TEPE GAWRA SPEISER 417 



for attracting the spade of the excavator; and the British Museum 

 and the Louvre owe to the same circumstance some of their finest 

 collections. Historical prominence has also been instrumental in 

 equipping many an expedition. Once a site has been identified as 

 that of Babylon or of Ur, there is no lack of bids for excavating 

 permits; connection with the Bible is in such cases a very powerful 

 incentive. Other centers come to be uncovered through sheer acci- 

 dent. The peasant's plough accidentally striking a buried vessel 

 may lead to the most important discovery of a decade; the great 

 finds at Has Shamra, in northern Syria, which include epics in pre- 

 biblical Canaanite w^ritten in a new form of alphabetic script, are 

 due to precisely such a strike on the part of an unsuspecting peasant. 

 In short, expeditions are attracted in the main to sites that have 

 proved or promise to be productive of museum objects or of inscrip- 

 tional material. The cost of a modern excavation is considerable, 

 and reasonable assurance of material results is therefore a not un- 

 natural prerequisite. 



Gawra, however, could never have been started on that basis. 

 Judging b}^ the above standards, the first examination was discour- 

 aging. Intrinsically valuable finds were unlikely and only inveterate 

 optimism could have encouraged an expectation of written records. 

 But the mound proved fascinating, nevertheless, for a number of 

 different reasons, and it may not be amiss to give these briefly. 

 I shall lead up to the subject by stating the occasion which was to 

 culminate in the excavation of the site. 



In the year 1926 the American School of Oriental Research in 

 Baghdad, cooperating with the Dropsie College of Philadelphia, 

 undertook an archeological survey of northern Iraq. I had the 

 privilege of being given the assignment. The task carried me from 

 the Persian border in the east to the western slopes of the Sinjar 

 hills which cross the Iraq-Syrian border. In the course of this 

 surveying tour surface examinations were made of several hundred 

 mounds, many of which turned out to belong to the prehistoric 

 period. Conclusive evidence in each case was the presence of a 

 characteristic type of painted pottery accompanied by implements 

 and w-eapons of obsidian and flint. The discovery of a continuous 

 belt of archaic sites (isolated mounds of that type had been found 

 several years earlier) was particularly noteworthy in view of the 

 fact that the relative antiquity of INIesopotamian civilizations was 

 still very much a matter of dispute. It became thus manifest that 

 the Chalcolithic age — i.e., the period of transition from Late Stone 

 to Early Copper — was well represented on the eastern and northern 

 fringes of Mesopotamia. But what was the length of that Chalco- 



