ABSTRACT
The history of Mesopotamian archaeology as a modern discipline is rooted in the entrepreneurial and colonial past of the Western powers. The story of modern Western involvement with Mesopotamia, as with other parts of the world, begins with sporadic encounters by enterprising traders and travellers pushing out their horizons and setting up initial and tentative lines of contact between vastly disparate worlds. Since the end of the Crusades in the Middle Ages, a largely disastrous engagement between the West and the East had been in abeyance, but with the widening of cultural, political and economic horizons attendant upon, initially, the Renaissance and then, more urgently, the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe and the consequent capitalist drive towards new resources and markets, a renewal of interactions became inevitable. Over the past two centuries or so, the nature of that renewed engagement has scarcely been less catastrophic than that of the Middle Ages, as is attested by at least one story a day in our newspapers, but one of the surviving waifs of that intercourse is indeed the modern study of the Mesopotamian past. In assessing the role and position of Mesopotamian archaeology within the contemporary world, however, let us try not to visit the sins of the parent upon the child, at least not without a full and fair hearing.
