Bribes, Whips and Smuggled Tablets: Why Were the Iraqis Who Dug Kish Erased From Their Own History?

Have you ever heard of Kish? Kish was an ancient Sumerian city located in central Iraq. Sumerian tradition holds that it was the birthplace of ‘kingship’ after the great Flood.

But ask anyone to recount its archaeological history, and it will be told as follows: first excavated by Austen Henry Layard and Julius Oppert in 1852, had some excavations conducted by Englishman George Smith in 1873, again excavated between 1879 and 1880 by Hormuzd Rassam and Daoud Thoma and then excavated in 1912 by a French mission led by Henri de Genouillac, and excavated again by Oxford University and the Field Museum of Chicago from 1923 to 1933.

Some actors are missing from this story. In a new study, Nadia Ait Said-Ghanem revisits Kish’s excavation history through letters between museums, excavators and dealers. They reveal grudges, bribes, and a fair bit of smuggling, and rewrite the official timeline of one of Mesopotamia’s most important sites.

For decades, archaeology has been presented as something the West brought to Iraq, with locals uninterested in their own history. But these letters show Iraqis were excavating before Genouillac’s French mission arrived. But while local excavations were written off as ‘illicit’ and ‘clandestine’, foreign missions, even though they too smuggled finds, were ‘legal’ and ‘proper’.

So, who really dug up Kish, and is it really as simple as legal vs illicit excavations?

The Dealers in the Letters

Kish’s remains lie in the mound known as Tell Uhaimir (red mound) in present-day Iraq. People occupied it for centuries during the Early Dynastic period (2900-2340 BCE), the Akkadian period (2340-2200 BCE), and the Sasanian period (5th century CE). At the time, it was the seat of kings, and King Sargon of Akkad, who seized power around 2340 BCE and unified Mesopotamian territories for the first time, claimed its title. The title ‘king of Kish’ became synonymous with ‘the king of all’ and was borne by Sargon and his successors.

George Smith visited the site in 1873, and after 1880 it wasn’t excavated again until 1912. But here’s the thing. If Kish was not being excavated, how did tablets from there appear in markets and museums?

To better understand Kish’s long-forgotten history, Ait Said-Ghanem selected three groups of letters between Iraqi-born antiquities dealer Ibrahim Elias Gejou and various actors, including the very museums receiving the tablets and later correspondence with French excavator Henri de Genouillac. The British Museum alone holds 593 letters spanning 1895 to 1940; the Yale Babylonian Collection holds 312 from 1911 to 1937, while the Louvre, despite Gejou’s 39-year relationship with the museum (1898-1937), has only five written by Gejou.

First we have Gejou (1868-1942), born in Baghdad to a merchant family. Gejou and his younger brother, Isaac, however, dealt in antiquities. Sometime in the late 1880s Ibrahim moved to Paris while Isaac stayed in Baghdad. By 1894 both brothers were selling to the British Museum.

Then there are three other dealers, Alexander Messayeh, who ran an antiquities trading business with his brothers Rizouk and Emile, following in the footsteps of their father Daoud. Messayeh married Gejou’s sister Sara, which made the two families colleagues, competitors and in-laws all at once. The letters reveal that they often quarrelled yet would still help each other sell their goods.

Then we have Antone Samhiry, who came from a family of excavators; his uncles, the Thoma brothers, had worked with Hormuzd Rassam during the British Museum excavations between 1879 and 1880, while their father, Thoma Shishman, was Layard’s right-hand man and trusted enough to run excavations while Layard was absent.

And finally, we have George Khayat, based in Baghdad, who knew the Gejou brothers well. Yet these names are rarely mentioned in histories of the site. 

“Archives and early reports are filled with records that contain the names of local experts and intermediaries, but they have been erased,” said Ait Said-Ghanem.

Erased History

Just from knowing who these individuals were, we can already see the role of Iraqis in the early ‘official’ excavations at Kish, but what about the periods in between?

The earliest mention of Kish in the letters dates to 1909, when Gejou wrote to the British Museum, offering 124 tablets from a ‘new site’ called ‘Hum-mer’, which he described as lying north of Sippar, in other words, Tell Uhaimir aka Kish. He even sent four ‘sample’ tablets in the post, you know, to give the museum a taste of what might be in store. That same year, François Thureau-Dangin used a Louvre tablet to show the site lay on the banks of the Euphrates. What’s interesting is that Gejou sold that same tablet to the Louvre in 1902, smack in the middle of the supposed gap between excavations.

By December the following year, Gejou had another 700 to 800 tablets from Kish and Sippar ready to sell. In February 1911, he shipped a whopping 5,200 tablets from six sites, including Kish, to Yale, and a few months later, in May, he offered more unbaked mathematical tablets from Kish.

With no ‘official’ excavations ongoing, Iraqi teams must have been digging at Kish from 1909 at the very latest.

By 1911, word of these excavations had spread so far that Frenchman Père Vincent Scheil told scholars in Paris about the ‘recent clandestine excavations’ at the site.

According to Ait Said-Ghanem, labelling these excavations illegal makes little sense.

“What we should be asking is by whose standard were excavations legal?”

Interestingly, and perhaps somewhat ironically, the news of Kish's 'illegal' excavations greatly interested Genouillac.

Kish, said Ait Said-Ghanem, shows “that many foreign expeditions were sent to Iraq because Iraqis found sites of interest long before they came onto the radar of Westerners.”

In 1911, France sent Genouillac to Kish; Italy’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire delayed him a bit, but he eventually reached Baghdad in January of 1912 and began excavating ‘legally’ by January 28th. His workforce of over 80 men and teenagers soon encompassed over 200 workers.

However, a major problem remained: Genouillac could excavate, but he was legally forbidden to export these objects. Article 27 of the Ottoman Antiquities Law of 1906 extended the 1884 export ban on archaeological artefacts. Although foreign missions were often granted export permissions, Genouillac was not one of them.

So what did he do? He enlisted Iraqi dealers to smuggle his finds out for him.

Dubious Dealings

Genouillac, Messayeh remarks, could easily make almost all the best finds disappear without ‘Ab’ (aka Abdul-Settar Effendi), the Ottoman superintendent who was supposed to ensure no illegal dealings were made, ever being the wiser. Some of Messayeh’s earliest letters cover payments to workers’ families and advice on dealing with Ab. In fact, Ab had secretly asked Messayeh for five pounds and promised to go easy on Genouillac, as long as Genouillac never found out. Messayeh paid up and told Genouillac anyway.

But Messayeh’s role went well beyond trading.

According to Ait Said-Ghanem, she “didn’t expect to find written evidence that antiquities dealers were asked by foreign archeologists to take care of the administration of their archaeological missions.” And Kish wasn’t unique: “I’ve found other dealers put in charge at other sites too since this study.”

What happened at Kish often followed this pattern: Genouillac selected various objects and sent them to Baghdad to Messayeh through a middleman, Haim Mochi. Messayeh would forward these parcels to Gejou in Paris to hold onto until Genouillac arrived or sent further instructions. Meanwhile, Messayeh, Samhiry and Khayat kept an eye on the Baghdad markets for any Kish tablets, likely sold by Genouillac’s own workers. They then shipped those to Gejou too.

By April Gejou was telling the curator at the British Museum, Budge, that he had around 12,500 tablets from Umma, Puzrish-Dagan and Kish.

Then that same April excavations came to an abrupt end. Site inspector Bedry Bey had complained that Genouillac’s tent flew the French flag; the argument culminated in Genouillac whipping the inspector’s muleteer, leading to excavations being shut down.

Genouillac went back to France, but excavations at Kish continued. In May 1912, George Khayat reported sending 474 Kish tablets to Gejou. In June of 1912, Samhiry bought around 100 tablets, including from Kish, and planned to send those to J.J. Naaman in London because he was upset with Gejou that his previous 90 tablets had not yet been sold. What he apparently did not know: Naaman was Gejou’s cousin, so those tablets may have found their way to him anyway.

Kish tablets would continue to be smuggled from Baghdad to Paris, London and New York until World War I. In 1921 Gejou moved to Iraq and continued to export tablets mostly to the British Museum, although Kish’s name is never mentioned. Weirdly, during the ‘official’ excavations of the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition, Kish remains unmentioned in the letters until 1931. But Gejou’s brother Isaac had died in 1930, and Kish objects dwindled to a single cylinder seal and a vase. Likely a result of both Isaac’s death and the changing political landscape, with Iraq gaining independence in 1932 and its own new antiquities law being implemented in 1936. A few years later, in 1942, Gejou died.

Of the 853 Kish tablets mentioned in the letters, excluding the larger lots of 5,200 and 12,500 tablets where the exact numbers from Kish are unknown, only 279 Kish tablets in museums are actually recorded as coming from the antiquities market. That leaves some 574 unaccounted for.

Ait Said-Ghanem thinks institutions “probably did not record them as coming from Kish because they were understaffed, and/or didn’t have the early correspondence in which dealers named the site.”

Dealers were often precise about their finds, naming nearby mounds like Tell Nekhala, but that detail was lost as tablets changed hands.

Standard histories of Kish record the official foreign excavations but remain silent on Iraqi excavations. Yet the evidence that they occurred is staggering, recorded in hundreds of letters. And these are not obscure letters recently uncovered; they have been housed in world-renowned museums for decades. These were not unknown excavations; they were left out of the record because they were deemed ‘clandestine’ and undocumented. Iraqi teams were excavating at Kish in 1909, 1910, 1911, after Genouillac left in 1912, in 1913, and possibly 1914.

Despite this, the narrative has always been that Western excavators came to Iraq, saw its potential, and chose to excavate and rescue it from the locals, who did not care for or understand it. It isn’t only wrong, but it shapes how modern Iraqi archaeology is treated as somehow lesser. And it’s odd because those early foreign excavators never hid the help they got from locals; they named the experts and intermediaries.

Then there is the problem with labelling any of these excavations legal versus illicit. On closer inspection, that line becomes nearly impossible to draw. Back then archaeology was basically a treasure hunt. Foreign institutions poured money into expeditions to collect the most exciting finds and boost their own prestige. And local excavators did much the same, digging up finds to build their own collections, earn a living, or gain social standing. The goal on both sides was the same: find antiquities and extract them.

On top of that, even the official digs were smuggling. If official digs were smuggling and unofficial digs were smuggling, and it all happened under the cloak of colonial authority, what separates a legal dig from a clandestine one?

Why do you think Iraqi excavations at Kish were left out of its history for so long, when the evidence sat in major museums for decades? And by whose standard should an excavation count as ‘legal’?

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References

Ait Said-Ghanem N. ANTIQUITIES DEALERS IN BAGHDAD AND CUNEIFORM TABLETS FROM KISH IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY. Iraq. Published online 2026:1-17. doi:10.1017/irq.2026.10053

Kish. (2026). Kish | Archéologie | culture.gouv.fr. Gouv.Fr. https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/en/kish