Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt die von Philip Watson begonnene Edition der 1982 in die Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery gekommenen Texte aus der Wellcome-Sammlung fort. Ich danke Philip Watson für die Publikationserlaubnis und ihm und seinen Kollegen und Mitarbeitern, voran David Symons, für die freundliche Aufnahme im Department of Antiquities des Museums und die Bewirtung mit vielen Tassen Tee. Den Trustees des British Museum danke ich für die Erlaubnis, unpublizierte Texte aus den Sammlungen dieses Museums zitieren zu dürfen. H. Baker, A. Bongenaar und M. Weszeli bin ich für ihre Hinweise verpflichtet.

Die folgende Liste bietet die hier behandelten neubabylonischen Texte in der Birmingham-Sammlung, geordnet nach Museumsnummern, mit Angabe der Nummer in der vorliegenden Publikation, der ehemaligen Wellcome-Nummer und sonstigen Informationen über die Herkunft der Tafeln, insbesondere über Händler oder Sammlung, aus der die Texte ursprünglich gekommen sind. In eckigen Klammern steht entsprechende Information, die nicht aus dem Museumsregister stammt.

The dominant feature of the walled town, now identified as Karana, is the temple ziggurat mound which rises prominently at the centre. In this paper we are concerned only with the phases of the principal temple in the second millennium. Suffice it to note that a small Neo-Assyrian temple dated to Adad-nirari III was placed later in the north-west angle formed by the earlier temple and ziggurat.

The great temple of Karana was entirely symmetrical in plan, and attached to a rectangular ziggurat on the east axis. The approach to the ante-chamber and cella was via a courtyard with surrounding rooms. Construction of temple and ziggurat was executed in mud-brick with an elaborate architectural decoration of multi-formed columns and pilasters across the façade of the ante-chamber and surrounding the courtyard. The principal phases of building activity are the Old Assyrian c. 1800 B.C., the Nuzi period after 1600 B.C., and the Middle Assyrian after 1400 B.C.

The additional decoration of major importance which concerns us in this essay consists of four carved stone members associated directly with the functioning of the ante-chamber door. One further piece to be considered with this group is a carved stone orthostat of a winged demon, which we date on stylistic grounds to the Old Assyrian period. It is discernible immediately to the trained eye that the five pieces fall into two groups: the earlier or Old Assyrian consists of Humbaba I, the Lady between Palms, and the Winged Demon; the later group, presumably executed by sculptors of the Nuzi period, consists of Humbaba II and the Bull-man between Palms. Additional evidence comes from the various find spots. It should be emphasized that although two of the stone blocks were excavated in situ, not one of the five reliefs occurred in original context.

R. Maxwell-Hyslop hat die grosse Bedeutung hervorgehoben, die das Erdgrab 20 in Assur hat, und zwar sowohl für die Geschichte des Schmucks als auch zur Datierung der berühmten Schätze aus Troia. Sie hat auch bedenkenswerte chronologische Folgerungen daraus gezogen; da dies an etwas versteckter Stelle geschah und deshalb bisher nicht beachtet wurde, und da ich glaube, ihre Beobachtungen noch stützen zu können, sei dieser für den altassyrischen Metallhandel so wichtige Komplex hier noch einmal vorgeführt.

Unter den Schmucksachen sind es zwei Formen, die das Erdgrab 20 mit dem ‘Schatz A’ in Troia verbinden: röhrenförmige Perlen mit vierfach spiralig aufgerollten Enden und halbmondförmige Ohrringe, deren Körper dergestalt getrieben ist, dass er von aussen aus drei senkrecht nebeneinander hängenden Halbmondscheiben zu bestehen scheint (Fig. 1). Man kann gegen diese Vergleiche einwenden, dass die Geschichte der Schmuckformen weder in Westkleinasien noch in Mesopotamien hinreichend bekannt sei, um danach genau datieren zu können; und in der Tat sind Doppelspiralen ein nahezu weltweites Motiv. Jedoch ist zum Mindesten der zweite Vergleich besonders schlagend deshalb, weil es sich um eine sehr spezielle, technisch nicht ganz einfache Sonderform innerhalb eines allgemeinen Typs handelt: den der senkrecht gegliederten Halbmond-Ohrringe.

During the excavation season of 1974 and 1975 archaeologists of the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities uncovered at Hatra a huge edifice, built of ashlar masonry, located in the forecourt of the Great Temple. The building was a temple dedicated to the worship of Allat, the great Arab goddess. This identification is based on epigraphic evidence and sculptural representations, some of which offered in turn evidence for the goddess's assimilation with Nemesis, the omnipresent Greek goddess of justice and vengeance. The plan and architecture of the temple exhibit the distinctive features of the Hatrene style, characterized by the appearance of a triple iwan. In this way the temple is similar to the southern and northern units of the great iwans, the temple of the Triad and the temple of Smya, though its dimensions are larger. The inscriptional evidence indicates that it was King Sanatruq who was responsible for planning and building the temple. However, the final stages of the work were completed by his son, 'Abdsmya, who acted as Sanatruq's viceroy before succeeding him as king. Both kings left their images carved in high relief in two niches in the small iwans.

During the course of last year's excavations at Nimrud many metal objects were found in both the Assyrian and Hellenistic levels, and the present article attempts a brief description of this material. The Assyrian buildings were especially rich in military equipment of various kinds while the Hellenistic villages included a good range of standard domestic implements. But it should be stressed that the finds of a single season cannot be regarded as a true reflection on the full range of metals, or of metal types, that were used in either period.

The bulk of the Assyrian metal-work was found in the building known as Fort Shalmaneser, which was a royal depôt in the S.E. corner of the outer town. For, despite the fact that the building seems to have been looted before it was destroyed in the sack of 612 B.C., many of its less precious metal objects were left in situ. One room in particular, F.S. N.W. 15, proved especially rewarding as it contained the remains of a rich collection of spearheads, armour and decorative metal plaques that would appear to have been abandoned when the upper walls threatened to cave in.

Plate XI illustrates a white magnesite cylinder seal, surmounted by a small recumbent ram in silver, which was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum at Sotheby's sale of the Ernest Brummer Collection on 16th and 17th of November, 1964.

The cylinder is engraved with a continuous design in two registers, combining cattle with reed buildings. The ram is probably attached to the end of a copper spindle, or what remains of it, designed to rotate in a perforation drilled through the axis of the cylinder. This cannot in fact be verified, for the ram is now immovable and nothing can be seen at the opposite end of the perforation except a tough filling of earth mixed with products of corrosion, which could not be removed without danger to the cylinder. An unexpectedly fine perforation is seen on each side of the ram itself, placed rather high, as if to take an exceedingly thin suspending thread. This perforation, too, is now obstructed.

The proportions of the seal, as well as the style and subject of its design and of the ram which forms its handle, all associate it with the latest proto-literate or predynastic phase of Sumerian culture; specifically, with the third level of the Archaic Temple sequence at Uruk (Warka).

So many different types of painted pottery have been found in the Near East and left unrelated that it seems important to recognise the constituent members of a single family where possible. Here an attempt will be made to identify a distinctive group of pottery which was made more or less contemporaneously in various parts of Turkey and North Syria between c. 1900 and c. 1550 B.C. This fabric is sufficiently similar in form, design and colour to enable us to say that it was technically interrelated, and that it was the manifestation of a fashion and mode of pottery comparatively restricted both in time and space. The makers therefore must have been in the grip of a dominant fashion; their wares were familiar, easily marketable, and doubtless often manufactured at the centres at which they have been found. But their common characteristics must lead to the conclusion, in keeping with the historical evidence, that the pot designers of Cilicia, the ‘Amq and North Syria were in fairly close touch with one another. There is no doubt that the pottery with which we are dealing has close connections with the Ḫabur ware, particuarly the large vessels, but in Cilicia, and to a lesser extent in the ‘Amq, there was a greater variety of forms and finer workmanship than the Ḫabur ware usually portrays.

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.

The site of Tell Aqab lies six kilometres south of the town of Amuda, in the Jezirah province of north-east Syria. It is one of a large number of early mounds which cluster along the northern edge of the Khabur triangle, an extensive and fertile plain drained by the Khabur River and its eastern tributaries. The rich well-watered soil of the Khabur triangle has attracted human settlement during many periods in the past. Earlier in this century excavations by von Oppenheim (Oppenheim 1931) at Tell Halaf and by Mallowan (Mallowan 1947) at Chagar Bazar and at Tell Brak demonstrated the great archaeological potential of the Khabur headwaters sites. The excavation of Tell Aqab was undertaken by the Department of Archaeology of the University of Edinburgh in order to gain a better understanding of the prehistory of this important area. In particular, the site of Tell Aqab promised to yield a long and well stratified Halaf and Ubaid culture sequence for the Khabur headwaters region.

During 1983 and 1984 the focus of archaeological research in Iraq shifted to the north of the country, with teams from Iraq and abroad participating in the Saddam Dam Salvage Project (previously known as the Eski Mosul Dam). In addition work continued on some sites in the Qadisiyeh Dam Salvage Project (formerly the Haditha Dam Salvage Project) and on research excavations in the south of the country.

We are indebted to Dr. Mu'ayyad Sa'id, President of the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage, for permission to publish these reports in Iraq. We would also like to thank Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof, Dr. Muhammad Baqir al-Husseini, Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-‘Azzawi and Sd. Abd-ul-Qadir Hassan, the Directors-General of the four regions, for the considerable assistance they have rendered. Our greatest debt is to the excavators of the various sites who have freely given the information about their discoveries. We apologize for any errors we may have made in summarizing their results.

The reports from the Saddam Dam Project have been collected by Robert Killick and those from other areas by Jeremy Black, from information supplied by the excavators, amplified by personal visits, conference reports, etc.

During the second season of excavations at Tell Brak, in 1978, work was continued in Area CH, Trench B. The small sounding below the two-staged dais in Room 1 of the “temple” was further deepened and its lowest levels were found to contain evidence of Late Uruk occupation. The small sample of pottery from these levels is of some importance. It is the first stratified group of north Mesopotamian locally-made Uruk pottery to be found immediately below an early third millennium B.C. pottery sequence of reliable stratification; it shows certain typological affinities with the third millennium material and with pottery from other Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age sites. Of particular interest is the first recorded occurrence of Ninevite 5 ware in a Late Uruk context.

It is our intention to describe briefly the principal Late Uruk wares found at Brak and to illustrate some of the characteristic sherd and vessel types.

Over 50% of each sherd batch was of coarse, Chaff-Tempered Ware. The light, brittle, medium to poorly fired fabric is pale to dark red, orange or brown in colour and is usually carbonized at the core. Sherds from larger vessels are more substantial and better fired. Particularly characteristic of the ware is its high chaff content, though other fillers were used: lime, basalt and sand grits (some of them fairly large) and shell being the most obvious.

During the season 1930–1 of the British Museum excavations at Nineveh, which were generously financed by Sir Charles Hyde, when Mr. R. W. Hamilton was assisting me, one of the tablets found was a letter to the king describing an earthquake and its results. Since this text is complete in itself, I am publishing it here separate from a forthcoming edition of a selection of the tablets which we found during the four seasons from 1927 onwards. It is written in Assyrian, and measures 1¼ × 2½ in., and it came from above the unburnt brick foundation of the Temple of Ishtar (6 ft. below datum level) not far from the great slab of Ashurnaṣirpal, of which the base was in situ.

A Snake goddess accompanied by a winged acrobatic figure is alone shown (Plate I a) in repeated cylinder seal impressions on a tablet dated year 9 of the reign of Warad-Sin of Larsa, 1826 B.C. by the middle chronology, 34 years before the first year of Hammurabi of Babylon.

Though the tablet originated at Larsa it seemed that the seal with its lovely but mysterious couple must be of Syrian origin. So far as can be discerned in the impressions they are rendered with a grace and delicacy that at least equal the best Old Babylonian work. Hair extended behind the head as on both of them finds its closest contemporary comparisons in hair styles common in Syrian work (Plate I b). In the latter, however, the effect is of definite shaping whereas here the hair looks almost wind-blown. Acrobats too occur quite often in Syrian glyptic, but not apparently in the pose of ours. To this we must return.

This paper is solely concerned with that group of burnished and incised Neolithic wares which occur in various sites in the Near East, chiefly in North Syria, Iraq and South Turkey. Sufficient excavation has now taken place to make some comparison between the wares found on these sites possible. There is still, however, much to be done and there remains an unfortunate lack of agreement among archæologists as to what shall be termed Neolithic. In Europe Burkitt1 defines what he calls ‘the most notable addition to human experience” in the Neolithic as

(1) The practice of agriculture;

(2) The domestication of animals;

(3) The manufacture of pottery;

(4) The grinding and polishing of stone tools instead of chipping only.

The first three do hold good to a large extent in Asia Minor and Northern Syria, but with regard to (4), the sickle blade and the point are more the type tools of the Neolithic than the ground and polished axes or hoes of Western Europe, although polished hoes have been found in increasing numbers on Near Eastern sites of the transitional Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Period.

The seventh expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq took the field on March 4th, 1956, and concluded its work on May 5th. As usual we are indebted to several institutions and to many persons for their help. Generous financial aid was received from: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Les Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels; the Iraq Petroleum Company, which also furnished the Expedition with apparatus and invaluable technical help through the good offices of the Fields Manager in Kirkuk, Mr. L. J. Teyssaud.

Among the seal impressions on the British Museum tablets from Abu Habbah/Sippar dating from the reign of Hammurabi (Teissier 1998), one impression seems of particular importance for the cultural and religious aspects connected with it (Fig. 1). A so-called suppliant goddess is the last figure in a scene at the other end of which (the central part is not preserved) there appear, framed by two guilloches, a kneeling nude male figure, a sort of stylized altar, and a bird with outstretched wings over a standard with two human heads (the upper one long-haired and thus female), apparently standing on a crouching lion. Beatrice Teissier (1998: 119) thinks that it “is probably a recut Old Syrian/Syro-Cappadocian seal: the small motifs are characteristic of these styles, whereas the suppliant goddess is not”. Although this remains a possibility, several considerations call for a different and more detailed historical framework for this impression.

The seal was impressed on the case of a house rental contract, together with two other Old Babylonian seals, respectively with a presentation and a contest scene, the latter one belonging to the typical Sippar style. On the tablet (in which all the individuals cited bear Akkadian names) only the month and the day of the contract are indicated, but on the case there also appears a dating formula from year 43 of Hammurabi.

Qasr Serīj lies five kilometres south-west of Tell Hugna, and some sixty kilometres north-west of Mosul, on gently undulating ground at the southern foot of Jebel Qusair. It is watered by a small perennial stream, now used to irrigate the fields of the modern village of Qusair just to the north of the ancient site. The ruins were visited by the writer in 1956 in the course of a survey sponsored by the Stein-Arnold Fund of the British Academy, and will be more fully published in the forthcoming account of that work. I am greatly indebted to Father John Fiey, of the Dominican community in Mosul, who subsequently called my attention to documentary evidence for the foundation of a monastery, and a church dedicated to St. Sergius, in this region by Mar Ahudemmeh, Metropolitan of the monophysite church in Mesopotamia A.D. 559–575, and suggested that this church was Qasr Serīj, an identification which is amply confirmed by the evidence. The purpose of this brief article is to entertain readers of Iraq with an unusually well-documented episode in a little known period of Mesopotamian history, the last century of Sassanian rule before the coming of Islam.

The church stands in the middle of a ruin field extending half a kilometre to the east of the watercourse. The other buildings, although some at least may be contemporary, were apparently built of mortared rubble in the common medieval tradition of the region, and are so far buried in their own debris that no coherent plan can be recovered. The church, on the other hand, was constructed of carefully dressed limestone blocks, and parts of the structure stand to nearly their original height. The plan (Plate XXVII), which is unique among the existing monuments of Iraq, is that of a small basilica of North Syrian type, of which many well-preserved examples exist farther to the west. It is an approximate rectangle c. 23 by 14 m., with a central nave flanked by aisles and terminating in an inscribed semi-circular apse.

An investigation of the social position of the merchant at Nuzi, of his rôle in the spheres of trade and credit, and of the commercial procedures most commonly in use may be regarded as a useful contribution for a better understanding of the Nuzian economy. An analysis of this kind has not yet been undertaken, in spite of the wealth of textual material—in fact the trend of Nuzian studies has been mostly towards an elucidation of “juridical” problems, with the result that the field of exchange and trade has been disregarded. Significantly enough, all that we can recall are the two pages on the merchant, written by A. L. Oppenheim in 1939 and the essay of D. Cross, whose main concern was to establish a list of commodities and calculate their prices.

With the present investigation I intend to focus on the position of the merchant in the context of Nuzian society and economy, and to analyse the procedures in use for carrying out trade enterprises. Other aspects connected with the subject of trade, e.g. commodities, prices, provenience and destination of goods, etc., will be dealt with in forthcoming articles.

In 1953, as has been previously explained, one of our objectives was to extend the dig in the area Z.T. Not only did we expect to make further discoveries there, but we intended to climb back on to the Ziggurrat Terrace and to re-examine the ninth century temples discovered by Layard, particularly that of Ninurta and the ‘Small Temple.’ It was also desired to locate some of the other religious buildings mentioned in the texts of Aššur-naṣir-pal.

It was found, however, that the task of clearing the ground on the top of the terrace was beyond the resources of the Expedition, for the quantity of late debris which would have had to be removed from the south and east sides of the Ziggurrat was too great an obstacle to overcome in the short time at our disposal. Moreover the great expense of money which would have been involved in this operation was beyond our means; it also became obvious as we excavated the eastern side of Z.T. that this particular area had been repeatedly plundered, and that the chances of making any significant discoveries were poor. Nevertheless it is not impossible that further work in this disturbed ground might yet produce some important information, and we could hardly affirm with any confidence that such a task is not worth attempting.

The Quyunjiq letter No. 81–2–4, 65 (Harper, Ass.-Bab. Letters, No. 473) has attracted no little comment from scholars, some of whom (Waterman, Royal Corresp. I, No. 473, III, 173; and Olmstead, Hist, of Assyria, 341) consider that it relates to what happened after the death of Sennacherib. It is, however, I venture to think, far from being properly understood; that it describes a rebellion is obvious, but I suggest from internal evidence that it may perhaps refer to the accession of Sargon, and that the cause of the revolt is contained in the piece of scandal alluded to by the writer that the king (whoever he may have been) had taken the wife of a prefect into his harem, which ultimately led to the upheaval.