You are seeing an unstyled version of this site. If this is because you are using an older web browser, we recommend that you upgrade to a modern, standards-compliant browser such as FireFox [http://www.getfirefox.com/], which is available free of charge for Windows, Mac and Linux.

اقرأ هذا الموقع باللغة العربية

The large archaeological site of Kish, 15 km northeast of Babylon, comprises the ruins of one of the greatest cities of ancient Babylonia, yet it is largely unknown today. Since the mid 19th century, several international antiquarian and archaeological expeditions have worked there. Most of their finds were taken to museums in Paris, Istanbul, Oxford, and Chicago so it is now impossible to study them together, and few artefacts are in Iraq itself. The few archaeological and historical studies of Kish are in French and English, not Arabic. Visitors to the site today see only filled-in traces of long-ago excavation pits and the eroded remains of mud-brick buildings, which the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) is working hard to conserve. This project aims to help SBAH to recover lost and dispersed knowledge of Kish, and render it useful to Iraq.

Research Objectives

The Forgotten City of Kish Project has three main aims:

To share data

We aim to make the archeological and cuneiform record of Kish accessible to Iraqi authorities, researchers, students and publics.

• Browse the corpus of cuneiform texts from Kish
• Search the Kish Object Database, created by the Field Museum in 2004-09 and refactored for Oracc in 2025
• Read about the ancient history of Kish, from the Field Museum's Kish Project, 2004-09 [/kish/fieldmus/index.html]
• Read about the modern history of Kish
• Take a virtual tour of the mounds of Kish
• Learn about the people, gods and places related to Kish
• Study the Kish bibliography
• Find further online resources about Kish

To create tools

We aim to enable Iraqi and other Middle Eastern cuneiformists to use and create similar resources of their own, in their own languages.

• Read an introduction to cuneiform script [/saao/knpp/cuneiformrevealed/index.html] and the Akkadian language, originally created for the Knowledge and Power [/saao/knpp/index.html] project in 2007
• Learn how to create Oracc content in right-to-left scripts
• Download Oracc's cuneiform text editor, Nisaba [https://github.com/oracc/nisaba/blob/main/README.md]

To change mindsets

We articulate and advocate widely for the practice of "knowledge repatriation" as a complement or alternative to artefact repatriation.

• Read about the concept of "knowledge repatriation"
• View a list of this project's talks, events and publications
• See who has contributed to this project

08 Jul 2025