Archaeologists who spent the 1930s in northern Iraq studying early civilizations befriended the local Yazidi community, taking photos of them going about their daily lives.

The black-and-white images ended up scattered among the 2,000 or so photographs of the excavation work kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which led the ambitious digs.

One photo — a Yazidi shrine — caught the eye of Penn doctoral student Marc Marin Webb in 2022, nearly a decade after the Islamic State group destroyed it while plundering the region. Webb and others began scouring museum files and gathered nearly 300 photos to create a visual archive of the Yazidi people, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.

The attacks, which the United Nations called a genocide, killed thousands of Yazidis and sent thousands more into exile or sexual slavery. It also destroyed much of their built heritage and cultural history, and the insular community is now splintered around the world.

Ansam Basher, 43, a computer science teacher living in Manchester, England, whose grandparents are captured in a batch of photos taken on their wedding day in the early 1930 said she was overwhelmed with emotion when she saw the photographs.

The archive documents Yazidi people, places and traditions that the Islamic State sought to erase. Marin Webb is now working with Nathaniel Brunt, a Toronto documentarian, to share it with the community, both through exhibits in the region and, in digital form, with the Yazidi diaspora.

The first exhibits took place in the region in April, when Yazidis gather to celebrate the New Year. Some were held outdoors, in the very areas the photos document nearly a century earlier.

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AP Video by Tassanee Vejpongsa