, in fits and

spurts, to the development of chiefdoms, states, and eventually empires that controlled huge swathes of the

Ancient Near East

While the actual regulatory power of the city of Kish wanes during the Akkadian period, when King Naram-

Sin was forced to quell a rebellion there (ca. 2250 B.C.), its cachet as the first major regional seat of power

lingered for centuries. This is best demonstrated by the fact that leaders of other cities who aspired to be-

come some sort of regional leader, conquering the city in order to add the title “King of Kish” to their list of

names, as the possession of this honorific lent some legitimacy to their claim of power. In many ways, this

title is thought to have functioned in much the same manner as the later Medieval title of “Holy Roman

Emperor”. Despite this powerful association with the concept of kingship, the fortunes of the city of Kish

waxed and waned throughout the following millennia. During the Akkadian period (2330-2150 BC), the

power of Kish declined as the center of regional political gravity shifted to Akkad. This regression continued

into Old Babylonian times (2000-1600 BC), although the significance of Kish later rebounded, and the city

and region continued to prosper well into the Sassanian period during the first centuries of this era (GIBSON

1972). The total occupation of Kish spans four millennia, and the excavated collections include artifacts from

the Jamdat Nasr through Sassanian periods (ca. 3200 B.C.-7th century A.D.) as well as medieval ceramics

(late 10th to early 14th centuries A.D.). As such, the collections serve as a chronostratigraphic key to un-

derstanding the history of Mesopotamia.

Excavation In 1921, Stephen Langdon of Oxford University wrote to Berthold Laufer, then Chief Curator of the Anthro-

pology Department of The Field Museum, to propose a joint Mesopotamian expedition. Laufer expressed

The Field Museum’s interest, and in 1921-22 the expedition’s eventual chief financier, Mr. H. Weld-Blundell,

conducted a survey of important sites in Mesopotamia, settling on Kish as the site holding the most interest

and archaeological potential. In March of 1923, Mr. Ernest Mackay, protégé of the famed archaeologist Sir

Flinders Petrie, and later the excavator of Mohenjo-Daro, began the first season of excavations of the Joint

Oxford-Field Museum expedition to Kish. Excavations continued during the winter months of the next ten

years, from 1923-33, under the absentee direction of Stephen Langdon who, although serving as the director

of the project, visited the excavations only twice, in 1924 and 1926. Mackay served as field director through

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the 1925 – 1926 season, after which Mr. Louis Charles Watelin became field director. Watelin served as field

director for the remainder of the project.

During the course of the ten years of excavation, work was conducted on seventeen different mounds both

inside and outside the ancient boundaries of Kish. The excavations were absolutely enormous in scale,

employing teams of hundreds of local men and boys, overseen by just a handful of “Europeans”, working at

a break-neck pace to remove soil to depths of fifteen or more meters in trenches tens of meters on a side

(Fig, 3).

Fig. 3 – Trench “Y”, Kish

Initial excavations at Kish centered on the ziggurat and adjacent structures at Uhaimir. These represented

a series of temple buildings and re-buildings that ranged in date from the Old Babylonian to the Neo-Baby-

lonian period (ca. 1750-550 B.C.), with possible traces of earlier remains of the third millennium B.C. Later

work on Ingharra revealed a massive Neo-Babylonian temple complex, roughly 130 meters square, with

walls preserved to a height of over 4m. This temple stood upon an Early Dynastic plano-convex brick plat-

form that also supported two adjoining “ziggurats” or temple towers of the mid-third-millennium B.C. Broad

areas adjacent to the Neo-Babylonian temple were cleared down to plain level in a series of trenches,

designated by a veritable alphabet soup of letters, over the course of the excavations. This work revealed

habitation levels stretching back to the beginning of the third millennium B.C. as well as a cemetery that

extended south toward Mound A. Included in this cemetery were a series of remarkably rich burials, each

of which contained multiple human skeletons and a wheeled vehicle drawn by a team of bovids or equids.

These are often referred to as “chariots,” and the burials as “chariot burials,” although the term “cart” more

aptly describes these four-wheeled means of conveyance. These graves appear to date to Early Dynastic II

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(ca. 2700-2600 B.C.) and are the direct predecessors of the richer royal tombs at Ur (GIBSON 1972,

MOOREY 1978).

Mound A contained a palace of the Third Early Dynastic period (ca. 2500 B.C.) over which was another ex-

tensive cemetery. The 154 graves in the “A Cemetery” were rich in ceramic vessels; copper weapons, tools,

pins, and vessels; and luxury items such as ostrich-egg shell vessels and, in one case, an iron dagger. They

date to the end of the Early Dynastic and beginning of the Akkadian period (the end of the third millennium

B.C.). Graves of the same date found on the adjacent portion of Ingharra appear to have been even more

richly furnished, attesting to a stratified society in which wealthier individuals were buried closer to the sacred

complex with its ziggurats than were the less well-to-do.

North of Ingharra was a second, somewhat earlier, Early Dynastic palace, dubbed the “Plano-Convex

Building” after the shape of the bricks used in its construction. Mound W, to the west of Ingharra, yielded

hundreds of texts of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods (first half of the first millennium B.C.)

as well as graves of the 5-4th centuries B.C. Tell H, to the east, seems to have been a city of the Sassanian

period, including a series of eight “palaces” or elite residences. These were richly decorated with elaborate

patterned and figural stucco, datable to the later 6th century A.D. The expedition also excavated in a number

of other locations deemed to be of interest by sponsors and/or field directors, including Jamdat Nasr (type

site of the eponymous 4th millennium B.C. period), located 30 kilometers northeast of Kish. Here a monu-

mental building, probably administrative in nature, yielded early clay tablets, seal impressions, and richly

polychromed pottery vessels.

At the end of each season, pursuant to guidelines established before the first season in 1923, the retained

objects were divided, with the Iraq Museum retaining half of the objects and any one of a kind pieces, and

the two excavating institutions splitting up the remainder of the objects, with Oxford retaining all inscribed

objects, and the Field Museum of Natural History receiving all archaeological, skeletal, and scientific mate-

rials. Similarly, the records of the excavation were dispersed to the three institutions. Duplicate sets of the

field registers, cards, and photographs went to the Ashmolean and the Field Museum. Records such as the

field directors’ reports to Langdon eventually ended up in Chicago, while Mackay’s detailed notes on his

discoveries are part of the Ashmolean Museum archives. While this was standard operating procedure for

the time, note-keeping at this project was, as with many other elements of the excavation, sub par. Seton-

Lloyd perhaps described it best stating, “…(the site) was badly excavated, the excavations were badly re-

corded, and the records were correspondingly badly published” (LLOYD 1969). The results of the project

was thus a single coherent assemblage of material culture arbitrarily divided into three collections separated

by thousands of miles. This division occurred not just on the scale of individual contexts (e.g. graves or

rooms), but also on the level of individual objects, pieces of which were dispatched to the four corners of the

globe without note of their common origin (Fig. 4).

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Fig. 4 – Three pieces of same vessel, now held respectively, clockwise from top left, by Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, and Iraq Museum, Baghdad (rubbing by Roger Moorey).

The Status Quo For the eight decades since their excavation, the collections from Kish have remained divided, with forces of

fate, scholarly predilection, geography, and international politics precluding the production of a synthetic site

report for the city. Accounts of The Field Museum-Oxford University Joint Expedition to Kish were originally

published in the 1920s and 1930s by both Langdon (1924, 1930, 1934), who wrote a popularly oriented

series, and Mackay (1925-1929 and 1931), who was responsible for a series of more scientific publications.

However, Watelin died in 1934 and Langdon in 1937, with the result that no final site report was ever pro-

duced. McGuire Gibson (1972) and Roger Moorey (1978) both revisited the products of the excavation in

the 1970s, and since these seminal publications, the archaeological assemblage from Kish frequently has

been the subject of scholarly inquiry. Works have been produced on the private houses and chariot burials

at Ingharra (al-Gaze 1983-84), on cuneiform texts from the city (Dalley and Yoffee 1991), on the physical

character of its inhabitants (Rathbun 1975), and, most recently, on the nearby site of Jamdat Nasr (Englund

and Grégoire 1991, Matthews 2002). Forthcoming works on the previously excavated Kish collection focus

on the cylinder seals (Gibson, in preparation), and additional cuneiform tablets (Dalley, in press). However, a

synthetic site report resulting from the 1920s and 1930s excavation is still lacking. As Kish may have been

one of the first true cities of the world, and one of the first places to hold any sort of regional power, the lack

of a final site report stands as a significant gap in the archaeological record of Mesopotamia.

Ironically, the salvation of this collection was to be the result of martial aggression, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the aftermath of the invasion, and despite the prescient advanced warning of numerous scholars, the mu-

seums, cultural institutions, and archaeological sites of Iraq fell prey to looters. As an act of atonement for

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their perceived inaction in the face of this cultural tragedy, in late 2003 the US federal government through

the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities developed a Special Iraq initiative offering sub-

stantial funding to projects to preserve and document Iraqi cultural resources. This program offered the

unique opportunity for funding of efforts dealing not only with collections within Iraq, but also with those

materials of Iraqi cultural patrimony exported to Europe and America. The appropriateness of this funding

opportunity was not lost on The Field Museum, which sought, and received, the funding necessary to revisit,

after nearly a century, the collections from Kish. This initial funding for the Kish Project has been substan-

tially augmented by both private donations and, in late 2005, by an appropriation from the United States

Congress which, along with further requested funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities,

will make possible the ambitious project goals outlined below.

Challenges As with any effort to resurrect the work of old excavations, the Kish Project has been presented with a large

number of challenges, some resulting from inherent defects in the style and execution of the excavation and

others from decades of neglect of the excavated materials.

Principal among the former challenges is the dispersal of the excavated objects to the four corners of the

globe. This division, and the poor documentation that accompanied it, has certainly resulted in the irreversi-

ble loss of context and association for a sizeable number of artifacts excavated by the OFME. In addition,

problems with the original recording methods often have often proven difficult to overcome. For example,

neither Mackay nor Watelin established a long-term, systematically conceived program of operations or a

logical, ongoing system of recording. In fact, both excavators changed their registry methods in mid-stream,

using alphanumeric designators that at times referred to provenience designations, at others to patron

names, and finally to a general sequence of finds. In addition, for at least two seasons, duplicate field num-

bers were assigned. Moreover, a combination of the poor quality of excavation and the subsequent division

of the artifacts has resulted in an utter lack of consistency in the way in which the collected artifacts are de-

scribed. Object types, materials, even loci, are referred to in an idiosyncratic and inconsistent manner, with

the result that a new standardized cataloguing terminology has had to be developed and applied to all avail-

able objects. These factors, combined with the generally slipshod style of excavation, the lack of any consis-

tent onsite director, and the death of both Watelin and Langdon within five years of the close of excavation

have all combined to create a rather desperate situation.

Subsequent treatment of collections at the three holding institutions also has not lived up to the standards of

today. For example, when The Field Museum assigned registration numbers to Kish objects as they entered

the collection, field numbers were often removed, presumably with an eye toward aesthetics. Thus objects

were dissociated from their field records. Some of these associations can be recovered by methods such as

use of a black light to read erased numbers; others will have to take place with the aid of drawings and pho-

tographs, where such exist. Even in instances where numbers were not intentionally removed, deterioration

such as soluble salt efflorescence or bronze disease have resulted in the physical disassociation of many

objects from their field numbers. Finally, in the 1920s and 30s, archaeologists could not have seen the im-

portance of the unglamorous remains (e.g., sherds, bones, lithics) that today constitute a vast realm of

archaeological possibility. Thus at least 10,000 of these pedestrian artifacts were never even given regis-

tration numbers in the field or at their respective holding institutions, but languished in obscurity.

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As briefly mentioned above, issues of politics have also conspired to make more difficult a full reconciliation

of the scattered Kish collections. Issues of safety and security have prevented a full appraisal of the state

and condition of the Kish collections held by The Iraq Museum (which should have the largest and “best”

collection of the three holding institutions). Until the storage room doors at the Iraq Museum are re-opened,

any attempted reconciliation of the results of the OFME will necessarily be incomplete. The groundwork for

the incorporation of the Iraqi portions of the Kish materials has and is, however, being laid with the training of

Iraq Museum staff by Kish Project personnel and the establishment, for the first time since 1928, of lines of

communication between Field Museum, Ashmolean Museum, and Iraq Museum administrators. The general

lack of security in Iraq today has also affected directly the site of Kish, both preventing further site revisits or

excavation and increasing the pace of looting therein. Project staff are, however, in contact with US Military

personnel stationed at the site and have been assured of the security of at least some portions thereof.

Project Goals and Methods The ultimate goal of the Kish Project is the belated production of a site report which would draw together

the fruits of ten seasons of excavation into a unified, synthetic, and comprehensive statement on the cultural

history and processes of the people of ancient Kish. It is only through the production of such a report that a

detailed reckoning of the city’s illustrious place in history can be had. Given the nature and distribution of the

excavated materials, however, a number of necessary antecedent steps were/are required. Principal among

these is the production of a full synthetic catalogue of the Kish holdings of all three institutions (Ashmolean

Museum, Field Museum of Natural History, Iraq Museum), which will reconcile, for the first time since exca-

vation, the scattered collection of material culture from Kish. This document, which will have both print and

digital incarnations, will include a reckoning of not just all of the excavated objects, but also of the trove of

documents produced by the excavators pertaining to the ten seasons of excavation. The envisioned cata-

logue is not intended to be a simple list of materials, but rather aims to be the first earnest attempt to re-

construct (through the use of the aforementioned documentation) object assemblages (with objects form

all three collections) by provenience.

In order to produce this catalogue, Field Museum staff members have traveled to the Ashmolean Museum

in Oxford to inventory extant archival records and to photograph over 2,000 Kish objects prior to their being

packed in anticipation of a major construction project. The Ashmolean generously offered to loan all its Kish

archival materials to The Field Museum for the duration of this project, and these are now in Chicago. In total

some 16 cubic feet of documents were shipped from the Ashmolean’s archives, documents including every-

thing from original Expedition field cards, notes, correspondence, and photographs to the entire corpus of

Kish documentation compiled over a period of three decades by longtime Kish scholar Roger Moorey. All of

the collections-related records from The Field Museum and Ashmolean Museum Kish collections have been

entered on computer (some 20,000 object records), and all the photographs produced by the expedition,

numbering over 5,000 images, have been scanned.

In addition, each Kish object at The Field Museum has been photographed digitally (over 9,000 images) and

has been examined in order to establish a standard cataloguing terminology to be used in a new object data-

base. An electronic object catalogue, following this standardized terminology and including photographs, has

been produced for The Field Museum collections and is in the process of being produced for the objects held

by the Ashmolean. At the moment, circumstances in Iraq prevent our working there—the Director of the Iraq

Museum, Donny George, has told us that all the storerooms have been welded shut to prevent further loot-

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ing. However, we believe that we will be able to establish, at the minimum, a basic catalogue using the

detailed notebooks preserved in the papers of Roger Moorey, who spent an extensive period of time in

Baghdad in the early 1970s studying Kish material there. Staff working on the Kish project are now in the

process of identifying and scanning relevant archival material such as the weekly reports sent back from

the field by both Mackay and Watelin and original plans and drawings—all of which will be used to recon-

struct the archaeology of Kish to be presented in the final site report.

The dissemination of the catalogue of the three Kish collections that will have been completed by the end

of the present grant period (August 31, 2006) will be accomplished through both traditional print and digital

media. The print publication will be done as part of the Field Museum’s esteemed Fieldiana monograph

series, which has been the venue of publication for more than 175 anthropology and archaeology mono-

graphs since 1895. The printed edition of the Kish catalogue will be bilingual (English/Arabic) and will include

introductory chapters by the appropriate curator(s) and eminent scholar(s) in the field of Mesopotamian

archaeology, an explanation of the process and methods used in its production, and a richly illustrated

detailing of the materials held by each institution. In addition, the results of the Kish catalogue will be dis-

seminated by means of a web-based database, which will also be made available in both English and

Arabic. This database will link together in a dynamic manner object descriptions, object photos, digitized

versions of related field records, and relevant field photographs, allowing the user the ability to literally click-

down to the level of individual trenches, graves, etc. in order to “see” the site of Kish and the collections as

they were when excavated, in effect to reverse the process of their division. This database and its accompa-

nying narrative web pages will be accessed through the existing Field Museum of Natural History website

(http://www.fieldmuseum.org).

The next task will be to produce the final site report covering the entirety of the excavations at Kish. This will

be a complex undertaking, analogous to assembling a giant jig-saw puzzle using the pieces provided by the

various databases and records left – but for the large part undigested and uninterpreted – by the excavators.

Setting each artifact, building, and area of excavation in its fullest archaeological context and unraveling the

archaeology and history of Kish as it emerges from that process will be a considerable challenge. To this

end, a team of more than a dozen specialists in archaeology and related disciplines have been assembled to

produce this report. Work will proceed area by area for the site. For each area the responsible staff member

will examine the existing record of the work that was done, as it is documented in the few original reports and

in the archival record. Using that material plus the work of Algaze, Gibson, Moorey, and others, s/he will re-

construct the stratigraphy of that part of the site, producing drafts of plans and sections as necessary. Then

the objects discovered there will be placed in their original archaeological contexts, and studied for the in-

formation they reveal about a wide range of topics, including date(s) and function(s) of that portion of Kish

and changes over both time and space. The whole area and its contents will be studied in the context of

local formation processes and other discoveries in Mesopotamia and adjacent regions and compared and

contrasted with that material to reveal what broader aspects of Mesopotamian culture—if any— it elucidates.

As part of this project, the Kish collection for the first time also will be studied using sophisticated scientific

analytical techniques, opening up new avenues of inquiry that could not have been dreamed of in the 1920s

and 30s. The Field Museum is home to an exceptional battery of analytical instruments providing substantial

capabilities for the scientific study of archaeological materials. In-house facilities include a scanning electron

microscope with energy dispersive spectrometer capabilities (SEM-EDS), a quadropole inductively coupled

plasma mass spectrometer with laser ablation (LA-ICPMS), and a multicollector ICP mass spectrometer for

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high precision isotope analysis. Combined, these instruments allow for the examination and elemental

characterization of mineral and metallic objects (SEM-EDS) and the proveniencing of archaeological and

skeletal materials (ICPMS). In the case of the Kish materials, proposed types of analysis will involve the

sourcing of trade goods, including non-local stone and semi-precious gems; the characterization of early

copper, copper-alloy, and (potentially) meteoritic iron tools, weapons, and utensils, and the study of the

evolution of metallurgy in Mesopotamia; and the identification of the place of origin of certain presumably

non-local individuals buried in the cemeteries of the city. Further work on light element stable isotopes,

radiometry, and genetics, can, if necessary, be accomplished using specialized equipment available at

partner institutions.

The revisit of the Kish materials also presents a unique opportunity to combine information gleaned from

textual artifacts (e.g. cuneiform tablets) with data derived from scientific, stylistic, or other archaeological

analysis. The marriage of these lines of inquiry was not thought highly of during the original excavation, and

as such, their ability to inform one-another and provide far deeper and more probing insights into the lifeways

of the inhabitants of ancient Kish was discounted. The present work will seek to redress this oversight with

the aid of project Assryiologists, who today are far more willing to incorporate into their research the work

and findings of archaeologists. All of this interpretive work on objects excavated from Kish is essential if we

wish to truly understand the nature and development of this early city, which occupied such a prominent

place in the civilization of third millennium Mesopotamia—a civilization that was in many ways ancestral to

all that has come after it down to the present day.

Conclusion The lack of a final site report for the site of Kish stands as a significant lacuna in the archaeological record

of Mesopotamia, effectively precluding an understanding of the true historical significance of this crucial

Mesopotamian city. Through the process outlined above, the Field Museum, along with the Ashmolean

Museum and the Iraq Museum, hopes to make such a final publication of the Kish excavations a reality.

Roger Moorey, in the preface to his 1978 work Kish Excavations 1923-1933, undertaken to produce a

catalogue of the Ashmolean’s Kish holdings, concisely encapsulates the necessity of this endeavor:

“In undertaking this project, nearly fifty years after the excavations were started, I have been very

conscious that the original work was inspired by aims no longer recognized as viable and executed by

methods which were largely inadequate…It would be to confound the evil if the results of this excavation

were for these reasons ignored and the finds, with what is left of the records, allowed to suffer further

neglect. It would be particularly so at a time when fresh excavations at Kish on this scale are unlikely,

though modern development there is radically modifying the site. …Ideally all three collections should be

fully published as a single unit…” (pp. viii, xxi)

Roger Moorey died on December 23, 2004, less than two months after the initial funds for the Kish Project

were awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His death, besides being deeply felt by those

who knew him, serves as a stark reminder of why old and incomplete excavations like Kish need to revisited

and revived without delay. With the deaths of Stephen Langdon and Charles Watelin within years of the

close of the Kish excavations, the direct link to the acts of the excavators was gone, and with the loss of

Moorey, the second generation of scholars versed in the convolutions of Kish began to join them. The

information these men and women hold in their heads, and the scribblings tucked away on fading pieces

of paper and deteriorating objects, must be captured, codified, and disseminated before it is too late.

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References Algaze, G. 1983-84. “Private Houses and Graves at Ingharra, A Reconsideration,” Mesopotamia 18-19, pp. 135-191.

Dalley, S. In press. Old Babylonian Texts in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts 15) Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Dalley, S., Yoffee, N. 1991. Old Babylonian Texts in the Ashmolean Museum: Texts from Kish and Elsewhere (Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts 13) Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Englund, R. K., Grégoire, J.P. 1991. The Proto-Cuneiform Texts from Jemdet Nasr. 1: Copies, Transliterations and Glossary (Materialien zu den frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients I.) Berlin, Gebr. Mann.

Gelb, I.J. 1970. Sargonic Texts in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary No. 5). Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Gibson, M. 1972. “The Archaeological Uses of Cuneiform Documents: Patterns of Occupation at the City of Kish,” Iraq 34, pp. 113-123.

Gibson, M. 1972. The City and Area of Kish. Coconut Grove: Field Research Projects.

Goetze, A. 1961. “Early Kings of Kish,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 15, pp. 105-111.

Harden, D.B. 1934. “A Typological Examination of Sumerian Pottery from Jamdat Nasr and Kish,” Iraq 1, pp. 30-44.

Langdon, S. 1924. Excavations at Kish I. Paris, Paul Geuthner.

Langdon, S. 1930. Excavations at Kish III. Paris, Paul Geuthner.

Langdon, S. 1934. Excavations at Kish IV. Paris, Paul Geuthner.

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