Nippur and the University of Pennsylvania expeditions

This is the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's own account, on its institutional website, of Nippur and the Penn Museum's own excavation expeditions to the site, one of the earliest and most significant American archaeological projects in Mesopotamia. As the excavating institution's own record of its own work, it is a reliable primary source for what the museum holds, when its expeditions took place and what its own excavation history was. Its limit is that it is an institutional self-account written to describe the museum's own history and collection rather than an independent scholarly analysis of Nippur's archaeology or of Sumerian religion more broadly, so a specific interpretive claim about the site's findings benefits from a dedicated scholarly publication alongside it.