Leading the Expeditions

During the 1925–26 expedition, Edward Chiera recognized the importance of the site of Nuzi and its contents and appealed to Harvard University’s Semitic Museum and the newly opened Fogg Museum for funding to lead a second expedition to the mound in 1927–28 along with staff from the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). It was negotiated that the Harvard museums would retain the rights to the publication of the discoveries, and, as was customary, half the artifacts would remain in Iraq while the rest would be divided among the sponsoring institutions.

The 1928–29 season saw a new expedition director, Robert H. Pfeiffer of Harvard University, but after only one term, he relinquished the directorship to R. F. S. Starr, who had proven himself an able general assistant, photographer, and skilled project field supervisor in the previous seasons under Chiera and Pfeiffer. Starr later claimed he had been hired originally only when Edward W. Forbes, the Fogg’s director, realized he had agreed to fund a major expedition but had no representative on the project. Starr was then the registrar at the Fogg and was ready for an adventure. In 1929, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the University of Pennsylvania Museum joined in the sponsorship, sending trained staff but little monetary support. Their shares of the expedition artifacts were selected after the Semitic and Fogg museums had chosen theirs. Thus, the majority of the artifacts from the 1927–31 expeditions, most notably the thousands of inscribed clay tablets, remain in the collection of the Semitic Museum.