Finds from Samarra, Iraq, unearthed between 1911 and 1913, are going to be revisited!

Through a new project, funded by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, a number of objects that come from the extensive excavational research that took place in Samarra by archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, and are now kept in the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London, are going to be reviewed and listed in a digital catalogue.

According to a new blog where the project’s different stages are going to be reported, the first part, involving the preliminary assessment of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s material, has already been completed. During that stage, 285 objects from Samarra that entered the Museum in 1922, recorded in the V&A’s central inventory, were counted and assessed. What is yet to come will also be reported through the blog.

The project complements related projects underway at the Museum für Islamische Kunst (Berlin) and the Freer-Sackler Gallery (Washington DC), and feeds into a bigger international collaboration to reunite Herzfeld’s Samarra finds.