Bahija Khalil Ismail

Bahija Khalil Ismail was an Iraqi Assyriologist and director of the Iraq Museum from 1983 to 1989. She was the first woman director of the museum and the first Iraqi archaeologist reading the scripts in Iraq. She obtained her first degree in archaeology at the University of Baghdad and then studied further in Germany where she gained her Ph.D from Humboldt University after studying cuneiform writing in 1967. She was the first Iraqi student to obtain a doctorate in Archaeology from Germany. She carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Baghdad and published several works on ancient Mesopotamian texts and culture. She also participated in archaeological excavations and conferences around the world. She was a respected scholar and a pioneer in her field. She died in Amman in 2019 at the age of 84 or 85.