The publication in 1955 of the fourth volume of Sir Leonard Woolley's Ur Excavations series set a coping-stone upon the remarkable edifice of recorded research which he and his collaborators in the “Combined Expedition” have achieved. This volume deals finally with the pre-Third Dynasty discoveries, other than those connected with the Royal Cemetery. But, having in the sequence of publications given precedence to Volume V (The Ziggurat and its Surroundings), its appearance has been long delayed, and, as explained in a foreword, it has now proved necessary to publish the original text as prepared for printing in 1935, almost without reference to the bearing which subsequent work in the same field has had upon its contents. Clearly its usefulness will be greatly enhanced if this omission can gradually be repaired; and though an attempt can hardly be made to do so with a standard of thoroughness comparable to that of the original work, the following notes are intended as a small contribution. They concern the discoveries connected with the Al ‘Ubaid period at Ur and the light thrown upon them by subsequent finds, particularly at the sites of Tell ‘Uqair and Tell Abu Shahrein (Eridu).

The following texts come from the Sippar Collections of the British Museum and offer substantial new data on numerous aspects of the administration of the Ebabbara, particularly as regards crown relations and privatised functions. Among the more important points are:

(a) Text No. 1, a fragmentary text dealing with the gardeners of Šamaš, mentions a royal official (rēš šarri) in charge of the gardeners and a letter (šipirtu) from Nabonidus in Tema, the first evidence for that king exercising direct control over the Ebabbara from his Arabian capital.

(b) We also have definite indication that certain official positions connected with the collection of dues payable to the temple could be hired out. Specifically this involves the collection of tithes (No. 8) and the office of gugallu (No. 7). The occurrence of the ša muhhi ešrê and gugallu in letter orders had already prompted speculation that these two duties were rented out in the same manner as the rab sūti and this is now shown to be the case. Other examples of privatised functions are a contract to supply baked bricks to the temple (No. 6) and an undertaking by a širku (temple slave) to supply some of the material requirements of the offerings (No. 2).

(c) Hints of temple affairs outside the Sippar region are given by the appearance of the šangû and the rab ummāni in Opis (No. 4). The text concerns sheep, though whether they were there for pasture, sale or provisioning temple personnel is not clear. The sheep coming from Rusapu were part of a cycle in which temple flocks might be pastured far away with animals rotated as required (Nos. 11, 12). Sheep belonging to the temple are also found on the road in No. 10.

This paper is concerned with a distinctive type of axe-head, examples of which have been found at Chagar Bazar and Nimrud (Pl. VII and Figs. 1–2). Both have four horizontal ribs encircling the socket and a rectangular-shaped projection at the base of the blade. The Chagar Bazar specimen comes from a level I grave, to which Sir Max Mallowan assigned outside limits of c. 1750–1600 B.C. He concluded, however, that the axe-head was unlikely to be much later than 1700 B.C. (Mallowan 1947, Pls. XLI: 1, LV: 15, pp. 187–8, 218). The same date was assumed for the Nimrud axe, which, although not from the same mould as suggested by Sir Max, is certainly very similar and is probably a product of the same workshop. Indeed, they are so close there can be very little difference in date between them. Subsequent writers on axe-heads have generally followed Sir Max's dating (Maxwell-Hyslop 1949, 107; Deshayes 1960, I, 188; Erkanal 1977, 16). Sir Max found confirmation for the early date of these axes in “an almost identical axe” found in level Ib at Kültepe (Mallowan 1956, 20–21; 1966, I, 346–7, n. 36), and thus belonging to the first half of the eighteenth century B.C. The Kültepe axe (Fig. 3:1; Özgüç, T. 1955, 69–70, Figs. 40a, 42) does in fact belong to a small group of Anatolian axe-heads that have been conveniently collected together by Erkanal (1977, Pl. 5, nos. 57, 59–61).

It is the purpose of this article to gather from a variety of places and publications the examples (known to me) of a particular form of game-board which was in use, at widely different periods, over a very large area of the ancient East, and to point out one historical fact which seems to have a clear connexion with it.

The game in question is that which has been called, for want of any other name, the Game of Fifty-eight Holes. In all cases but one the only requisites of the game which have survived are the boards upon which it was played, and these show in general a striking resemblance, not only in the arrangement of the holes, but in the shape of the whole object, which is roughly rectangular, but has one of the short sides straight while all of the other sides are curved, the long ones concave, the remaining short one convex. Despite individual variations this general form is common to all but a very few of the examples; it has been aptly compared with an axe-blade. As to the holes, there is always a line of these following the edges of the board and two straight lines down the middle. Occasionally the middle displays some pictorial device, a palm-tree, or a pair of eyes, so contrived that it marks out the end (?), or winning-point, of the game; but this feature is rare. The holes are arranged in groups so that, in all but one particular area, four ordinary holes occur between special holes which are always distinguished either by a mark, an inlay, or the end of certain lines connecting them with other holes of the same kind. In the middle of the curved short side is always a central hole of the special kind, generally marked in the same way as the others, but occasionally made larger, or even signalized by a sign of its own. In the particular area referred to, which is on the middle lines towards the straight end of the board, there is always a pair of groups of three special holes with only one ordinary hole dividing them.

Scholars had once assumed that all of the relief programmes in Sennacherib's “Palace Without Rival” at Nineveh depicted events solely from his first three military campaigns. In 1994, however, E. Frahm successfully reconstructed a heavily damaged epigraph from the throne room specifically identifying the city of Ukku as the topic of the relief programme on Slabs 1–4 of this room's western wall. We know from Sennacherib's annals that Ukku was a target of the king's fifth campaign, aimed at enemies to the north of the Assyrian heartland in the Zagros mountain range. I have therefore re-examined the palace reliefs in order to identify other fifth-campaign programmes that have previously been overlooked. In this article, I argue that Rooms XXXVIII and XLVIII, in addition to the images on the western wall of the throne room, contain representations of Sennacherib's fifth campaign. With this identification substantiated, I then explore the typological aspects of these fifth-campaign programmes to classify their visual features.

Each season of excavations at Tell al-Hiba confirms Jacobsen's proposed identification first made in 1953 that Tell al-Hiba rather than Telloh, as formerly believed, is the site of ancient Lagash.

During the first two seasons of the excavations in 1968–69 and in 1970–71, no less than fourteen foundation stones identifying the temple oval in which they were found as the Ibgal of Inann a were unearthed. Nine of the stones were accompanied by inscribed copper foundation figurines,figurines which represented Šulutula, the personal deity of Enannatum I, the builder of at least Level I of the Ibgal. As Hansen has indicated, however, in a wadi a mile to the north of the Ibgal fragmentary cones stating that Enannatu m was the builder of the Ibgal have been recovered. In addition it may be well to say that no such cones have been found within the extensive area of the Ibgal which has been excavated. Why this is the case is not yet known. The foundation stones and the companion figurines found in situ are, however, solid evidence that the physical location of one of the temples mentioned in the texts as being located in Lagash has been ascertained.

Coins of the Kākwayhid dynasty, whose princes ruled over a part of al-Jibāl (north central Persia) in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, are of sufficient rarity to warrant their publication whenever they come to the attention of students of Persian history. The period between the collapse of the Buwayhid power and the rise of the Seljūqs is a complex one and as ‘Alā’ al-Dawlah, the Kākwayhid, played a not unimportant role in the political events of the time, his coinage is of considerable interest. While making a study of the Muḥammad an collections in the American Numismatic Society in New York I came across seven Kākwayhid specimens, all of them unedited, and these, together with two likewise unpublished coins in my own possession and one formerly in the collection of Professor Ernst Herzfeld, I propose to describe in the present paper. As previous notices of the Kākwayhid coinage are scattered in the wide numismatic literature, I have thought it worth while to assemble, as an appendix to the descriptions of these ten new specimens, all the known issues of the two Kākwayhid rulers who (to our present knowledge) struck coins: ‘Alā’ al-Dawlah Muḥammad b Dushmanzār and his an Farāmare.

Between 1927 and 1930 a joint expedition by the University of Oxford and the Field Museum of Chicago to the site of Kish opened a series of soundings (ZY, Y, YW and YWN) on the mound of Tell Ingharra in order to investigate the earliest periods of the settlement. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the YWN sounding utilizing previously unpublished documentation and excavated objects, and offers a new interpretation of the evidence. In addition, a new radiocarbon date assigns the latest phase from the sounding to the ED IIIb to Akkadian transition and it can be compared usefully with existing dates from several central and north Mesopotamian sites.

This article re-examines the cuneiform evidence for the upper end of the Old Babylonian metrological systems for capacity and area. We demonstrate that the reading 1(šar2) gal šu nu-tag “one large šar2 that the hand cannot touch” is not supported by that evidence, and show instead that the phrase's final sign is not tag but gi4 “return” or “repeat”. We then consider several likely interpretations of this reading, arguing that the size of the largest units in both systems is probably sixty times smaller than previously assumed, but nevertheless more than adequate for practical needs. Editions of two important metrological cuneiform texts are appended.

In his Anabasis recounting his march on Babylon with the Persian prince Cyrus in 401 B.C., Xenophon provides his readers with many descriptive details about the area that would come to be called Mesopotamia. He speaks of villages, of wheat, barley and dates, of fields under cultivation and of many other indications of settled life. He also offers a brief description of the flora and fauna of Mesopotamia, in which he mentions wormwood, aromatic shrubs, wild asses, bustards, gazelles and ostriches. Musil, who travelled extensively in this region at the beginning of the twentieth century, commented favourably on the accuracy of some aspects of the picture drawn by Xenophon.

Yet, for all the verisimilitude of Xenophon's description, anyone who has travelled in Mesopotamia, or who is familiar with the accounts of it found in later classical authors such as Strabo or Pliny, cannot help but feel that something is missing in Xenophon's account. What is missing is any reference to pastoral life in the region, particularly the camel pastoralism long associated with Arabia and Arabs. Sheep are mentioned, in passing, only once in the sections of the book devoted to Xenophon's passage through this area, in association with the villages of Cyrus's mother, Parysatis, situated along the upper Tigris, and there is no mention whatsoever of goats or camels, or of nomadic pastoralists who might have herded flocks of such animals. This dearth of positive evidence for nomadism in Xenophon's account might tempt one to conclude that pastoral nomads—at least Arab nomads of the kind described by Strabo and Pliny—had not yet arrived in this area in 401 B.C. But Xenophon himself thwarts such a ready conclusion by calling the part of Mesopotamia lying east of the Khābūr river “Arabia”, a name which in itself implies the existence of Arab nomads.

During October and November 1977 a third season of work at Abu Salabikh was undertaken by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. On this occasion we remained at the site for less than two months, partly because we had planned to do less excavation so as to concentrate on the study of materials from the previous seasons, and partly to enable the expedition to move up to the area of the Hamrin dam, where we had a pressing invitation from the State Antiquities Organization to join in rescue excavations. Despite the short season at Abu Salabikh we were able to achieve most of our objectives, and in fact it proved necessary to undertake some minor rescue excavations of our own because of urgent irrigation drainage works close to the site. This year we were happy to welcome once more Sd. Abdul-Mejid Muhammad with Sd. Muhammad Yahya as our representatives, and are as ever grateful to them for their unfailing kindness and ready assistance. Our thanks go also to Dr. Muayad Sa‘id, Director General of Antiquities and all of the Organization's officials who helped to smooth our paths. In particular, though, we must pay tribute to the late Prof. Fuad Safar: as Director of Excavations he took the most active interest in our work, and he was especially enthusiastic about the new light it might throw on the Early Dynastic I period. So often in the past it has been his penetrating comments that led us to new approaches and objectives, and we all feel that archaeological research in Iraq can never be the same again without him.

The original meaning and the changes in the content of the term Amurru in the course of the second millennium B.C. have been one of the most intensively discussed and debated subjects of Near Eastern history. The name appears from the late third millennium on, both in phonetic spelling and in the logographic writing MAR.TU. It is now generally agreed that in the early part of the second millennium the term refers loosely to the Syrian regions situated west of Mesopotamia proper and to the inhabitants of these regions. The more difficult questions under debate are concerned with the original meaning of Amurru, whether ethnic or geographical, and with the exact nature and origin of its equation with MAR.TU. These important questions however are of little concern for the issue discussed in this paper.

The broad sense of Amurru as indicated above, often used in opposition to Akkad, is gradually restricted to a more limited region of central and southern Syria. A Mari text has the “Land of Amurru” in a sequence after the lands of Yamhad and Qatna, whereas another text mentions “the messengers of four kings of Amurru” alongside the messengers of Hazor. Texts from Alalakh VII and IV mention individuals from the “Land of MAR.TU”, without however any clues to its whereabouts.

Auch wenn sich dieser Beitrag zu Ehren Sir Leonard Woolleys nicht L. unmittelbar auf Ergebnisse bezieht, die wir seinen Ausgrabungen in Ur verdanken, so hätten vielleicht diese wenigen Zeilen doch auch sein Interesse gefunden, gelten sie doch einer sumerischen Dichtung, die uns in etwa die grosse Herrscherpersönlichkeit Šulgis, des zweiten Königs der III. Dynastie von Ur, näherzurücken geeignet ist.

As is well known, al-Fārābī formulated his political philosophy on more than one occasion. The most comprehensive statements of his political views are to be found in two texts which engaged the attention of the German orientalist Dieterici and whose Arabic titles may conveniently be rendered the Ideal State and the Political Philosophy. It is apparently these two works which are mentioned together in terms of the highest praise by the Qāḍī Ṣā'id of Toledo (died 462/1070). The general position developed in both works is the same, but the relation between them remains quite obscure. As certain topics receive greater development in the Political Philosophy it is natural to think of it as later in date than the Ideal State, which is said to have been begun at Baghdad in 330/941 and completed at Damascus in the following year. If this is correct, the Political Philosophy, like Plato's Laws, was produced in the last years of its author's lifetime. (Al-Fārābī died in 339/950.)

During his second expedition to Assyria, October 1849 to April 1851, Layard excavated extensively at both Nimrud and Nineveh, as in his first campaign of November 1845 to June 1847, but now principally in Sennacherib's palace on Kuyunjik. The two London institutions, the British Museum and the British Library, house a rich corpus of primary material, in the form of drawings, sketches, plans, notebooks, diaries and journals, letters and other manuscript documents, which not only add much information and detail to our knowledge of Layard's achievements, as published in his second book, Nineveh and Babylon (1853), but also give a vivid and colourful picture and almost day-by-day account of his excavations. These sources are here described and discussed, and in a subsequent article will be used to trace the course of Layard's second campaign at Sennacherib's palace on Kuyunjik.

Since this article deals for the most part with the primary sources and only secondarily with Layard's published account, Nineveh and Babylon, the rooms and courtyards of Sennacherib's palace are here referred to as Chamber A, etc., as found in these sources and also in Nineveh and its Remains (1849). It was only in Nineveh and Babylon that Layard changed to the system of designating rooms by Roman numerals (Fig. 1). Concordances for converting the chamber or room letters to numbers and vice versa will be found on p. 213.

Many of the scenes on cylinders are evidently renderings of myths, but great uncertainty prevails as to their interpretation. This is partly due to the incompleteness of our knowledge of the contemporary literature and partly to our inability to grasp the allusions which must have been clear to the clients of the seal-cutters. Apart, however, from these inevitable handicaps, attempts at interpretation have suffered from a singular lack of method. For if it is true that our only hope of utilizing the information of the seals lies in a comparison of their scenes with the texts, it should be equally obvious that a haphazard interpretation of isolated scenes remains necessarily guess-work. If, for instance, a vanquished god is called ‘Kingu’ or a two-faced figure ‘Marduk’, such identifications do not carry conviction as long as we do not know precisely in which scenes these figures appear, which versions of each scene are extant, and what bearing the variants of any one scene have upon its interpretation. But, as is so often the case, the archaeological material has been denied the methodical treatment given, as a matter of course, to every text.

The intention of this article is to continue the process of comparing modern archaeological data relating to Babylon and its buildings with the ancient written sources. Previous work has produced results for the topography of the city, particularly the location of the city's gates, quarters and temples, and has achieved some success with two individual structures, namely the temple of Marduk under the mound Amran ibn Ali, and the eastern city wall at its junction with the river defences to the south of the same mound. A newly published text adds considerably to the textual material avail able for study of the cult-centre of Marduk, so that it is useful once again to go back inside E-sagil (E-sangil).

Given the exalted position of Marduk's temple at Babylon as the supreme sanctuary of Babylonia in the first millennium, it is no surprise that there survives a relatively large number of documentary sources which shed light on this building, its ground-plan and its interior. These include building inscriptions, of course, but such texts are not informative about lay-out so much as the work undertaken. Rituals are also useful, in that they sometimes describe the progress of processions in temples, but the most rewarding texts for those who would wish to know more about the ground-plan of the temple, its architecture and cultic fixtures and fittings, are: a) metrological texts which give measurements of temples, and b) “topographical” and other texts which list the ceremonial names of shrines, gates, throne-daises and other cultic fixtures and fittings.

The Neo-Assyrian stone vase BM 93088 (82–5–22, 300a) was briefly described in E. A. W. Budge's Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities (3rd ed., 1922), p. 196 no. 220. That description misleadingly suggests that the vessel is made of na4na-aḫ-bu-[x]; in fact the term referred to the vase itself as the full text of the inscription (Fig. 1) shows:

a-na-kuI.dsin-PAP.MEŠ-SU šar4kurAŠ na4na-aḫ-bu-[ṣ]u an-ni-u a-naIaš-šur-DINGIR.MU-TI.LA.[B]I ˹DUMU˺-[ia]

at-ti-din man-nu šá TA pa-ni-šú TA DUMU.MEŠ-šú DUMU.ME DUMU.ME-šú i-na-áš-šú-u-nidŠÁR šar4 DINGIR.MEŠ

˹a-di˺ DUMU.MEŠ-šú TI.LA li-ki-mu-šú-nu a-du ma-li-ke-e-šú MU-šú-nu NUMUN-šú-nu ina KUR lu-ḫal-li-qu

“I, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, have presented this naḫbuṣu to my son Aššur-ila'a-muballissu. Whoever takes it away from him, from his children (or) his grandchildren, may Aššur, king of the gods, take the life of his children (and) make the name (and) seed of his counsellors disappear from the land.”

With the curse-formula compare D. D. Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (OIP 2), 139, 68–72 and 147, 36–39 and 148, 27–29. The plural forms here are presumably the result of abbreviating a longer original. Note the use of the preposition adi/adu, “as for, concerning”, for which the current dictionaries give only Old Assyrian attestations.

When F. R. Kraus, at that time curator of the tablet collection in the Museum of the Near East in Istanbul, collated the date list of Šulgi Ni.394 (= BE 1/2 No. 125) of that museum, he found that the three last lines of the obverse give the text of one date formula, not of three, as had formerly been believed. In the meantime this date has turned up on a tablet excavated at Nippur during the season of 1955/56; its excavation number is 5N-T490. A copy of that tablet is given on Plate XVIII. Its interest rests mainly on the date formula which leads beyond what had been known from the date list.

This article examines UET 6/2, 414, the Old Babylonian dialogue between a fuller and a client, commonly referred to as “At the Cleaners”, from the point of view of ancient technology. Drawing upon a wide range of Talmudic and Classical sources mentioning laundry, and based on a careful philological reading of the Akkadian text, this study offers a new understanding of the different stages of washing and treatment of luxury garments in the Old Babylonian period. It is argued that the possible humorous aspect of the text is irrelevant to the fact that UET 6/2, 414 is a unique composition in antiquity, offering a long and accurate sequence of laundry instructions. Washing procedures and ways of treating luxury garments in Mesopotamia are outlined step by step; new Akkadian terms pertaining to garments and clothing are presented; wages of laundry workers in ancient Mesopotamia are briefly discussed. The study concludes with a new edition and translation of UET 6/2, 414.