of Babylon’s earlier grandeur, when it was the capital of the dynasty of Hammurabi in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries b.c.

After an exploratory season in 1884, the first major American excavations began under H.V. Hilprecht, J.P. Peters, and J.H. Haynes at the Sumerian cult center of Nippur in 1887 and continued intermittently up until the 1980s. The thousands of texts from this site, mostly school exercises in Sumerian, form the backbone of our knowledge of Sumerian literature. Four Sumerian and Akkadian sites of the third and second millennia b.c. were excavated in the Diyala region in the 1930s by a Chicago expedition under henri frankfort, whose close analysis of the ceramic typology and glyptic and sculptural art found formed the basis of the first systematic periodisation of third-millennium Mesopotamia (1929, 1931).

A hiatus in excavation during World War I was followed by the creation of the nation of Iraq and the establishment of a department of antiquities under gertrude bell. Expeditions returned to earlier Assyrian (Khorsabad, Nineveh) and Sumerian (Tello, Kish, Jemdet Nasr, Fara) excavations, and started at many new sites. The most important of these was the joint U.S.-British expedition (1922–1934) under c. leonard woolley to the Sumerian city of Ur. This was the first British expedition to emulate the care and precision of the Germans, to which Woolley added his own talent for inspired improvisation (as in his use of plaster to recover the forms of perished wooden objects). Woolley recovered important remains of Neo-Babylonian and Isin-Larsa period housing, and established a deep stratigraphical sequence for early Sumer, but the most celebrated finds then and since were the richly furnished “Royal” Tombs of ca. 2600 b.c. (in fact probably priestly burials). This was the first and only time Mesopotamia has yielded “treasure” that ranks in the popular conception with the finds of Bronze-Age Greece and Egypt. Woolley’s excavations at nearby al-Ubaid (1923– 1924) recovered evidence of the earliest (fifth millennium b.c.) settled presence in the alluvium, known since as the Ubaid culture.

The period up to World War II also saw an expansion of activity in the hilly uplands surrounding the Tigris-Euphrates valleys at sites like Tepe Gawra, Tell Brak, Arpachiyeh, hassuna, Samarra, and Tell Halaf, where rain-fed agriculture had supported pre-Ubaid village communities. Continuing discoveries in this “fertile crescent” (extending beyond Mesopotamia from Palestine through Syria and Turkey and down western Iran), especially by American archaeologist robert braidwood in the 1950s at jarmo, have documented this region’s crucial role in the early domestication of plants and animals, and, at some Samarran sites, early irrigation. Evidence of Paleolithic activity in the Kurdish mountains was found in the 1920s by English archaeologist dorothy garrod.

The broad chronological and cultural outlines of Mesopotamian archaeology having now been defined, the period after World War II saw a proliferation of excavation at sites of nearly all periods and regions, some continuing long-established expeditions (Uruk, Nippur), others recommencing at earlier excavations (Tell Brak, Nimrud, Sippar, Babylon), and others starting on new sites. In the 1970s and 1980s a large number of rescue excavations were undertaken in areas designated for flooding by the Hamrin, Haditha, and Eski Mosul dams in Iraq (and for dams in Syria and Turkey), some with startling results. The German and Dutch excavations at Habbuba Kabbira and Jebel Aruda in Syria uncovered hitherto-unsuspected outposts of early Sumerian culture (“colonies”) along the Upper Euphrates. Survey and limited excavation along the Arabian side of the Gulf from the 1950s on has indicated an Ubaid-period Mesopotamian presence (fifth millennium b.c.) along this littoral, a prelude to the well-documented Gulf trade with Meluhha (Indus Valley) of the third through the second millennia b.c. A number of area surveys of Babylonia by American archaeologist robert mccormick adams in the 1960s and 1970s illuminated demographic patterns that have had a significant impact on models of early state development.

Intellectual History

The great popular and scholarly interest in Mesopotamian archaeology in the nineteenth century was sustained both by the historical-scientific