The Discovery That Never Was: Art, Politics and Time in Tello (Ancient Girsu)

In The Discovery That Never Was, I argue that the putatively self-evident notion of “discovery” has led to a Eurocentric form of tunnel vision which focuses on the deeds of individual “discoverers,” systematically neglects local sources, networks, structures, and glosses over the multilayered histories of local engagement with ancient Mesopotamian sites. By taking the site of Tello as an example and incorporating underrepresented sources from across millennia, I critically engage with “discovery” as an all-powerful paradigm—a paradigm that is far more than a mere rhetorical device but has had immense material-historical consequences.

Central to my project is to construct what I call a “site-world:” the totality of the multi-temporal networks of material encounters, discussed not in isolation but as embedded in an understanding of the mutual constitution of past and present, and of object and subject. Through a critical engagement with non-linear models of temporality, a site-world encompasses not only the physical site of Tello and its material remains but also the variety of discourses that have grown out of them over millennia. Therefore, stylistic and contextual analyses of artworks from Tello are accompanied in this book by critical readings of Sumerian, Hellenistic, Medieval Arabic, and Ottoman texts about their production, excavation, reception, transportation, and exhibition. By disrupting neat, linear, academic narratives of nineteenth-century “discovery,” this book paves the way for narratives that are complex, multitemporal, and open to non-academic forms of knowledge, making it clear that Tello was a mound that bore the traces of generations of populations who claimed to have made there their own “discoveries.”