After nearly two centuries of investigation, much is known about Mesopotamian civilization, but much still remains unknown, poorly understood, or uncertain. Many of the texts recovered from excavations have yet to reveal their secrets: Their volume is great, their condition often poor, their language challenging, and the number of scholars who can read them small— but the task is infinitely rewarding. A great recent advance has been the use of computer graphics programs to redraw cuneiform texts from photographs of tablets. Much other excavated material also remains to be studied: Finds like the thousands of ivory fragments recovered from Nimrud take years to conserve, piece together, and analyze. Although many excavations have taken place, often they have concentrated on monumental architecture—palaces, temples, and city walls—and comparatively little is known about urban domestic architecture and even less about rural settlements and land use, although research has increasingly focused on all of these areas of interest in recent years. In addition, there are many controversies about the significance of particular archaeological discoveries or historical texts, and changing archaeological theory has also focused new attention on interpretations of the archaeological and documentary evidence. There is much to do. But the prospects for Mesopotamian archaeology are not good: Warfare, intercommunity violence, sanctions, and looting have devastated many sites, seriously reduced the resources available for funding archaeology, and made the region a dangerous place in which to work, for locals and foreigners alike.
World History
