The Metropolitan Museum's excavations at Nishapur (1935–1940, 1947)

The Metropolitan Museum's Iranian Expedition chose ancient Nishapur in Khurasan because Arabic and Persian sources record its founding in the Sasanian period and its importance, with flourishing crafts, in Islamic times. ¹ Test digs began in 1935 after a preliminary survey by Wilkinson, and work continued on the Rogers Fund until 1940, with a final season in 1947. ^{1 2}

The excavations yielded much pottery, glass, metalwork, coins, and wall decoration in brick, carved and painted stucco and painting. ² At Sabz Pushan were small close-set houses with courts, some decorated with carved plaster dadoes, and 376 coins found singly, mostly of the eighth and early ninth centuries. ⁴ At Tepe Madraseh was a prayer hall with a much-redecorated mihrab, to which a burnt-brick minaret was added in the eleventh or twelfth century, and a large complex of halls and vaulted corridors that Wilkinson suggests was an official seat begun by Abd Allah ibn Tahir, rebuilt by Amr ibn al-Layth and subdivided in Samanid times. ^{5 6} At Qanat Tepe were small dwellings, a rectangular mihrab flanked by colonnettes, a bathhouse with wall paintings, and kilns that produced alkaline-glazed pottery. ⁷

The expedition found no real trace of Sasanian Nishapur; Wilkinson believes the Sasanian city lay outside every area dug, and disagrees with Richard Bulliet's view that Tepe Alp Arslan was the Sasanian fortress, since the test digs there produced nothing clearly Sasanian and a century of digging into it had produced no Sasanian antiquities. ³ None of the sites, he says, was occupied before the later eighth century, and most were extinguished when the Mongols ravaged Nishapur and Shadyakh in 1221. ⁸

Wilkinson laments that after the expedition the site was opened to commercial looting — Tepe Madraseh, for one, was wrecked by commercial digging — and writes that Nishapur deserved a better fate than death by looting. ^{9 6}