ISAC Lecture: Derek Kennet

Event Date: Wednesday, April 2 · 7pm CDT

ISAC Lecture: Derek Kennet

Join us as we welcome one of our newest ISAC faculty members, Derek Kennet, Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf State Archaeology.

Samarra: the Abbasid capital of Iraq in the 9th century

At 25 miles long, Samarra is probably the largest archaeological site in the world. It is certainly the best preserved early Islamic town that has come down to us and, as such, can tell us a lot about the way in which the early Muslim community organized its urban spaces. Located on the River Tigris 120 km north of Baghdad, Samarra was the Abbasid capital from 836 to 892 AD/CE at a time when the Abbasid empire ruled over the provinces of the Abbasid empire extending from Tunisia to Central Asia. The size of the city testifies to the wealth of the Abbasid period. The famous Great Mosque and its spiral minaret are among the numerous remarkable architectural monuments of Iraq. Along with the amazingly well-preserved town plan, which has come down to us via aerial photographs taken in the 1950s, we have contemporary written descriptions of the site. Together these two sources of information allow us to say a great deal about what an early Islamic town looked like and how it worked. It is interesting to think that Samarra sits right at the end of a 4000+-year long tradition of urban innovation in Mesopotamia. After this time, Mesopotamia was never again to be the world center of such developments.

Derek Kennet is Howard E. Hallengren Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf States Archaeology based at ISAC. He approaches the peninsula from a number of different perspectives, such as: longue durée regional archaeology; the archaeology of the Late Antique period, the rise of Islam, and the Islamic periods; human economic strategies in semi- to hyper-arid environments; and interaction between the Arabian peninsula and surrounding regions/empires/economies, including the Sasanians. The geographical location of the peninsula also means that there is real value to using the relatively accessible and well-preserved archaeological record as a window onto wider inter-regional developments such as Indian Ocean trade and globalisation. He graduated from the Institute of Archaeology in London (now part of UCL) in 1984 and completed a PhD at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London in 2001. He has been involved in archaeological fieldwork in many countries, including Italy, Bulgaria, Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, Egypt and Libya, as well as (in the Arabian Peninsula) Oman, the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He has also directed research projects in India and China. In the early 1990s he held the post of Resident Archaeologist at the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah (UAE) before moving to the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK for 25 years, with two-years teaching in the Department of Archaeology at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. He moved to Chicago in 2024.

Recent books include the Archaeological Atlas of Samarra (with A. Northedge 2015, BISI); Excavations at Paithan, Maharashtra: Transformations in Early Historic and Early Medieval India (with M. Kasturi Bai and J.V.P.Rao, 2020, de Gruyter); Sasanian and Islamic settlement and ceramics from Southern Iran 4th – 17th century AD: the Williamson Survey (with Seth Priestman, 2023, British Institute for Persian Studies/Oxbow). The Bronze Age communal graves of Qarn al-Harf, Ras al-Khaimah (UAE): Southeast Arabia, Feb 2025.

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