The site of Umm al-Aqqarib was excavated by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities
between 1999 and 2002 under the direction of Donny George. There they exposed a
large forecourt which provided access to a bipartite building with a temple to the south
and what may have been a residence with a large entrance court to the north. This dates
to the middle part of the Early Dynastic period and is probably more or less
contemporary with the earlier phase of the Temple Oval at Khafajah. Although Donny
George (personal communication) described this building as a combined temple and
palace, perhaps better parallels might be with the Temple Oval at Khafajah and the
later Giparku at Ur (see below).
It is at about this time that the “Palace A” was built at Kish, located next to the temple
to Inanna at Ingharra and consisting of a pair of connected buildings, whose scale and
architecture indicate their importance but which lack the features known from temples,
or for that matter, later palaces. The slightly later planoconvex building is located on a
more distant mound and, as suggested by Moorey ( 1964 : 92 ), perhaps served as a
fortified arsenal. High-resolution satellite imagery now indicates three palaces located
on the same mound as the plano-convex building: two next door to each other and one
behind. Surface scraping and soundings conducted by the Japanese expedition date
them to the very end of the Early Dynastic (Matsumoto and Uguchi 2000 : 6 ). Unlike
Palace A, all three have clear evidence of the courtyard/throne-room pairing which will
form the core of Mesopotamian palaces until the time of Nebuchadnezzar in the first
millennium BC. These three buildings also have double exterior walls and in each case
their throne-rooms are located to the west of the courts, although their orientations
differ slightly. A street runs to the east of two of the palaces and, a quarter kilometer
further northwest, passed immediately to the east of the plano-convex Building, sug-
gesting that the two complexes were probably contemporary.^13
These newly identified palaces at Kish can best be compared with the palaces
excavated at Eridu (Safar, Mustapha and Lloyd 1981 : 271 – 304 ) which also date to the
same time (Figure 8. 4 ).^14 Both sites have multiple buildings with similar orientations,
double walls and the courtyard/throne-room combination familiar from all subsequent
palaces. Both are located more than a half kilometer north of the temples of their
respective cities. Satellite imagery shows that the examples from Kish are on the other
side of the river from the main temple, and a watercourse of unknown date is visible
between the Eridu palaces and the main mound. Perhaps similar are traces of a double-
walled building recovered from surface traces at the south mound Abu Salabikh, again
separated from what is thought to be the religious center by a watercourse (Postgate
1990 : 106 ). The only other known palace that might date to the Early Dynastic period
was found at Tell Wilaya. It was located at the edge of the site, but too little of it was
excavated to tell whether it had the throne-room/courtyard combination (Madhloom
1960 : Plan 2 B). Its date is also a little in question since this building might in fact be
assigned to the early part of the Akkadian period (Rashid 1963 : 85 ).
The palace complexes at Eridu and Kish represent a clear break with the past.
Although they share the double external wall with Palace A, they are the first examples
with a clear throneroom andare located a considerable distance from the religious
center. Thus they embody the practical and symbolic separation between the religious
and secular which is the hallmark of Mesopotamian rule from this time forth.
–– Elizabeth C. Stone ––