Richard L. Zettler

Richard L. Zettler (born 1949) is an American archaeologist of Early Bronze-Age Mesopotamia, with special interests in urban development and the organization of complex societies.

He has published studies and excavation reports on the Ur III Temple of Inanna and Kassite buildings at Nippur, and on settlement patterns in Tell es-Sweyhat.

One article appeared, for example, in a volume considering the legacies of the first Ottoman director of antiquities, Osman Hamdi Bey, who received an honorary doctorate from Penn.

[5] Another examined the Penn Museum’s late nineteenth-century excavations in Nippur – a site at which he himself has conducted extensive research.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, he expressed concern about the security of standing monuments, including mosques, as well as a reconstructed 2,000-year-old ziggurat at the site of Ur, and an archway at Ctesiphon from 129 B.C.

The MHSP established a program to train local workers in carving Mosul marble with Arabesque motifs and Arabic calligraphy – a traditional artisanal craft of the area – to produce relief tiles to adorn the walls.