Edgar James Banks

Banks was an antiquities enthusiast and entrepreneurial roving archaeologist in the closing days of the Ottoman Empire, who has been held up as an original for the fictional composite figure of Indiana Jones.

[1] Starting from his position as American consul in Baghdad in 1898, Banks bought hundreds of cuneiform tablets on the market in the closing days of the Ottoman Empire and resold them in small batches to museums, libraries, universities, and theological seminaries, several in Utah and the Southwestern United States and across the United States.

The book contains lively accounts of his excavations in Adab and discoveries of a sequence of buildings from the prehistoric into the reign of Ur-Nammu in the ancient Sumerian city.

Tablets Banks sold to Charles W. Ames are now in the Science Museum of Minnesota, University of Minnesota, and many other private and public sites in the U.S. Banks is known as the person who sold the ancient mathematical cuneiform tablet Plimpton 322, which was likely excavated in what is now southern Iraq, to the New York publisher George Arthur Plimpton, reportedly for $10.

Edgar Banks also started two film companies and climbed Mount Ararat in a search for Noah's Ark.