Back to Ingharra: Some Further Thoughts on the Excavations at East Kish

Abstract

In recent numbers of this journal, P. R. S. Moorey has, as readers will remember, contributed two very useful articles, attempting to reconstruct certain operations of the Oxford (Weld)—Field Museum excavations at Kish (1923–1933), which had never till then been adequately reported. For this purpose, he had at his disposal both the interim reports published at the time and the unpublished correspondence between Langdon and Watelin, still surviving in the Ashmolean Museum, on which these reports were partly based. Of these two articles, it is perhaps the second which has proved most stimulatingly informative to Mesopotamian archaeologists, since it goes far towards clarifying vitally important stratigraphic evidence, which the excavators at the time were hardly in a position to understand. Moorey's work on the records of the Ingharra sounding had also to take into consideration a great volume of information subsequently acquired by means of comparable excavations elsewhere and a diversity of more recent archaeological studies. This would have been easier if the records themselves had been of the sort which we should today expect from a competent field director, supported by the usual specialist assistants. Instead they present a curious picture of collaboration between a French archaeologist in the field and an American philologist at Oxford. Watelin was doubtless, in Langdon's words “a great archaeologist”; but his reports, translated, interpreted and sometimes “improved on” by Langdon, are in some passages mutually contradictory and in others incomprehensible. There are no sections save for two inadequate diagrams; plans, only of selected buildings, and approximate levels are only occasionally given in feet or metres beneath an arbitrary “plain-level” or below the surface of the mound, (which naturally undulates precipitately). Unhappily Watelin died in 1934, the year in which the outstanding report was published, having made clear that he regarded it only as “an interim record of work still proceeding”.