Kish

One of the oldest and most venerable of the Sumerian cities and, according to the

Sumerian King List, the place where the first royal dynasty arose following the great flood. Several mounds of ruins marking the site of ancient Kish lie about 8 miles (13km) east of the site of Babylon and some 85 miles (137km) south of modern Baghdad. The king list provides the names of many early kings of Kish, but Enme-baragesi and his son Agga were the first for whom archaeological evidence has been found. It appears that in the third millennium b. c. Kish was one of several prosperous and often competing Sumerian city-states, including Uruk, Ur, and La-gash; Kish may have enjoyed a brief period of dominance over the others around 2500 B. c. It is interesting that the king list gives credit for the establishment of the city’s third and briefest dynasty (ca. 2450-2350 B. C.) to a woman named Kubaba since sole rule of Mesopotamian states by women was extremely rare. Kish also gained notoriety as the birthplace of the Akkadian conqueror Sargon in the late third millennium b. c. After the close of the Sumerian period, Kish remained an important center of learning. It was finally abandoned in the sixth century a. d.

Initial excavations at Kish were undertaken between 1912 and 1914 by a French team headed by Henri de Genouillac. An Anglo-American expedition under Stephen Langdon explored the site from 1923 to 1933. In addition to a royal cemetery similar to, but smaller than, the one found by Charles Leonard Woolley at Ur, they excavated the remains of a ziggurat dedicated to Kish’s local warrior god, Zababa.

See Also: king lists; Ur; Woolley, Charles Leonard