Wilson Karen L., Bekken Deborah (Eds.). Where Kingship Descended from Heaven: Studies on Ancient Kish

Chicago: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, 2023. — 384 p. — (Studies in Ancient Cultures 1).From 1923 to 1933, the Chicago Field Museum and the University of Oxford conducted archaeological excavations at the site of Kish, located on the floodplain of the Euphrates River in modern Iraq approximately 80 kilometers south of Baghdad. Over the course of ten years of work, the expedition explored seventeen different mounds both inside and outside the ancient boundaries of Kish. The finds were divided at the end of each season, with the Iraq Museum retaining half of the objects and any one-of-a-kind items and the two excavating institutions splitting the remainder.
Beginning in 2004, the Field Museum undertook a reevaluation of its Kish holdings. To highlight new research and insights into the material culture from Kish and our understanding of the importance of the site to Mesopotamian archaeology, the Field Museum held a symposium in 2008 that brought together an international group of scholars who presented papers on various aspects of the ancient city. This volume, which grew out of that symposium, presents a wide array of studies on the excavated material remains from Kish, including cuneiform texts, animal figurines, human remains, lithics, figural stucco wall decorations, and more.Life and Death in Early Dynastic Kish: The Evidence from Ingharra, Trench Y, by Guillermo Algaze
Animal Figurines at Kish: Variability in Style, Completeness, and Context, by Deborah Bekken
Kish and Hursagkalama: An Assessment of the Cities’ History and Cults in the Light of Information from Cuneiform Texts, by Stephanie Dalley
Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Glass from Kish, by Laure Dussubieux
The First Actual Stratigraphic Profile of Part of the Y Trench, by McGuire Gibson, with an appendix on archaeological sedimentation by Joseph Schuldenrein
Provenience Investigations of Obsidian Artifacts from the Field Museum of Natural History’s Kish Collections Using Portable X-ray Fluorescence Analysis, by Mark Golitko
The "Sasanian" Stuccos of Mound H, by Trudy S. Kawami
Piercers, Borers, and Perforators: Use Wear and Cylinder Seal Manufacture, by Thomas J. Loebel
Life and Death at Kish: Reanalysis of the Human Skeletal Remains, by William J. Pestle, Christina Torres-Rouff, and Blair M. Daverman
Chipped- and Ground-Stone Assemblages from Kish, by James L. Phillips and Michelle E. Ekwall
Catalog of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in the Collection of the Field Museum, by McGuire Gibson, with Margaret Brandt and Leslie Schramer