Karen L. Wilson

Bismaya: Recovering the Lost City of Adab

Published 2012. Please view the publication webpage here:

Bismaya: Recovering the Lost City of Adab

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. The excavations were first directed by Edgar J. Banks. 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will rectify this situation and will result in the complete presentation of this large and significant corpus of unpublished material.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.