Diyala Project brings beginnings of urban civilization to the Internet

[Dover]

Diyala Project brings beginnings of urban civilization to the Internet

By William Harms
News Office

The story of the origins of urban civilization in Mesopotamia will soon become more accessible to academics and school children around the world as a result of a $100,000 grant to the Oriental Institute’s Diyala Project from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Given as part of the NEH’s “Recovering Iraq’s Past” initiative, the grant will fund the launch of the Oriental Institute’s online Diyala database. The database will contain a full publication of all artifacts recovered during the institute’s excavations on archaeological sites in the Diyala River Basin northeast of Baghdad between 1930 and 1936. These excavations were the most carefully executed and documented in modern-day Iraq of their time. When completed, the Web site will contain the largest single online collection of excavated artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia available in the world.

The Web site will have particular value in the wake of the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad in April 2003. About half of the objects gathered in the excavation were located in the Iraq museum. Although some 600 Diyala cylinder seals have been confirmed to be missing, all of these objects were photographed during the institute’s excavation. The photographs now form a vital component of the Diyala database.

“The Diyala Web site is a revolutionary database and research tool because it will be able to integrate many different kinds of analysis,” said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. “It also provides a way to search the whole range of different kinds of field records of artifacts, architecture, texts and stratigraphy in a completely new way. This is something that has never been possible to do before, and it will provide us with major new insights.

“It is also revolutionary in the way it links two spatially separated collections of artifacts—one essentially inaccessible in Baghdad and one in Chicago. I think this project may well represent the future of archaeological publication,” Stein said...cont'd

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/041202/diyala.shtml