Content overview: “Forgotten Iraqi Antiquities Dealers Fueled Early 20th-Century Kish Excavations, Letters Re”. Long before official archaeological digs resumed at the ancient city of Kish in 1912, local Iraqi excavators were unearthing cuneiform tablets and supplying them to museums in London, Paris, and New York. Newly examined letters from the early 1900s expose the central role of Baghdad antiquities dealers, who quietly fed Western institutions' hunger for Mesopotamian artifacts between 1880 and 1912—a period when no formal expeditions were active at the site.
The correspondence shows that these dealers, often unnamed in official records, not only sold tablets but also provided crucial logistical knowledge and access to dig sites, effectively shaping the collections now held by major museums. Yet their contributions have been systematically erased from the historical narrative, which celebrates the later 'official' excavations while ignoring the Iraqis who made them possible. For the complete material, the listing points back to the source inside the network.