New Perspectives on the History of Early Mesopotamia

The history of the Irisärig and Malgûm region of central Babylonia had been neglected by near eastern studies for decades. This changed with the looting and dissemination of thousands of cuneiform tablets found by illegal excavators in the city of Irisärig, whose location remains unknown. The documents appeared on the antiquities market in the early 2000s or were confiscated by the Iraqi authorities and entered the collections of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and the Sulaymaniyah Museum. Since then, archaeological fieldwork in the area has intensified, leading to the identification of Tul¿l al-F¿j and Tul¿l al-Baqar¿t with the cities of Malgûm and Keš respectively. This book brings together for the first time the research of archaeologists and philologists on this region of ancient Mesopotamia. It presents the results of their ongoing archaeological research, together with studies of the geography, history and economy of the region, and devotes a section to the work of Iraqi scholars in cataloguing and editing the cuneiform material held in national museums, in the belief that all this will contribute to the advancement of knowledge, the promotion of international academic cooperation and the preservation of Iraq's heritage.