Iraq's Yazidis rediscover lost history through photos found in a museum archive

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University of Victoria postdoctoral fellow Nathaniel Brunt views an image from a collection of photos of the Yazidi people in their northern Iraq homeland in the 1930s, during an interview at the Penn Museum Archives in Philadelphia, Aug. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

PHILADELPHIA – Archeologists studying ancient civilizations in northern Iraq during the 1930s also befriended the nearby Yazidi community , documenting their daily lives in photographs that were rediscovered after the Islamic State militant group devastated the tiny religious minority.

The black-and-white images ended up scattered among the 2,000 or so photographs from the excavation kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and