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This is a list of significant archaeological expeditions by date, which include first excavations at important sites, or expeditions that uncovered important objects.
Nineveh, also known in early modern times as Kouyunjik, was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located in the modern-day city of Mosul in northern Iraq. It is located on the eastern bank of the Tigris River and was the capital and largest city of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as well as the largest city in the world for several decades. Today, it is a common name for the half of Mosul that lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and the country's Nineveh Governorate takes its name from it.
Sippar was an ancient Near Eastern Sumerian and later Babylonian city on the east bank of the Euphrates river. Its tell is located at the site of modern Tell Abu Habbah near Yusufiyah in Iraq's Baghdad Governorate, some 69 km (43 mi) north of Babylon and 30 km (19 mi) southwest of Baghdad. The city's ancient name, Sippar, could also refer to its sister city, Sippar-Amnanum ; a more specific designation for the city here referred to as Sippar was Sippar-Yahrurum.
Sir Austen Henry Layard was an English Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He was born to a mostly English family in Paris and largely raised in Italy. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal. Most of his finds are now in the British Museum. He made a large amount of money from his best-selling accounts of his excavations.
Hormuzd Rassam was an Assyriologist and author. He is known for making a number of important archaeological discoveries from 1877 to 1882, including the clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest notable literature. He is widely believed to be the first-known Middle Eastern and Assyrian archaeologist from the Ottoman empire. He emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he was naturalized as a British citizen, settling in Brighton. He represented the government as a diplomat, helping to free British diplomats from captivity in Ethiopia.
George Smith was a pioneering English Assyriologist who first discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest-known written works of literature.
Nimrud is an ancient Assyrian city located in Iraq, 30 kilometres (20 mi) south of the city of Mosul, and 5 kilometres (3 mi) south of the village of Selamiyah, in the Nineveh Plains in Upper Mesopotamia. It was a major Assyrian city between approximately 1350 BC and 610 BC. The city is located in a strategic position 10 kilometres (6 mi) north of the point that the river Tigris meets its tributary the Great Zab. The city covered an area of 360 hectares. The ruins of the city were found within one kilometre (1,100 yd) of the modern-day Assyrian village of Noomanea in Nineveh Governorate, Iraq.
Paul-Émile Botta was an Italian-born French scientist who served as Consul in Mosul from 1842, and who discovered the ruins of the ancient Assyrian capital of Dur-Sharrukin.
Dur-Sharrukin, present day Khorsabad, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. Khorsabad is a village in northern Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC. After the unexpected death of Sargon in battle, the capital was shifted 20 km south to Nineveh.
Assyriology, also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC through to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD. The topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria" within the name.
Borsippa or Birs Nimrud is an archeological site in Babil Governorate, Iraq. The ziggurat is today one of the most vividly identifiable surviving ones, identified in the later Arabic culture with the Tower of Babel. However, modern scholarship concludes that the Babylonian builders of the Ziggurat in reality erected it as a religious edifice in honour of the local god Nabu, called the "son" of Babylon's Marduk, as would be appropriate for Babylon's lesser sister-city.
Shuruppak, modern Tell Fara, was an ancient Sumerian city situated about 55 kilometres (35 mi) south of Nippur and 30 kilometers north of ancient Uruk on the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq's Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate. Shuruppak was dedicated to Ninlil, also called Sud, the goddess of grain and the air.
Eshnunna was an ancient Sumerian city and city-state in central Mesopotamia 12.6 miles northwest of Tell Agrab and 15 miles northwest of Tell Ishchali. Although situated in the Diyala Valley northwest of Sumer proper, the city nonetheless belonged securely within the Sumerian cultural milieu. It is sometimes, in archaeological papers, called Ashnunnak or Tuplias.
The Department of the Middle East, numbering some 330,000 works, forms a significant part of the collections of the British Museum, and the world's largest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq. The collections represent the civilisations of the ancient Near East and its adjacent areas.
Kisurra was an ancient Sumerian tell situated on the west bank of the Euphrates, 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) north of Shuruppak and due east of Kish.
Khafajah or Khafaje, ancient Tutub, is an archaeological site in Diyala Governorate, Iraq 7 miles (11 km) east of Baghdad. Khafajah lies on the Diyala River, a tributary of the Tigris. Occupied from the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods through the end of the Old Babylonian Empire, it was under the control of the Akkadian Empire and then the Third Dynasty of Ur in the 3rd millennium BC. It then became part of the empire of the city-state of Eshnunna lying 12 miles (19 km) southwest of that city, about 5 miles (8.0 km) from the ancient city of Shaduppum, and near Tell Ishchali, both which Eshnunna also controlled. It then fell to Babylonia before falling into disuse.
Babylon was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Iraq. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-speaking region of Babylonia, with its rulers establishing two important empires in antiquity, namely the 18th century BC Old Babylonian Empire and the 7th–6th century BC Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the city would also be used as a regional capital of other empires, such as the Achaemenid Empire. Babylon was one of the most important urban centres of the ancient Near East until its decline during the Hellenistic period.
Sippar-Amnanum was an ancient Near Eastern tell about 70 kilometers north of Babylon, 6 kilometers northeast of Sippar and about 26 kilometers southwest of modern Baghdad. Occupation dates back to the days of the Akkadian Empire and later the Ur III period but most of the development was during the Old Babylonian period. Early archaeologists referred to the site as "Der" or Dair".
Assyrian sculpture is the sculpture of the ancient Assyrian states, especially the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911 to 612 BC, which was centered around the city of Assur in Mesopotamia which at its height, ruled over all of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt, as well as portions of Anatolia, Arabia and modern-day Iran and Armenia. It forms a phase of the art of Mesopotamia, differing in particular because of its much greater use of stone and gypsum alabaster for large sculpture.
Tell Zurghul, also spelled Tell Surghul, is an archaeological site in Dhi Qar Governorate (Iraq). It lies on an ancient canal leading from Lagash of which is lies 10 km to the south-east. Its ancient name was the cuneiform read as Niĝin. The city god was Nanshe (Nanše), who had temples there (E-sirara) and at nearby Girsu. She was the daughter of Enki and sister of Ningirsu and Nisaba. Niĝin, along with the cities of Girsu and Lagash, was part of the State of Lagash in the later part of the 3rd Millennium BC.
Sargon II ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 722 to 705 BC as one of its most successful kings. In his final military campaign, Sargon was killed in battle in the south-eastern Anatolian region Tabal and the Assyrian army was unable to retrieve his body, which meant that he could not undergo the traditional royal Assyrian burial. In ancient Mesopotamia, not being buried was believed to condemn the dead to becoming a hungry and restless ghost for eternity. As a result, the Assyrians believed that Sargon must have committed some grave sin in order to suffer this fate. His son and successor Sennacherib, convinced of Sargon's sin, consequently spent much effort to distance himself from his father and to rid the empire from his work and imagery. Sennacherib's efforts led to Sargon only rarely being mentioned in later texts. When modern Assyriology took form in Western Europe in the 18th century, historians mainly followed the writings of classical Greco-Roman authors and the descriptions of Assyria in the Hebrew Bible for information. Given that Sargon is barely mentioned in either, he was consequently forgotten, the then prevalent historical reconstructions placing Sennacherib as the direct successor of Sargon's predecessor Shalmaneser V and identifying Sargon as an alternate name for one of the more well-known kings.