Backward Glance: Americans at Nippur

The heat is oppressive, even in winter. You could get used to the fleas and the scorpions, but “the flies [are] the most terrible pests … The countless myriads of tickling, buzzing, biting things from which there [is] no escape from dawn to dusk, in house or field, in motion or at rest.” Your traveling companions are writing letters to your boss back home stabbing you in the back. You’re surrounded by “a half-savage people,” who are “vilely dirty,” “unprogressive and unlovely.”¹ Now, just as you’re packing to go back home, these same locals set fire to your camp, burning everything in sight and stealing several saddlebags full of money.

It’s April 17, 1889, you’re in Nippur, Mesopotamia, on the first American archaeological expedition to the Near East, and things aren’t going too well.