Iraqis and international travellers have been exploring the mounds of Kish for over two hundred years. Here we uncover some of the forgotten stories of those explorations, and put thim into historical context.
- Early investigations (1816–1909)
- How did Kish become an archaeological site? In the early nineteenth century, there was no such thing yet as archaeology, and nobody had been able to read cuneiform script for nearly two thousand years. It took a lot of work, by local people and by foreign travellers, to start to understand its ancient identity, decide that it was worth investigating further, and to trial different ways of doing that.
- Local excavations and antiquities dealers (1909-1911)
- Outside Iraq, museums not only hold archaeological artefacts from Kish received from excavation work they supported, they also own thousands of objects which they purchased from antiquities dealers in the early 20th century. This is visible in the correspondence exchanged between curators and dealers based in Baghdad, Paris, London, and New York. These documents, preserved in museum archives as part of their collections' history, show that archaeological work led by local residents was ongoing at Kish long before foreign-led excavations began work on site in the 20th century. This fact was well-known among Assyriologists who studied this newly acquired material at the time.
- The French mission, spring 1912
- In late 1911, the Ottoman Government granted a two-year permit to excavate at Kish to Henri de Genouillac, a museum-based Assyriologist with no fieldwork experience but with official French funding and diplomatic backing. With 80–180 local labourers working for eight and a half hours a day, six days a week, he directed them to dig for tablets and other artefacts wherever looked most promising. The expedition soon erupted into controversy and the Mayor of Baghdad terminated the project after just three months.
- Local excavations and antiquities dealers (1912-1923)
- After leaving Iraq in May 1912, de Genouillac kept in regular contact with antiquities dealers in Baghdad to purchase artefacts from Kish. As before, Alexander Messayeh and Antone Samhiry continued to buy collections for him, which they then shipped to Ibrahim Elias Gejou in Paris. This international trade was disrupted when Baghdad fell to the British in 1917, but resumed in 1920.
- The Oxford-Field Museum Expedition (1923-1933) [/kish/fieldmus/KishPast,PresentandFuture/Excavations,1923-1933/index.html]
- In March 1923 the Joint Oxford-Field Museum Expedition (OFME) started to dig at Kish. Excavations continued during the winter months of the next ten years, under the absentee direction of Stephen Langdon who visited the excavations only twice. Ernest Mackay served as field director until the end of the 1925-26 season, after which Louis Charles Watelin replaced him the remainder of the project. The excavations were absolutely enormous in scale. Both Mackay and Watelin employed hundreds of local men and boys, who worked at a break-neck pace to remove soil to depths of fifteen or more metres in trenches that were tens of metres wide, with little regard to documentation.
- Kokushikan University Archaeological Missions, 1988-2001
- Although tourists continued to visit both Uhaimir and Ingharra in the decades after the OFME ended in 1933, archaeological work at Kish did not resume for many years. A systematic topographical survey of Kish and the surrounding area was conducted in 1966-67 and in 1980–81, Iraqi archaeologists worked on the Temple of Ishtar at Tell Ingharra. Then, in 1988, team of archaeologists from Japan's Kokushikan University Archaeological Expedition began a series of field missions, with the aim of testing the results of the OFME. But, in very unfortunate timing, each attempt was cut short by major conflicts in Iraq.