Ancient Umm Hafriyat in Iraq
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Ancient Umm Hafriyat

Akkadian Buildings Partially Excavated (Oriental Institute)

The site is located in the desert about 28 kilometers to the east of Nippur and was excavated in 1977 as an adjunct to the Nippur operations. The reason for the excavations was in a sense salvage because the site was being excavated illegally by nomads.

Umm Hafriyat (Mother of Excavations) is a group of low mounds of different ages that lay along an ancient water course. A careful collection of potsherds from the surface showed that there was a small town here from as early as the Uruk Period (circa 3500 BC) until Seleucid times (circa 300 BC) but the settlement tended to shift rather than build up on one spot to form a large high mound. Unlike Nippur where there may be ten or more levels superimposed on one another, at Umm Hafriyat each mound has no more than three periods of occupation. Area C for example where the illegal digging was done has Akkadian buildings only a few centimeters below the surface .....

NIPPUR REGIONAL PROJECT: UMM HAFRIYAT
McGuire and Gibson (Professors of Mesopotamian Archaeology)
[Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago]

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