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Back to Ingharra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Seton Lloyd
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Extract

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 For this purpose, he had at his disposal both the interim reports published at the time and the unpublished correspondence between Langdon and Watelin, still surviving in the Ashmolean Museum, on which these reports were partly based.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”.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring 1969 , pp. 40 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1969

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References

1 Iraq, 28 (1966), 18–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Watelin, L. Ch. and Langdon, S., Excavations at Kish, IV (1934)Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Moorey's Pl. IIIa.

4 There is some uncertainty about the area of the “Z” area and “Y” sounding. The plan of monument “Z”, (XK. IV, fig. 6) covers only 25 × 35 metres; the plan of the “Y” settlement, 70 × 40 metres. Yet in a footnote (XK. IV, p. 41), Langdon describes the “Y” sounding as “130 yards square”.

5 XK. IV, fig. 6.

6 Langdon, S., Art and Archaeology (1927), 104, fig. 4Google Scholar.

7 Langdon explains this in a footnote (XK. IV, p. 45) to the effect that “it will be described in a future volume, after the ziggurat shall have been entirely exposed.”

8 XK. IV, Pl. III.

9 XK. IV, fig. 6, p. 47. It is here labelled “Kisu”—a term which Langdon frequently applied to it.

10 This stage of the proceedings is illustrated in Moorey's second expedition photograph, (pl. IIIa).

11 Woolley, C. L., Ur Excavations, V, 130–1Google Scholar.

12 Iraq Supplement 1944, 6.

13 In Plate VII, the “A” palace and cemetery are placed beside the E.D. III strata at Ingharra for purposes of equation in time, Moorey thinks the “A” palace lies well above the “flood stratum” at Ingharra, and Watelin detected a “mudbrick terrace” on which it stood. (Moorey, p. 44).

14 Iraq 26 (1964), 62–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 In his diagram (XK. IV, fig. 7) he marks three subsidiary “floods” in three metres of deposits above the water-table. In his “stratification through the street”, (XK. IV, fig. 1), however, there are five separate layers of “grey clay”.

16 Cf. his chart opposite p. 82.

17 XK. IV, fig. 2.

18 XK. IV, p. 5.

19 XK. IV, p. 6.

20 Delougaz, and Lloyd, , Presargonid Temples in the Diyala Region, 163 and 170 ffGoogle Scholar. The earliest plano-convex bricks are kiln-baked and made for special purposes.

21 Quoted by Moorey on p. 19.