Ancient Lagash: Current Research and Future Trajectories

This volume collects the papers presented in a workshop held at the 10th ICAANE in Vienna in 2016. The ancient state of Lagash, with the three main sites of Tello (ancient Girsu), al-Hiba (ancient Lagash) and Tell Zurghul (ancient Nigin), was once a central and powerful political institution of Sumerian history, at least in the 3rd millennium BC. Excavated in the past, between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, with the pioneering works by Ernest de Sarzec at Girsu and a few soundings by Robert Koldewey at the three sites, the area was then neglected for a long time until the Tell al-Hiba Expedition, a joint project of the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, conducted six seasons of excavations at al-Hiba between 1968 and 1990. After a very long break in excavations and research in the region of the ancient state of Lagash, the resumption of activities in the field since 2015 is opening up new trajectories in the archaeological, historical and epigraphic research, filling the gaps in our knowledge of the morphology of the sites and the surrounding area, the ancient landscape and environment and the material culture. The volume thus presents the state of the art of information on the archaeology of Girsu, Lagash and Nigin and, at the same time, ongoing results from recent excavations and archive research through combining old and new data. Further research has been conducted since the time of the workshop, but the papers collected here set out the main issues and the new questions that the current archaeological projects at the three sites are attempting to answer.