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The Late Prehistoric Administrative Building at Jamdat Nasr

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

P. R. S. Moorey
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Extract

When, in their contributions to the revised Cambridge Ancient History, two eminent archaeologists independently thought it best to refer only in passing to the enigmatic structure at Jamdat Nasr in central Iraq excavated by Langdon in 1925–6, further discussion of it needs more than usually precise justification. Frankfort put the matter explicitly: “Its plan has not been sufficiently elucidated for guesses regarding its function to be profitable.” The charge is indeed accurate; but is the implied sentence of complete and continuing obscurity fair? May not contents be as revealing of function as plan? This building was indeed not only badly excavated, but also inadequately and obscurely published. Its contents, however, were adequately published, and have since been widely recognized as a distinctive component of Mesopotamian culture in the last quarter of the fourth millennium B.C. Outstanding among them was a collection of archaic tablets which constitute very nearly the oldest, and most coherent, administrative archive yet retrieved from antiquity. These tablets alone will continue to send scholars from time to time back to the building whence they came. My purpose here is simple and threefold: to make Langdon's plan more easily accessible and as complete as possible on the basis of the surviving original draft; to set out concisely what further information there is on these excavations and those of 1928; and finally to attempt not so much to resolve the “temple-palace” dilemma as to set discussion of this building on as firm and broad a basis of evidence as is now possible. For the purposes of this paper I accept the opinion of Delougaz that the pottery found at Jamdat Nasr, though not necessarily a homogeneous group, belongs largely to Diyala Protoliterate “d”.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1976 , pp. 95 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1976

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References

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7 I have used copies in the Kish Archive, Ashmo-lean Museum, Oxford; for the site see also Gibson, McG., The City and Area of Kish (Miami, 1972), 140, no. 92Google Scholar; 202, no. 203 (Adam's Survey); for a firsthand account of conditions at the time of excavation see: Field, H., The Field Museum-Oxford University Expedition to Kish, Mesopotamia 1923–9 (Field Museum, Chicago, 1929), 11–14, 22–3Google Scholar.

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