John P. Peters

John Punnett Peters (1852-1921) was an American Episcopal clergyman, Hebrew scholar, and archaeologist who led the first two seasons (1889 and 1890) of the University of Pennsylvania's Babylonian Expedition to Nippur, the longest-running American archaeological project in Iraq during the late 19th century. Peters served as field director and chief of the expedition during the foundational seasons that established the basic stratigraphy and tablet recovery program at the site.

Nippur was the religious center of Sumer, home to the temple of Enlil (the E-kur), and its tablet archives provided some of the earliest extra-biblical material illuminating Mesopotamian literature, religion, and law. The Pennsylvania excavations recovered tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, including portions of the Sumerian flood narrative and the literary corpus that informs comparative study of Genesis 1-11. Subsequent seasons under John Henry Haynes (field director, season 3, 1893-1896) and the philologist Hermann Hilprecht (scientific director, season 4, 1898-1900) continued the project through the turn of the century.

Peters published 'Nippur, or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates' (1897), a two-volume narrative that combined excavation report, travelogue, and a sometimes acrid account of the expedition's internal conflicts — particularly his disputes with Hilprecht, which became one of the more public scandals in early American Assyriology. Peters served as Professor of Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania and later as rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in New York City, holding both ecclesiastical and academic positions through his career.