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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 modernday 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 Oxford 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 Mesopotamian 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. According to the Sumerian King List, Kish was the first seat of kingship founded after the great flood, and archaeologists now recognize the site as one of the earliest true cities in the world, and the region’s first true
hegemon.
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In the early 3 millennium BC, the socio-political landscape of southern Iraq was characterized by the presence 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,
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most influential city-state in the region in the earliest part of the 3 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 development 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 innovation 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 substantial 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 NaramSin 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 become 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
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the Jamdat Nasr through Sassanian periods (ca. 3200 B.C.-7 century A.D.) as well as medieval ceramics
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(late 10 to early 14 centuries A.D.). As such, the collections serve as a chronostratigraphic key to understanding the history of Mesopotamia.
Excavation
In 1921, Stephen Langdon of Oxford University wrote to Berthold Laufer, then Chief Curator of the Anthropology 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-Babylonian 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 platform 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 extensive 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.)
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as well as graves of the 5-4 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
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patterned and figural stucco, datable to the later 6 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
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site of the eponymous 4 millennium B.C. period), located 30 kilometers northeast of Kish. Here a monumental 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 materials. 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. SetonLloyd perhaps described it best stating, “…(the site) was badly excavated, the excavations were badly recorded, 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 produced. 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 museums, 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 substantial 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 substantially 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 irreversible 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 numbers 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 described. 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 available objects. These factors, combined with the generally slipshod style of excavation, the lack of any consistent 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 photographs, 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 importance 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 registration 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 excavation, 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 catalogue is not intended to be a simple list of materials, but rather aims to be the first earnest attempt to reconstruct (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 everything 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 database. 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 loot8
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 reconstruct 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 monographs 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 disseminated 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 clickdown 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 accompanying 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 reconstruct 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 information 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
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Dalley, S., Yoffee, N. 1991. Old Babylonian Texts in the Ashmolean Museum: Texts from Kish and Elsewhere (Oxford Editions of
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Englund, R. K., Grégoire, J.P. 1991. The Proto-Cuneiform Texts from Jemdet Nasr. 1: Copies, Transliterations and Glossary
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Pt. 2 (Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropology Memoirs I, 1-2) Chicago, Field Museum.
Matthews, R. 2002. Secrets of the Dark Mound: Jemdet Nasr 1926-1928. Warminster, British School of Archaeology in Iraq.
Moorey, P.R.S. 1970. “Cemetery A at Kish: Grave Groups and Chronology,” Iraq 32, pp. 86-128.
Moorey, P.R.S. 1978. Kish Excavations, 1923-1933: with a microfiche catalogue of the objects in Oxford excavated by the Oxford-Field
Museum, Chicago, Expedition to Kish in Iraq, 1923-1933. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Rathbun, T. 1975. A Study of the Physical Characteristics of the Ancient Inhabitants of Kish, Iraq. Coconut Grove, Field Research
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