About Sumer

Sumer

Sumer is the archaeology journal of Iraq, first issued in Baghdad in 1945 by the country's Directorate General of Antiquities. Published in Arabic and English, it has been the principal venue for excavation reports and Mesopotamian studies by Iraqi archaeologists for eight decades, and the journal of record for the archaeology of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates. Few scholarly journals anywhere are so closely identified with the civilisation they study: Sumer is named for the southern Mesopotamian culture that produced the world's earliest known literature.

First Issued in Baghdad in 1945

Bibliographic records confirm the journal's starting point: Sumer, a journal of archaeology in Iraq, was published by the Directorate-General of Antiquities in Baghdad from 1945. The date is significant. Iraq had been independent since 1932, its antiquities service was asserting national control over excavation and the division of finds, and a generation of Iraqi archaeologists trained at the University of Baghdad was coming into its own. A national journal, publishing Iraqi fieldwork to an international audience, was both a scientific instrument and a statement of scholarly sovereignty.

From its first issue in 1945, the journal featured archaeological work led by Iraqis, a point historians of Iraqi archaeology emphasise when tracing how the field moved from Western-dominated expeditions toward local leadership. Excavators of the post-war generation, among them Tariq Madhloum and his colleagues, published their findings in Sumer as a matter of course.

The Journal of the Antiquities Service

Sumer's publisher evolved with the Iraqi state: the Directorate of Antiquities became part of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, within the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities. The Board's own organisational law makes publishing the Sumer journal an explicit duty of its studies, research and publishing directorate, which maintains a dedicated Sumer Journal section alongside archaeological photography and library services. The journal is thus not a private venture but a statutory function of Iraq's heritage administration.

That institutional anchoring explains the journal's longevity. Ministries changed, regimes changed, and the country endured wars and sanctions, but the antiquities service continued to excavate, conserve and record, and its journal continued to be the place where that work was formally reported.

Excavation Reports in Two Languages

Sumer was published in Arabic and English from its early years, a bilingual structure visible in surviving volumes: a single issue might carry English articles on cuneiform texts, excavation districts and museum objects alongside Arabic articles on fieldwork, manuscripts and inscriptions. Volume XVI and XVII contents, preserved in booksellers' and library records, show the pattern clearly: reports on the E-Anna district at Uruk, archives from Shemshara, sites around the Hammar Lake, the stele of Ur-Nanshe, Greek theatre remains at Babylon, and Arabic studies of excavations at Tell ed-Daim, Abu Thar and elsewhere, edited under the authority of Taha Baqir, the distinguished Iraqi archaeologist whose name recurs as the journal's guiding editor in that era.

Bilingual publication gave Iraqi archaeology a double audience. Arabic readers, including Iraq's own students and officials, could follow the recovery of their national past in their own language, while the English articles placed Iraqi results directly into international Mesopotamian studies, where they were cited by scholars worldwide.

Mesopotamian Studies and Iraqi Archaeologists

The journal's subject is the archaeology of Mesopotamia in the widest sense: prehistoric settlements, Sumerian and Akkadian cities, Assyrian and Babylonian capitals, and the Parthian, Sasanian and Islamic remains layered above them. Excavation reports from Nineveh illustrate its role across decades: Iraqi teams working at the city's gates from 1965 to 1971 under the State Board published in Sumer, and studies of individual discoveries, such as a statue of Hermes found at Nineveh and reported in Sumer in 1954, entered the international literature through its pages.

Individual scholars' collected reports show the same pattern at career scale. The excavation reports of Behnam Abu al-Soof, covering fieldwork in Iraq from 1956 to 1986 at sites including Basmusian, the Rania Plain and the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, were first published in Sumer by the Ministry of Culture and the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. For Iraqi archaeology's founding generations, Sumer was where a career was documented.

Recording a Civilisation

The stakes of the journal's work are set by its subject. Mesopotamian civilisation, flourishing between the Tigris and Euphrates, produced the earliest known corpus of recorded literature, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and cities, laws, mathematics and astronomy that shaped the ancient world. Iraqi literature itself is traced by scholars back to Sumerian times. A journal that publishes the excavation of that world is therefore publishing primary evidence for the beginnings of literate civilisation.

Sumer's reports, plans, photographs and object studies form a cumulative archive: season by season, site by site, the archaeological map of Iraq was drawn in its pages. Later researchers return to early Sumer reports because excavation destroys the contexts it records; the published report is often all that survives of a trench, a building phase or a find's original position.

War, Looting and Heritage Protection

The journal's later volumes document a darker subject: the destruction of the heritage it exists to record. The looting of the National Museum and the wave of site looting that followed the 2003 invasion devastated Iraq's archaeological record, and subsequent armed conflict brought deliberate destruction at Mosul, Nineveh, Nimrud and other sites. Volume LXIV of Sumer, published by the State Board, is substantially devoted to damage assessment: surveys of looting at Isin and Bismaya, the Fara regional survey, studies of destruction at Tulul al-Baqarat, Shurqat and Mosul, and proposals for preventive archaeology in Iraq.

That a journal founded to publish discovery should devote a volume to destruction is a measure of Iraqi archaeology's recent history. It is also evidence of the discipline's response: Iraqi and international teams documenting damage site by site, in the journal of record, so that loss is at least measured and the surviving record protected.

Continuity into the Digital Era

Sumer's continuation into the era of volumes numbered in the sixties, with contributions from Iraqi, Italian, German and other international missions working under Iraqi authority, shows the journal adapting to a new phase of Iraqi archaeology: collaborative fieldwork, satellite and drone documentation, and open scholarly exchange. Recent Iraqi-Italian survey work in the Qadisiyah region, for example, was published in Sumer LXIII, and damage-assessment research from the Fara survey appeared in Sumer LXIV.

The journal's presence in international library catalogues, from WorldCat records of its 1945 founding onward, and the circulation of its volumes as PDFs among researchers, have carried its contents far beyond the print runs that sanctions-era Iraq could manage. For students of Mesopotamia who cannot travel to Baghdad, Sumer remains a primary window onto Iraqi fieldwork.

Place in Iraqi Scholarly Publishing

Within Iraq's periodical landscape, Sumer holds a unique position. The country's cultural journals, al-Aqlam, al-Mawrid and their companions, served literature and heritage broadly, but Sumer is a disciplinary journal of international standing in a single field, sustained by a state scientific service since 1945. Surveys of Iraqi publishing before 1990 already singled out the country's scholarly periodicals, naming the journal of Sumer among those that contributed significantly to Arab intellectual and cultural life, in the transliterated form Majallat Somar.

Its longevity also makes it an institutional memory for Iraqi archaeology itself: the succession of directors, excavators, epigraphers and conservators who built the discipline in Iraq can be traced through its author lists across eight decades.

Legacy

Sumer's legacy is the published record of Iraqi archaeology. Founded in Baghdad in 1945 by the Directorate General of Antiquities, published in Arabic and English, and maintained by the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage as a statutory duty, it carried the excavation reports of Iraq's own archaeologists to the world and built the evidentiary base on which Mesopotamian studies rests. Through discovery, war, looting and reconstruction, the journal endured.

For anyone studying the ancient Near East, Sumer is not background reading but a primary source: the first place where much of what is known about Iraq's excavated past was set down, by the institution charged with protecting that past.