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From Tomorrow we dig – Excerpts from Vaughn Crawfords letters
some of the spectacular results of the five season project which are now well known from publication by Donald Hansen include:

• confirmation that al-Hiba is the site of ancient Lagash
• The discovery of an oval temple in area A, ….
• Confirmation of the location of the Bagara of Ningirsu, the chief deity of Lagash
• The initiation of excavations in a structure in Area G having a major curving wall – probably oval

From Letter to Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot February 1966

The interesting thing about al-Hiba is its size… it takes a full hour to walk from one extremity to the other…  it is very different from other Mesopotamian mounds in that it is almost completely surrounded by marshes and can be reached only by boat.   There is a canal full of water…….The range of time at al-Hiba would probably be from 4000 to 2000 BC.

From Expedition to al-Hiba – First season Nov 8th 1968 Newsletter

Professor Hansen discovered part of a very impressive wall made of baked plano-convex bricks instead of the usual sun-dried ones, we hope that the use of the baked bricks indicates an important building

From Expedition to al-Hiba – First season February 6th 1969 Newsletter

On December 22nd, when I last wrote we were expanding the excavations in the platform of the Igbal of Inanna….. after encountering a very large courtyard, Professor Hansen suspected we were in a temple oval complex such as those discovered previously at Khafajah and Ubaid.  Indeed, once had had the idea, he and Khalaf Jasim our dig foreman looked to see if such an oval were visible on the surface, visible by means of a difference in the coloration of the soil.  There it was plain as a blueprint!

They put Salih Jasim to work tracing the oval according to the difference and it worked perfectly.  The width of the oval from east to west proved to be no less than 93 meters.

If the proportion of the length to the width is like that of Khafajah, the oval should be about 130 meters in length…. Unfortunately the southern portion is completely eroded away.

We were, though, able to complete all of the platform as well as the remains of the oval and as a result we know that the temple within the oval was not set on a free standing platform within an oval wall but rather that the oval formed the outer wall of the temple itself…. Certain features of the platform, curved steps on the southeast and a rounded corner on the north west, suggest that the architect wished for the building to blend with the curvature of the oval itself