Wilhelm Konig

Wilhelm Konig was a German painter.

A painter by profession, Konig was also interested in natural science. In 1931 he was elected assistant to the German leader of the Baghdad Antiquity Administration as head of the laboratory. In 1938 he made the first thorough examination of a curious clay jar in the National Museum of Iraq (of which he was the director), now known as the Baghdad Battery. In 1940, having returned to Berlin due to illness, he published a paper speculating that they may have been galvanic cells, perhaps used for electroplating gold onto silver objects.

In March 2012, Professor Elizabeth Stone, of Stony Brook University, an expert on Iraqi archaeology, returning from the first archaeological expedition in Iraq after 20 years, stated that she does not know a single archaeologist who believed that these were batteries.