Diyala Project

"With the Diyala on-line Database, the Oriental Institue will launch an innovative, web-based publication of fundamentally important archaeological data from Ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). During the 1930s the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago conducted excavations on four major sites in the Diyala Region, an area northeast of Baghdad in Iraq. To the present day, these excavations have remained the basis of comparison for all excavations in Mesopotamia. The archeological material recovered in the Diyala sites provides the chronological backbone for much of Mesopotamia’s early history, making its full publication imperative. An ambitious program of publication resulted in nine monographs of temples, palaces, houses, and classes of artifacts such as pottery and seals, but the great majority of objects, numbering 12,000, have yet to be published..."