In the issue of this journal for Autumn, 1956, I published under the title ‘Two medical texts from Nimrud’ a fragment from the Nābû temple library which had been excavated the previous year. The piece is numbered ND. 4358, and in the issue referred to it was described as follows: ‘This text is a catalogue, perhaps sufficiently important to be called the “Nimrud Catalogue”, of a series “sa-gig”. The series in question we have not yet learnt to call by this name, but it is otherwise well known as enūma ana bīt mar marṣi āšīpu illaku.’ As to its physical description, it was stated that the fragment was ‘the lower half of a single-column tablet, obverse and reverse thus providing a continuous text which must represent about half the original.’

It is the purpose of the present communication to announce that the missing portion of the tablet has been identified.

The new piece is ND. 4366. It came to my notice through a copy made by D. J. Wiseman at Baghdad towards the end of 1959, and I am grateful for Wiseman's generous consent that I should edit the text in this publication. The text was collated by me in the course of a personal visit to Baghdad in the Spring of 1961, and I was then able to confirm my suspicion that it in fact physically joined ND. 4358. There is some loss of material at the join and down the left edge, and the quality of the surface rapidly deteriorates as the end of the reverse is reached, but every line of the tablet is now represented in some part at least. The copy will be included in Wiseman's forthcoming volume of texts from the Nābû temple library, and thus in the present edition the text is conveyed in transliteration only.

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).

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.

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).

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.)

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.

The craving for divine protection is so deeply inherent in human nature that a primitive society cannot long exist without creating for itself a god or gods, to whom are attributed the powers necessary for the preservation of mankind. Most of the great divine beings of the Babylonian pantheon were originally gods of the city-states, whose functions were multiplied according to the needs of their worshippers, until they became strongly marked personalities with very definite powers.

Secondary gods were much less clearly envisaged, and were often so nebulous that their characters sometimes changed completely in the course of ages, so that they became totally different from what they were primarily conceived to be. A god who was originally a mere phantom might, for political or other special reasons, acquire a position of some prominence, only to sink back again into the ranks when the particular circumstances which had called him forth ceased to exist.

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.

Through the recent publication (1942) of the excellent official Guide to the Iraq Museum there has come to notice a fragment of Assyrian bas-relief which is of interest in several points. This is numbered IM.31065, and is illustrated in the aforesaid Guide by Fig. 105, p. 125. The re-publication offered here (Plate V) is from a good photograph very kindly furnished by the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, together with permission to make this use of it. For both of these favours I wish to express sincere gratitude.

Hardly more than the first glance is needed to suggest a context for the fragment; it recalls at once the tents and domestic activities in the Assyrian camp shown upon the well-known scene now (or formerly) in the National Museums, Berlin, numbered VA. 965. The connexion is very close—the curved defensive wall and bastions which surround the camp have only to be continued on VA (the Berlin fragment) in the downward direction in order to coincide with the upturned line which continues in IM (the Baghdad fragment) up to a horizontal fillet dividing the registers of the slab.

The bronzes illustrated on Plates XXXVII, XXXVIII, 1, 2, and XXXIX, 4 are all unstratified and the provenance of only one of the daggers is known. This is illustrated on Plate XXXVII, 1 and comes from a site above Lahijan in the Elburz mountains east of Resht. It was presented to the Institute of Archaeology by Mrs. Iris Ainley. The dagger is 35 cms. long and the lunate pommel measures 5·9 cms. in width. Plate XXXVIII, 4 is in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (No. 422.991), and is published here by courtesy of the Associate Curator, Mr. G. W. Van Beek. It measures 38·4 cms. in length and the pommel is 4·1 cms. in width. Both the daggers (Plates XXXVII, 1 and XXXVIII, 4) show the distinctive features which relate them to daggers from the region of the Talish, where tombs excavated in both the Russian and Persian areas by De Morgan in 1890 and 1901 have yielded many comparable examples. Plate XXXVIII, 4 can be compared to my type 43 (Iraq VIII, 1946, Pt. 1, Pl. V, 43). This type cannot be included among the common types of Talish bronze dagger, but a dagger from Hiveri, published by De Morgan, has a solid hilt with three circular ribs and the type example from Veri, with one rib round the solid hilt are both comparable. A dagger from Luristan with hilt similar to the Veri example is also published by Godard, and again the skeuomorphic moulding representing the thong which bound hilt and blade together on earlier blades is visible. But, as Schaeffer has pointed out, the cemetery at Veri must have lasted for a considerable period. Most of the tombs can be assigned to his “Talish récent II” c. 1450–1350 B.C. (dated by analogy with comparable material in tombs at Hassan Zamini and Agha Evlar which contained seals of Kirkuk style) but there is an earlier group contemporary with Khodja Daoud Köpru (Talish récent I c. 1550–1450 B.C.) in which the swords are all narrow rapiers with tangs.

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.

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.

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 “Lion-demon” (Akk. ugallu, “Big Weather-beast”) is a human-bodied creature with a lion's head, donkey's ears and human feet or, more usually, the talons of a bird (Plate XIa). With variations on this form beginning in the Akkadian period, the figure is known from Old Babylonian down through Kassite, Late Assyrian, Late Babylonian and into Achaemenid times. Since the completion of a corpus of material depicting the figure in the art of Mesopotamia and the Near East (Green 1986), I have obtained photographs of two seals dating from the virtual chronological limits of the type's depiction in Mesopotamia, one Old Babylonian, the other Late Babylonian. A fuller supplement to the work, with additional and formerly restricted material, will appear eventually, but in the meantime, as these two particular seals were included in this catalogue, as nos. 41 and 144, but with somewhat incorrect descriptions (pp. 181, 229) based upon the line-drawings of their earlier publication (reproduced ibid., Pls. 8 and 38), it seems desirable, in the interests of an early corrective, to present here these photographs (Plate XIb and c) and some brief comments, as promised in the postscript to the catalogue-article (p. 254). I have to thank Dr. J. P. A. van der Vin of the Royal Coin Cabinet, The Hague, for the photographs and for permission to publish them, and, in the year of her eightieth birthday, I offer this short piece especially to Lady Mallowan, whose interests in Mesopotamian magic and iconography are well known.

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 Babylonian poem šar gimir dadmē (perhaps best entitled in English “Išum and Erra”) has been available to scholars in its hitherto most complete form since 1969 in the admirable edition of L. Cagni. Now excavations conducted by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage at Me-Turnat (modern Tell Haddad) have produced a first-millennium tablet in Babylonian script from the Neo-Assyrian Period occupation of the site, giving the text of tablet II of the composition. Previously the second tablet could be reconstructed as three separate broken passages (totalling 112 lines) with two lacunae. The new tablet, IM 121299 (TH 319), restores the first lacuna (four lines in length), completes some broken lines and restores part of the second lacuna (at least 29 lines), establishing altogether about 45 new lines of the text, some admittedly only to a very fragmentary degree. The whole tablet must be at least 159 lines long. Unfortunately the Me-Turnat tablet is damaged, and is rather poorly written by an apprentice scribe who has made a number of evident mistakes and incorrectly formed signs. Nonetheless the text of the poem is substantially increased by it. For a photograph, see Plate XX.

This article presents the preliminary results of the joint Kurdish-Italian Faida Archaeological Project (KIFAP) conducted by the Duhok Directorate of Antiquities and the University of Udine at the Assyrian Faida canal and rock art complex in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Investigation of this extraordinary and seriously endangered archaeological site was launched in 2019 and has led to the exploration of an 8.6 km-long irrigation canal cut into the limestone bedrock of the Chiya Daka hill range in the outskirts of the village of Faida, south of Duhok. Ten monumental sculpted rock panels carved along the canal's eastern bank were brought to light, representing an Assyrian ruler depicted at both ends of each panel, framing the cult statues of seven deities standing on pedestals shaped like striding animals. This article discusses the canal's role in the wider context of the Northern Assyrian Irrigation System and the function of the Assyrian hydraulic networks as economic infrastructures with transformative effects on the landscape and staple food production of the empire's core. The Faida bas-reliefs are examined from an archaeological and art historical perspective, and hypotheses are proposed about their religious and ideological meaning, as well as their dating and the identity of the king or kings who commissioned them.

We may want to recognise an “Akkadian period” in archaeology for two reasons. A sequence of periods is used as a system of chronological reference, and the Akkadian period conventionally represents the time from 2334–2154 BC (Walker 1995, 234). Periods are also used to define fields of analysis in which studies of social structure or other synchronic investigations may be conducted. The Akkadian period is known as the “first empire” which saw major political and administrative innovations. In archaeology periods have to be defined from the changes in artefact types, so a concordance is needed between the historical and artefactual phases. During the last thirty years McG. Gibson has persistently addressed questions of chronology, and has made an especially important contribution to the chronology of the Akkadian period. A new article (Gibson and McMahon 1995) represents the present state of this issue, based on excavations in the Diyala and Hamrin regions, and in the vicinity of Nippur. Dr McMahon has subjected thousands of sherds from stratified occupation surfaces to statistical analysis, and publication of their distribution and comparanda is expected. The resulting pottery sequence, exhaustively constructed, and summarised in that article, will constitute the principal reference sequence for archaeological sites of this period in southern Iraq. In this article, while accepting the validity and importance of this achievement, I will examine how the Akkadian period should be defined and how pottery sequences should be calibrated with respect to historical periods. I will suggest that the Akkadian pottery should be calibrated by ultimate reference to the glyptic sequence, and that this results in a different dating for the strata in question.

The cylinder seals and some impressions from the excavations at Tell al Rimah were published in Iraq 37 (1965). There remained for publication the seal impressions on the business documents dating to the thirteenth century B.C., all of which appear to belong to one archive. They were published by H. W. F. Saggs, D. J. Wiseman and Nicholas Postgate in Iraq 30 (1968), 154 ff. During a month's visit to Baghdad in 1973 I photographed as many impressions as I could find and Carolyn Postgate drew them. After I left Baghdad, she completed the drawings, finding impressions of the same seal on other tablets, and I have not seen the tablets since. She has however collated her drawings in response to my queries and additional photographs have been taken by Peter Dorrell, Jonathan Tubb and Christopher Watkins, working in very difficult conditions; I am grateful for their help. The impressions are extremely difficult to photograph and even in many cases to see, the tablet being sealed before the text is written, while the clearest impressions on the edges give insufficient space for a complete impression. It is ironic that the Middle Assyrians whose intaglio craftsmen produced such superb works of art should have left the worst record because, unlike the Late Assyrians, they left no space on their documents for the seal impression. In these circumstances Carolyn Postgate's work has been arduous, and I am most grateful to her, for her labours have enabled this addition to the corpus of Middle Assyrian seal design to be published.