Initial excavations at Kish centered on the ziggurat and adjacent structures at Uhaimir. These represented a series of temple buildings and re-buildings that ranged in date from the Old Babylonian to the Neo-Babylonian period (ca. 1750-550 B.C.), with possible traces of earlier remains of the third millennium B.C. Later work on Ingharra revealed a massive Neo-Babylonian temple complex, roughly 130 meters square, with walls preserved to a height of over 4m. This temple stood upon an Early Dynastic plano-convex brick platform that also supported two adjoining “ziggurats” or temple towers of the mid-third-millennium B.C. Broad areas adjacent to the Neo-Babylonian temple were cleared down to plain level in a series of trenches, designated by a veritable alphabet soup of letters, over the course of the excavations. This work revealed habitation levels stretching back to the beginning of the third millennium B.C. as well as a cemetery that extended south toward Mound A. Included in this cemetery were a series of remarkably rich burials, each of which contained multiple human skeletons and a wheeled vehicle drawn by a team of bovids or equids. These are often referred to as “chariots,” and the burials as “chariot burials,” although the term “cart” more aptly describes these four-wheeled means of conveyance. These graves appear to date to Early Dynastic II (ca. 2700-2600 B.C.) and are the direct predecessors of the richer royal tombs at Ur. Mound A contained a palace of the Third Early Dynastic period (ca. 2500 B.C.) over which was another extensive cemetery. The 154 graves in the “A Cemetery” were rich in ceramic vessels; copper weapons, tools, pins, and vessels; and luxury items such as ostrich-egg shell vessels and, in one case, an iron dagger. They date to the end of the Early Dynastic and beginning of the Akkadian period (the end of the third millennium B.C.). Graves of the same date found on the adjacent portion of Ingharra appear to have been even more richly furnished, attesting to a stratified society in which wealthier individuals were buried closer to the sacred complex with its ziggurats than were the less well-to-do.

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