Bismaya 2004 Overview

Excavations at Bismaya (ancient Adab), Iraq
Karen Wilson

The purpose of this project is to analyze, interpret, and publish the important discoveries made by a University of Chicago expedition in 1903-1905 at the site of Bismaya (ancient Adab) in what is now south-central Iraq (31°54' N, 45°36' E; see attached map). The excavations were first directed by Edgar J. Banks and then, briefly, by Victor S. Persons. Over 1000 artifacts, many of them early cuneiform documents, were sent to Chicago, where they are now housed in the Oriental Institute Museum.

The results of the Bismaya excavations were never properly published, and most of the material was never published at all. Banks' relationship with the University of Chicago soured after cessation of the work, and neither he nor Persons ever prepared a scientific presentation of their results. Banks wrote a lively and highly readable popular account, Bismya [sic.], or the Lost City of Adab-a mix of travelogue and archaeological narrative-that appeared in 1912 and included only a small fraction of his finds, with almost no analysis of their original contexts. Most of the material from Bismaya remains unknown, despite the fact that Adab was a major city at the dawn of Mesopotamian history. Banks excavated one of the earliest known Mesopotamian temples and discovered some of the world's first historical royal inscriptions, incised on stone vessels dedicated in that temple beginning as early as 2550 B.C. He also excavated an administrative center, a residential quarter, and what he described as a palace with a library, all of the Akkadian period (ca. 2335-2155 B.C.), a slightly later cemetery and residential area, and portions of the city wall.

Since 1912, little attention has been paid to this material, and Bismaya has been largely forgotten. This project will rectify this situation and will result in the complete presentation of this large and significant corpus of unpublished material. The proposed monograph will include analyses of stratigraphy, architecture, sculpture, cylinder seals, metalwork, and pottery, and discussions of chronology, the succession of the first kings of Adab, administrative practices during the third millennium B.C., and methods of artistic and symbolic representation. This "reexcavation" of Bismaya using the weekly reports that both archaeologists sent back to Chicago, Banks' daily field diaries (which are surprisingly detailed given that they date to the infancy of Near Eastern archaeology), and the artifacts housed at the Oriental Institute Museum is of immense value not solely because of the importance of Adab and its early date. In recent years, looters digging in search of antiquities have all-but-destroyed the site. Thus, whatever can be learned about the history of the city and those who lived and ruled there resides in the records and objects now in Chicago.