This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Between 1880 and 1912, no official excavations took place at Kish. Yet museums from London and Paris to New York were somehow acquiring brand-new tablets from the legendary old city.
As it turns out, local Iraqis had been excavating the site years before the "official" excavations at Kish resumed. But while the official excavations are remembered and celebrated, the local Iraqis have been erased from their own history. Century-old letters from Iraqi-born antiquities dealer Ibrahim Elias Gejou provide the evidence.
They also reveal that Henri de Genouillac, who led the supposedly "legal" later French excavations, teamed up with local dealers to smuggle tablets from his own excavation out of the country, right under the noses of Ottoman officials. "For decades, the archaeology in Iraq has been presented … as a field developed by Westerners who arrived in Iraq, a country and region where not one local individual cared about the country's ancient past and its remains," said Nadia Ait Said-Ghanem, a postdoctoral research associate at University College London and author of the study published in the journal Iraq. But this is a distortion of history, she continued.
Iraqis had been interested in their past for centuries, so when foreign excavators came, "local people showed them where, taught them how, and generally shared their knowledge." The ancient city of Kish lies on a mound known as Tell Uhaimir in central Iraq. If you read about its excavation history, the timeline would likely describe a few brief digs in the 19th century, then jump ahead about three decades to 1912, when official French digs led by Genouillac began. Another gap in excavations would occur, with a combined British–American team resuming digging between 1923 and 1933, the study said.
Gejou's letters fill in some of those gaps. Born in 1868 in Baghdad, Gejou left more than 900 letters, which the study examines. They record a long history of trade and smuggling of artifacts from Kish to the British Museum, the Louvre and Yale University.
According to the study, the earliest mentions of Kish come from correspondence written by Gejou in 1909, in which he offered the British Museum 124 tablets from a "new site": Kish. Over the next few years, the letters record Gejou handling hundreds of Kish tablets unearthed during Iraqi excavations that would be labeled "clandestine," the study reported. Then, in 1912, France sent Genouillac to Iraq, the study said.
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