This, the second report on the activities of a team from the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq in the north Jazira, will present an overview of the results of the first four seasons of fieldwork. A review of settlement change since the first millennium BC will be reserved for a future publication. The first two seasons of survey (autumn 1986 and 1987), which concentrated on the region around Tell al-Hawa, were followed, in autumn 1988, by a season of excavation of three sites within the hinterland: Tulul al-Biyadir, Tell al-Hilwa and Khanijdal. The most recent season, conducted over some four months between September 1989 and February 1990, resulted in a total survey coverage of some 475 sq km. In addition, a single Late Assyrian/Hellenistic/Parthian site (Khirbet ‘Aloki) was excavated to investigate the sequence of settlement within the area of putative Neo-Assyrian colonisation. The first interim report (Ball, Tucker and Wilkinson 1989, henceforth, Ball et al. 1989) presented an introduction to the area and the rescue project; this report will focus upon the development of settlement and the influence that early route systems had upon settlement patterns.

Three chisels (Fig. 1), excavated by Woolley (1934) in the 1920s from an Early Dynastic III grave at Ur, and now in the British Museum, were believed to be made of solid gold. Recently, however, it was noticed that the gold surface was blistering in places, revealing coppery coloured metal beneath, suggesting that they were gilded.

The chisels were from a very rich grave (PG 800), known as “the Queen's Grave”. It is attributed to Queen Pu-abi (in the original excavation report her name was mistakenly transcribed as Shub-ad) and dated to c. 2600 BC. Five chisels U. 10429–33 were found with a gold saw behind a large steatite bowl which contained various copper tools. Part of the material from this grave is now in the British Museum. Other items are in the University Museum, Philadelphia, including two of the gold chisels and the gold saw, and in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad. The purpose of these gold tools has never been fully explained; presumably they were symbolic rather than functional. The two small chisels in the British Museum appear to have had handles and the excavation report lists rings of gold binding (U. 10443) as “probably belonging to their [the gold tools] handles” (Woolley 1934, p. 81). Bitumen and wood handles were found on copper chisels from Ur. The larger chisel is burnished all over and appears not to have been hafted. A small chisel (U.9130) and spearhead (U.9122) from another grave (PG 580) were also examined (Figs. 2 and 4). The tools are here referred to by their Ur excavation numbers, as in Woolley's report. The British Museum Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities registration numbers are given in the concordance below.

Excavations at Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq by the Ur Region Archaeological Project have revealed a substantial building (hereafter the Public Building) dating to the mid-second millennium b.c. The results are significant for the light they shed on Babylonian provincial administration, particularly of food production, for revealing a previously unknown type of fortified monumental building, and for producing a dated archive, in context, of the little-understood Sealand Dynasty. The project also represents a return of British field archaeology to long-neglected Babylonia, in collaboration with Iraq's State Board for Antiquities and Heritage. Comments on the historical background and physical location of Tell Khaiber are followed by discussion of the form and function of the Public Building. Preliminary analysis of the associated archive provides insights into the social milieu of the time. Aspects of the material culture, including pottery, are also discussed.

In 1932 Sidney Smith published an article on ‘An Egyptian in Babylonia’ indicating a link between Egypt and Dēr where a brick inscription and drawing of the Amarna period was discovered. This interest in the relation between Egypt and her neighbours has long characterized his writings so that it would seem appropriate to publish here some fragmentary texts which offer evidence of Egyptian presence in Babylonia in the Neo-Babylonian period.

The Assyrian royal annals and administrative texts show that Egyptian prisoners were taken to Nineveh and Calah following the campaigns of Sargon II, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in Palestine and the Delta. However, when compared with the Neo-Assyrian evidence, scant though it is, even less is known of Egypt's contacts with Babylonia in the second half of the first millennium B.C. The Babylonian Chronicle gives some notice of the military encounter between the two powers in the Middle Euphrates area, culminating in the heavy defeat of the Egyptian army by Nebuchadrezzar II at Carchemish in the late spring of 605 B.C, the survivors being picked up in the Hamath plain. The same source tells how the Egyptians had recovered sufficiently to inflict a damaging reverse on the Babylonians when they tried to invade four years later. It is not yet clear when, and how far, the Babylonians were able to revenge this defeat.

In autumn 1989 a team from the British Museum worked at Nimrud and Balawat, resuming an association of the Museum with these two sites reaching back nearly a century and a half. At Nimrud work was confined to the excavation of a single room in Fort Shalmaneser (T20), while at Balawat a small trench was opened in that part of the mound where Hormuzd Rassam is believed to have found the two sets of Assyrian bronze gates in 1878. Originally it was intended that a report on the work at Nimrud would be held over until it could be presented in final form after the excavation of Room T20 was completed. In view of the present political situation, however, it is uncertain when operations will be able to resume. Therefore, we have decided to publish a report now.

This work would not have been possible without the co-operation and assistance of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, to whom we owe a considerable debt of gratitude. In particular, we should like to mention Dr. Mu'ayyad Sa'id Damerji, the Director-General, and Sd Manhl Jabr, the Superintendent of the Northern Region. Both did everything in their power to facilitate our work. Our representative from the Directorate was Sd Fadhil Abbas Hamdani, who tolerated with great forbearance our ageing Land Rover and the logistical problems caused by working simultaneously at two sites. At Nimrud we also received help from Sd Muzahim Mahmud, in charge of the excavation and restoration work in the North-West Palace, and the discoverer of the immensely rich tombs of the Assyrian queens, and Sd Abd al-Salaam, the representative attached to the Italian mission also working at Nimrud. Throughout the season we stayed at the Nineveh dig-house in Mosul, commuting daily to Nimrud and Balawat. There, we had the good fortune to share quarters with the Italian team from the University of Turin. As well as good comradeship, we are much indebted to them for help with transport arrangements and for liberally sharing with us the fruits of their excellent cuisine. In particular, we should mention the Director of the Italian mission, Paolo Fiorina, and the field director, Angelo Ghiroldi.

The ostracon ND.6231 described in this article was found at Nimrud (Kalḫu), in April 1957, during the excavation of the building known as Fort Shalmaneser which was a royal depot situated in the S.E. corner of the outer town. This sherd came from room F.S., S.W.1, and lay in rubbish mixed with ash, 20 cm. above a trodden level that represents the latest occupation of the Assyrian building which was destroyed in 612 B.C. It is hoped to publish the plan of this depot, in which many wine jars, metal objects and ivories were found, in a subsequent number of Iraq.

The exact nature and function of the winged disk in Western Asia have been the subject of discussion and disagreement for over half a century. There is no shortage of evidence; representations are found over a very wide geographical and chronological span. However, a new monument has recently come to light in Arabia, and it affords an unparalleled context for the winged disk. This study investigates in detail the proposal made by Winnett in 1970, that the Aramaic deity ṢLM, known mainly from inscriptions in the area of N.W. Arabia around the city of Teima, is the winged disk, and analyses cuneiform sources for the cognate Akkadian god Ṣalmu. The evidence shows that Ṣalmu may indeed be a name for the winged disk in cuneiform, and there are good indications that the winged disk was an object on which oaths of loyalty were sworn to the king and probably also to the crown prince during the neo-Assyrian period. Probable references to Ṣalmu as the winged disk in personal names and in various texts dating to the late second and early first millennia B.C. are assembled. Some evidence that Hebrew 'edūṯ and late Babylonian Adēšu are West Semitic words for the winged disk is presented. In the second part of the study the title šamšī, meaning “his/your majesty”, is investigated, and evidence is presented to show that the winged disk was adopted as the visual equivalent of the verbal title šamšī, and marked both mortal kings and certain deities who could claim to be head of a pantheon in a particular city or country. The symbol, whether representing a human or divine king, proclaims the sovereign's protection under oaths of loyalty which were guaranteed by dire curses and enforced by sympathetic magic on oath-breakers.

A new study of the human skeletal material from Ur, Iraq, has drawn attention to exceptional morphologies of shape, robusticity and muscle development displayed by the bones. It is proposed that these changes result from the intensive performance of restricted activities from an early age, since it is mainly whilst the skeleton is still growing that bones can be so modelled by forces imposed upon them. Some possible activities are suggested. The presence of such tasks in a population implies a role specialisation that amounts to child labour, even slavery. These extreme changes have rarely been observed in other collections.

In Sir Leonard Woolley's account of the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Dr. Plenderleith mentions in his section on metal techniques a minute ring (diameter 2 mm) composed of six gold granules, which was found in the tomb of Queen Pu-Abi, and states, “The Sumerians were the first people we know to have shown skill in filigree and granulated work”. While there is no difficulty in finding examples of filigree or crude attempts at granulation in the Royal Cemetery, the six-granule ring is (with the strip discussed below) the only evidence that, in the Early Dynastic period, goldsmiths were able to produce the fine granulated work comparable to that known in the 3rd Dynasty of Ur and Early Babylonian periods. But until recently it was impossible to examine this celebrated piece because it could not be found among the collections of Ur jewellery in London, Baghdad or Philadelphia. To-day, however, it is on loan to the Institute of Archaeology in London from the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, (the gift of J. R. Ogden), where a search, lasting over ten years, for what must be the smallest piece of archaeological evidence for the earliest use of this intricate and highly skilled technique, unexpectedly ended. (Plate Ia).

A detailed scientific report by Dr. Seeley will be published when work on the entire Leeds collection is completed but to date we can say that while there is a variation of copper and silver in the granules of the six-granule ring one of the granules and a joint between two of the granules are virtually 100% gold (Appendix I). We may therefore conclude that the goldsmith was using extremely small quantities of native gold obtained either from different alluvial sources or from the same river source but varying in composition.

The present article concerns the Northern Ubaid and Late Chalcolithic periods in Syria and northern Mesopotamia and presents an updated chronological framework for both periods, mainly based on recent excavations at the large site of Tell Hammam et-Turkman on the Balikh. Tell Hammam et-Turkman is a huge mound, measuring 500 × 450 × 45 m, and is located about 75 km north of the modern town of Raqqa, on the east bank of the river Balikh, northern Syria (Fig. 1). Since 1981 the University of Amsterdam has carried out excavations (Van Loon 1982, 1983, 1985; Van Loon and Meijer 1983) which have given ample evidence of the importance of the site during the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C., but test trenches on the east slope of the tell indicate that already during prehistoric times Tell Hammam et-Turkman was an impressive mound. Northern Ubaid-related levels comprise an accumulation of almost 15 m of occupational debris, immediately followed by Late Chalcolithic layers, which reach a thickness of about 10 m. At present, the prehistoric mound is almost completely buried underneath an extensive overburden of later occupational remains.

Here I confine myself exclusively to the results of the trenches on the east slope of Tell Hammam et-Turkman. A series of trenches 2 m wide was laid out, to be excavated in a number of steps. These narrow trenches perfectly met our aim, which was to set up a stratigraphy and pottery sequence at the site. The chronological positioning of the ceramics is based on the delineation of continuity and change in vessel shape, techniques of pottery manufacture and pottery decoration. It is important to stress the continuous and uninterrupted local development of the prehistoric ceramic sequence at Tell Hammam et-Turkman.

Although topographically simple, the landscape of the lower Mesopotamian plain masks a complex of sedimentary environments: old river channels, levees, flood basins, artificial channels, aeolian dunes, ancient irrigated soils and archaeological sites (both buried and at ground level). Many of these features owe their origin, either directly or indirectly, to the hand of man. In order to study early channel systems, the prime objective of the fieldwork, it was necessary to examine both the landscape and the sub-surface features beneath in order to produce a three-dimensional view of the area.

Fieldwork was conducted over some ten weeks in the springs of 1988 and 1989 as part of the Abu Salkabikh project, directed by J. N. Postgate. The immediate objective was to determine if an early branch of the Euphrates ran through the site, and if so, to attempt to trace its course. The presence of such an early course is implied in the name Buranuna (Akkadian Purattu from which the word for Euphrates is derived) and which is thought to have flowed through Sippar, Kish, Abu Salabikh, Nippur, Shuruppak, Uruk and Ur (Adams 1981, 159 and fig. 27; also Gibson 1972, fig. 69). It has been assumed that such a channel probably ran north-south between the Main and West Mounds of Abu Salabikh, and its presence must have determined or limited the growth and shape of the Uruk and Early Dynastic towns. A more general aim of the fieldwork was to determine how the settlement pattern may have evolved as a result of changes in the systems of channels or canals.

The Expedition began its third consecutive season at Nimrud on March 7th, 1951, and continued until the end of April. On an average approximately 200 workmen were employed, considerably more than in the two previous seasons, and this greater effort was correspondingly rewarded. The larger scale on which we were enabled to work was due to the support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and we wish to take this opportunity of thanking the Trustees for their generosity and the Director, Mr. Francis Henry Taylor, for the interest which he has taken in the Expedition. We are similarly indebted to the friendly co-operation of Mr. Charles Wilkinson who discussed the project with us in England in 1950. The Trustees approved the suggestion that Mr. Kelly Simpson of the Egyptian Department should join us on the dig; we welcomed him as a friend no less than as a valued member of our staff. This association with our American colleagues has thus proved to be a most happy and successful venture.

Study of the political history of Babylonia in the seventh century B.C. depends largely on records from Assyria, the dominant power for most of that time. A presentation of events from a Babylonian viewpoint is consequently of some importance, and that is provided by the texts generally known as Chronicles. Apart from the unique information they convey, these often act as a counterpart to the Assyrian Annals. They are concise accounts of happenings in Babylonia, or relative to it, year by year. All the known examples were abstracted from more detailed records and composed in differing forms for reasons not stated and now obscure. The briefest type of text has been called the ‘Extract Chronicles’. In this each entry is usually very short and no attempt is made to account for every year between the first date on the tablet and the last. A new representative of the class is presented here and covers the period of Shamash-shum-ukin's rule at Babylon (668–648 B.C.) after a single line concerning the sixth year of Ashur-nadin-shumi (694–3 B.C). The facts recounted by this Babylonian source can be linked with another Extract Chronicle and with allusions in the Nineveh correspondence, divination reports, and royal inscriptions, and so add to our knowledge of the relationship between Shamash-shum-ukin of Babylon and his brother, Ashurbanipal, the king of Assyria. More light is shed upon the compilation of this and similar Chronicles by the colophon, naming the source of the text and the scribe, a man whose identity and date can be established with reasonable certainty from other documents.

Records of commercial activity from Sargonic Mesopotamia offer a wealth of evidence to the student of ancient trade and business. In view of the richness of the documentation and the dearth of studies dealing with it, a broad survey of the problems and evidence seems called for in preference to a detailed study of a particular issue or group of texts. Questions that such a survey confronts are the nature and purpose of commerce in Sargonic Mesopotamia; who the people were who engaged in it and why; what the sources of their capital were; what commodities they dealt in, where and why; how their business was conducted, and what sort of records they kept. Documents and letters from various sites provide answers to some of these questions, even if they raise other problems of their own. This essay considers each of these questions in turn and the evidence the texts provide that helps to answer them.

Commerce in the Sargonic period is best defined by recourse to contemporaneous terminology: šám, that is, buying and selling of commodities. The purpose of this commerce was two-fold: to make a profit and to acquire goods not available locally in Mesopotamia. Most of the available documents are records of business transactions of a profitable sort. Of these two possible motives for commerce: personal or institutional profit and the necessity of importing foreign commodities, the profit motive was probably the more important in the Sargonic period. Evidence for this hypothesis will be offered below.

The eleventh and twelfth seasons of excavations at Tell Brak in North-eastern Syria took place in the spring of 1990 and 1991, from about the middle of March to the end of May in each year. The work was sponsored and generously supported by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Generous contributions were also received from the National Geographic Society, the British Academy and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. It is a pleasant obligation, as always, to record our gratitude to our sponsoring bodies and also to Dr. Ali Abou Assaf, Director General of Antiquities and Museums, and to Dr. Adnan Bounni, Director of Excavations, both for their generous cooperation in administrative matters and for their scholarly and friendly interest in our work. Our thanks go also to their staff in Damascus, Aleppo, Deir ez Zor and Hasake for all the practical help we have received from them, and especially to Sayid Assad Mahmud, Director of Antiquities, Deir ez Zor Museum, in whose keeping the antiquities from Tell Brak now are, and to our representatives, Sayid Bassam Jamus and Sayid Hussein Yusuf in 1990, and Sayid Heitham Hassan and Sayid Ibrahim Mustafa in 1991. Once again, HE the Governor of Hasake Province and all local officials with whom we came in contact gave us encouragement and support. We owe much to all our Syrian friends.

The latest volume of cuneiform texts published by the British Museum contains one piece of exceptional interest as nothing exactly like it has been discovered before. It is part of a tablet with three columns of writing on each side. The upper part of the tablet is missing, and since the Babylonians and Assyrians turned their tablets from top to bottom, and not from side to side, this means that the beginnings of the first three, and the ends of the last three columns are missing, which includes of course the beginning and end of the text. A substantial portion of each column is missing, though just how many lines are involved cannot be estimated. The left edge of the tablet is also missing, so much so that only the extreme right-hand ends of the lines are preserved in columns I and VI. While some disconnected words can be made out in these two columns, no sense results and they will not be referred to again. We have, then, three portions of the text left: parts of column II, columns III and IV (which are consecutive because they are on different sides of the tablet), and column V.

The first of these surviving sections begins as though it were prophecies of social disorder. Texts of this kind do indeed exist, and up to line 21 no objection could be taken to this interpretation. The rich and powerful are to oppress the poor. The judges will pay no heed to justice and will not lecture the oppressors on the error of their ways. (A specimen of such sermonising is actually given in 11. 9–13.) However, suddenly in line 22 we are abruptly introduced to the opposite, both in tense and spirit: a king devoted to justice and burning midnight oil to write down a just code of laws for his land and regulations for his city and his own royal office. The change is so abrupt that one must assume textual corruption, and indeed at a number of points there are erasures, badly written signs, and passages which simply do not hang together. In the translation an asterisk indicates where the present writer at least finds no connexion between clauses and assumes corruption.

In 1970 Geoffrey Bibby drew attention to a tablet from Ur of c. 1800 B.C. which equates weights on the Dilmun weight standard with those on the standard of Ur. He concluded that the Dilmun weight standard was the same as that used in the Indus Valley, but was puzzled by the inconsistencies in the arithmetic, which he explained by assuming that the merchants took a commission each time the weight was converted from one standard to another, that is a different rate of exchange was used to convert from Dilmun weights than was used to convert from Ur weights. Collation of the tablet in the Iraq Museum, however, has removed the problems in the mathematics and the need for Bibby's elaborate commercial procedures.

The literary composition known to Assyriologists as the “Weidner Chronicle” has been edited most recently by A. K. Grayson. I. L. Finkel has published the texts of a small fragment of a bilingual version (almost certainly a back-translation into Sumerian of an Akkadian original) and another small fragment. A preliminary description of the exciting discovery at Sippar of a complete Neo-Babylonian temple library with the tablets in situ on the shelves has been given in an earlier number of this journal. Among the tablets found in the library was a complete manuscript of the “Weidner Chronicle”. The tablet (which measures 14.4 × 11.4 × 2.4 cm) was found on the floor of the library and may originally have fallen from the shelves. It contained the whole text of the composition, but is extensively damaged. The scribe, Marduk-eṭir, also indicated that he was copying from a damaged original: he has marked hīpi, “break” in various places, and, quite exceptionally, has attempted by careful and deliberate cross-hatching on the tablet (e.g. lines 1, 31–3, rev. 20–3) and diagrammatic triangles (rev. 31–38) to represent explicitly the cracks, damage or breaks in the exemplar from which he was copying. It is quite clear that these marks are intentional and not subsequent damage. The colophon (hal-qa gur) requests return of the tablet if it is lost. This manuscript is obviously the product of a scholar.

The most important contribution to the subject of Urartian archaeology is the publication in 1950 of a preliminary report on the excavations at Karmir-Blur. This (Karmir Blur, I) is a short work of 97 pages accompanied by 16 half-tone illustrations and 64 text figures by B. B. Piotrovsky (Akademii Nauk Armyanskoy S.S.R.., Erivan, 1950). Its importance lies in the fact, first, that it is the first controlled excavation of any importance which has taken place in Urartian territory, and second, in the nature of the material discovered and described. The care with which the excavation was evidently conducted further adds to its importance. As copies of this work outside the “Iron Curtain” must be exceedingly rare, we have thought fit to present a detailed and illustrated summary for the benefit of Western students. The book, too, may be condensed with some profit, as it repeats itself in different chapters yet lacks enough cross-references.

In May 1879 Hormuzd Rassam left Mosul to explore the country around the Khabur river, rich in ancient sites. Among the places he visited was “the mound of Sheikh Hammad” where an Assyrian sculpture was said to lie. Rassam reported “I found the monument to be a representation of an Assyrian king on a black basalt tablet (supposed to be Shalmaneser II), but, unfortunately, the bas-relief had been broken, and only the head and shoulders of the figure were visible. This part of the monolith was covered with arrow-headed characters, which were very much defaced. It had been hurled down the mound by the Arabs … It is believed that the remainder of the tablet is buried on the top of the mound, and I intended, when I went back there on a future occasion, to search for it.” No particular monument in the British Museum's collections is known to be the piece Rassam secured, but it was suggested in a marginal note by the late C. J. Gadd in the copy of Rassam's book owned by the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum that BM 131124 might be one Rassam recovered from another mound not far away, mentioned in the succeeding part of his account, “a fragment of black basalt, whereon there were engraved a few hieroglyphic figures”. The description of the stone from Sheikh Hammad fits the fragment BM 131124 so much better that there can be little doubt of its identity and consequently it may be referred to by the name “Sheikh Hammad stele”.