Italian and Iraqi scholars join forces in an archaeological mission to train the next generation of Indiana Jones

The first Iraqi-Italian archaeological mission will bear the Sapienza label. These joint digging activities will take place in an area SW of Nasiriyah, capital city of the Dhi Qar province where the Sumerian culture developed during the III mill. BC.

Since the first Gulf War, Italy has been the only country allowed to participate in a joint mission in the south of the new Republic of Iraq. The Ministry of Culture and the Director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage granted a permit for new excavations in the site of Abu Tubairah, a ‘tell’ (artificial hill) of great historical meaning, which judging by the surface pottery findings is distributed chronologically over more than a millennium, from the Jemdet Nasr Period (2900 BC) until the Old Babylonian Period (1750 BC ca).

The aim of the project, co-directed jointly by the Assyriologist Franco D’Agostino of the Faculty of Oriental Studies and by the Archaeological Superintendent of the Dhi Qar province, Dr. Abdulamir Al-Hamdani, is to train on the site young Italian and Iraqi archaeologists, epigraphers and topographers.

The permit for digging is the result of a long series of didactic and scientific activities in the field of linguistics and philology of Ancient Mesopotamia (Sumerian and Assyro-Babylonian languages) carried on by the Faculty of Oriental Studies in the area of Nasiriyah, with funds of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of the University of Rome Sapienza. After a first topographical survey in September-October the mission will start the diggings in Spring 2011.