It is not generally realized that the roller-moulded type of window-pane, so common in Italy and the western provinces of the Roman Empire from the first century A.D. onwards, was unknown, or at least extremely rare, in the East. Its place was taken, at least from the fourth century A.D. onwards, by circular panes of blown glass resembling very shallow dishes without a foot-ring. The rim is not plain, but is folded over outwards (a curious feature, presumably for added strength); the sides, normally about ½ to 1 mm. thick, are straight, and the bottom, usually 3 to 5 mm. thick, is bulbous, being flat or slightly concave externally. The average diameter is about 16 to 20 cm.

A fragment of a two-column tablet containing a bilingual text from Nimrud, CTN IV 170, has turned out to belong to the same tablet as CTN IV 188, a manuscript of the fourth tablet of the series mīs pî “Mouth-Washing”. With the help of the new fragment, it becomes possible for the first time to reconstruct the second and third versions of a Sumerian Kiutu incantation to the sun god Utu-Šamaš.

The graffiti from the tilery and pottery which the Twentieth Legion maintained at Holt, Denbighshire, included one which Professor A. Guillaume acutely recognised as written in neo-Punic script. He rendered the text as M‘QR YTN (or M‘QR YNA) that is “Ma‘qar, (son of) Yathanbaal (or Yathanmilk)”. But a close study of the graffito, undertaken by the first-named writer of this note in conjunction with Professor H. F. D. Sparks, has shown that Professor Guillaume's alternative reading is to be preferred, and may be expressed as M‘QRYN’. The second and seventh letters, here transcribed as rough and smooth breathing respectively, represent the vowels, in this case, of a Latin word. The third letter will represent hard c, as Q (qoph) is often used to transcribe this sound in non-Semitic words. The fifth letter (yodh) would stand for long i. From the photograph the exact form of the final letter (aleph) is not clear, but can be seen by close inspection. The evidence, however, of the drawing (here given as Figure 1) was confirmed by a squeeze and shows how the straight stroke not only touches but actually intersects the other stroke and thus forms a cross with terminal hook, which was a common neo-Punic form of aleph.

This note examines the textual evidence bearing on Mesopotamian threshing implements, in the hope of throwing some light on the Uruk representations of sledges discussed in the first part of this article. The relevant terminology is limited to four words: giš-bad(-rá), kissappu, and dajaštu, and ḪAR-ḫa-da. “Of these, giš-bad(-rá), kissappu, and dajaštu have previously been recognized as denoting threshing implements; the suggestion that another such term is ḪAR-ḫa-da is new.

This article is based mainly on archaeological surveys of the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities between the years 1938–1965. In preparing this study, the writer examined more than 7,000 files in the Directorate's archives. The reliability of the report on each site has been carefully assessed. The numbers following the site names indicate serial numbers of relevant files in the Directorate's archives. The name of the district (Qadha or Nahiya) in which a site is located usually follows the serial number.

Examination of the available surface material from all over Iraq, suggests that Uruk pottery is more popular in the north than the south. It is not possible at present to tell whether this fact is significant, as the existing southern surveys are far from complete. Moreover, in the south there is the added problem of silting and subsidence which would have tended to obliterate sites, in particular small ones, of Uruk and earlier dates. However, where extensive surface surveys have been carried out, as, for example, in the Diyala and Nasiriya Liwas, and now in the Eridu and Warka regions, a number of Uruk sites has been found. In spite of the smaller number of recorded sites, one is inclined to treat the south as the focal area at this time, owing to the social and urban development which is known to have taken place there, and for which we have no parallels as yet in the north. However, only further excavations in the north and further survevy in the south can satisfactorily resolve these problems.

Ashmolean Museum inv. 1937. 993. Photo: P. R. S. Moorey, Ancient Iraq (Assyria and Babylonia) (Oxford, 1976) 47, plate XXX (reverse only). Cf. Plate IX (enlarged). An originally unbaked clay tablet: W., 8·2 cm, h., 6 cm, th., 1·4 cm (maximum).

The tablet was in the possession of Stephen Langdon and came to the Ashmolean as part of Langdon's bequest. No Kish excavation inventory number is scratched on the edges as on material from Kish. There is no reason therefore to assume Kish as the provenance. No exact provenance is in fact available for the tablet. The tablet is inscribed in Greek script on both sides. It was referred to but not published by Sollberger in his important collection of the fourteen known fragments of Babylonian texts in the Greek alphabet, the “Graeco-Babyloniaca” texts. To this collection can now be added the Harvard tablet, which contains part of an incantation inscribed in cuneiform on the obverse and Greek script on the reverse.

The Ashmolean tablet differs physically from these in two respects, (a) Size. It is considerably smaller in all dimensions than the other tablets in the British Museum with Greek script which Pinches estimated to have been about 5 in wide by 9 in high when complete. Their thickness is also greater at 2–3 cm. (b) Oblong shape. Apart from tiny chips the other fragments (including the Harvard text) are from tablets which had the usual shape of Babylonian tablets, height greater than breadth. It is like the other tablets in being unbaked. The size and shape of the Ashmolean tablet are, however, typical for Seleucid period cuneiform business documents.

In 1965 Roman Ghirshman drew attention to a particular element of Elamite architecture which he called the “salle à quatre saillants”: this is a rectangular room with four pilasters placed near the short walls and a large doorway in the middle of its long side, opening on to a courtyard. It must have served as the reception, audience and throne hall. Ghirshman identified this architectural form in successive Middle Elamite levels on the Royal City mound at Susa in houses belonging to officials of the Sukkalmahhu, and so it may reflect Royal Palace designs, as do the Neo-Assyrian Residences at Khorsabad. He has dated these levels from c. 1800 to c. 1300 B.C. He also noted its reappearance at Susa in the Palace of Darius. Here it is slightly modified: there are two “salles à quatre saillants” placed side by side with doorways piercing through them both (see also fig. 11). It would be possible to maintain that the double and single “salles à quatre saillants” are distinct but this has neither chronological nor geographical significance.

The eight centuries between these buildings cannot yet be filled with more Elamite examples of the “salle à quatre saillants” because very little Elamite architecture has been discovered. It does not appear in the funerary palaces at Choga Zanbil and has not been found on the Iranian plateau at this period. The Kassite palace at Dur-Kurigalzu shows no trace of it, and Geoffrey Turner in his recent study of Late Assyrian palace plans did not draw attention to this feature.

The first two seasons of excavation by the Iraq Directorate-General of Antiquities at Eridu (Tell Abu Shahrein) lasted from December to March in 1946–47 and 1947–48. They were directed by Professor Fuad Safar, with myself as Technical Adviser. A third season was already in progress when I left Iraq early in 1949, to take up a new post as Director of the newly founded British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. Preliminary reports on the excavations were published by Professor Safar and myself in the journal Sumer, as will be seen from the short bibliography below, and they were followed by various specialist articles and commentaries. The final publication has raised some more complicated problems, and, to judge by the many enquiries on the subject which Professor Safar and I myself have received, it seems probable that archaeological colleagues and others may be interested in the steps more recently taken to make this important material generally available.

Alkaline glazes were first used on clay-based ceramics in Mesopotamia around 1500 B.C., at the same time as the appearance of glass vessels. The Roman Empire used lead-based glazes, with alkaline natron glass being used only to produce objects of glass. Chemical analysis has had some success determining compositional groups for Roman/Byzantine/early Islamic glasses because of the discovery of major production sites. Parthian and Sasanian glass and glazed wares, however, have been found only in consumption assemblages, which have failed to inform on how they were made. Here we reanalyse compositional data for Parthian and Sasanian glazes and present new analyses for Parthian glazed pottery excavated at the early third century A.D. Roman military outpost of Ain Sinu in northern Iraq. We show that some Parthian glazes are from a different tradition to typical Mesopotamian glazes and have compositions similar to Roman glass. We propose that Roman glass was recycled by Parthian potters, thereby suggesting that as yet undiscovered Mesopotamian glass production centres ordinarily supplied glass for indigenous glazed pottery. Furthermore, if recycling glass to make glazed pottery was extended to indigenous glassware, this may provide an explanation for the paucity of Parthian and Sasanian glass in the archaeological record.

In a recent paper published in the journal Climatic Change, we put forward the hypothesis that drought and overpopulation played an important, if indirect, role in shaping the sudden decline of the Assyrian Empire during the mid-to-late seventh century b.c. This argument was partly predicated on five paleoclimatic proxy records for conditions in different parts of the northern Near East during the first millennium b.c., each of which indicates that relatively arid conditions affected much of the region during the seventh century b.c., especially during its middle decades. Here, we revisit the textual and paleoclimatic proxy evidence for a period of drought in more depth to examine whether this evidence does in fact support the climatic component of our hypothesis. In this paper, we show that the available proxy evidence supports the notion that there was some kind of regional climatic perturbation that affected much of the Near East during the latter half of the seventh century b.c., which caused conditions in many parts of the region to become more arid. The strongest signal for this short-term episode of aridification, which we have termed the “Late Assyrian Dry Phase,” is observed at approximately 650–600 b.c. These proxies thus corroborate and provide the background for the Neo-Assyrian textual evidence for drought during the mid-seventh century b.c.

Animal remains from two seasons of excavation at the Tell of Abu Salabikh (1975–1976) were examined during a month's visit to the site in October 1977. A proportion of this material was then selected for further study and was kindly sent on loan to the British Museum (Natural History) by the Department of Antiquities, Baghdad. Work is continuing on these specimens and on the equid skeleton described by Postgate and Moorey which had been loaned to the Museum a year earlier. The photographs, Plates XIV–XVI, were taken on site by Mr. David Nicolson and our thanks are due to him for his patience in the face of dust and sandflies.

The collection of animal remains was large, numbering perhaps more than 10,000 elements which were mixed with an equal or greater number of human bones. The animal bones were in a very fragmentary condition as is usual with the remains of food. They had suffered further breakage by the action of the compacted soil of the floors under which they were buried as well as by disturbance and re-burial following human interments. Furthermore the very high concentration of salts in the soil contributed to the fragmentation process. Shortage of time prevented analysis of this comminuted bone but the dimensions of every measurable element were recorded.

The general character of the Middle Assyrian glyptic is well understood from the seal-impressions on the archives from Assur, Fakhariyah and Rimah. As a result of the work of Saporetti (1979) there is now a better dating of the Assyrian tablets than was available to the pioneers. Mayer-Opificius (1986) made useful progress on the chronology of the thirteenth century designs, and this has been further elaborated by the present writer (1990).

There is at present no good evidence for geographical variations in the Assyrian seals, despite the wide spread of the material. This is in contrast to the chronological situation. The criteria for the thirteenth century are summarised here, but it is unnecessary to repeat the detailed arguments justifying them which are given in my former work. The thirteenth century is divided into three phases corresponding to the reigns of Adad-nirari I (1307–1275 B.C.), Shalmaneser I (1274–45 B.C.) and Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244–08 B.C.). This is partly for convenience and partly as a consequence of the form of Saporetti's book on the eponyms. When speaking of an “Adad-nirari” style I do not, therefore, mean to imply that such seals could not have been made in the adjacent reigns.

The lair of the wolf is his refuge,
and where he has made him his home,
Not even the head wolf may enter,
not even the council may come.
Rudyard Kipling,The Law of the Jungle

In a hymn written for Assurbanipal (K. 1290, cited here from Alasdair Livingstone's recent edition), the king describes how Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela have collaborated in helping him during his reign. The text is described in its colophon as a song of Assurbanipal for “the Lady of Nineveh”, a title reserved for Ishtar of Nineveh. Although this suggests that the text may have been copied out on this tablet to serve as a guide for performance of the text for Ishtar of Nineveh, the text itself is quite clearly a two-goddess hymn. It opens by urging listeners to glorify the Lady of Nineveh and magnify the Lady of Arbela “who have no equal among the gods” (1. 3: šá-ni-na la i-šá-a). Significantly, the verb “have” appears here in the feminine plural form. The praises that follow similarly employ feminine plural pronominal suffixes: “Their names (1. 4: zi-kir-ši-na) are most precious among the goddesses, their cult centers (1. 5: ma-ha-za-ši-na) have no equal”, and “the word from their lips (1. 6: zi-kir šap-te-ši-na) is blazing fire”. The grammar makes it unmistakably clear that we are dealing here with two separate and distinct goddesses, each named Ishtar.

The Near Eastern seal collection of the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, University of Durham, had a single immediate origin. It was part of the collection of antiquities belonging to the Dukes of Northumberland, formerly housed in Alnwick Castle. Most of the Egyptian antiquities were acquired by the 4th Duke during the first half of the 19th century, and in 1880, at the expense of the 6th Duke, a printed catalogue of the whole collection as it then existed was issued, compiled by Samuel Birch, Keeper of Egyptian, Assyrian and Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum. This describes four Near Eastern cylinder seals, nos. 2016–2018 and 2020, a very modest start. The greater number of these was collected after this time by the eldest son of the 7th Duke, who first came to public attention as Lord Warkworth, but was later styled Henry Algernon George, Earl Percy. He was born in 1871, travelled extensively in the Near East in 1895, 1897 and 1899, and died prematurely in 1909. As noted in the Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement 1901–1911, 904, “true to the traditions of his family, he began to collect antiques, particularly cylinder seals”, and significantly an Akkadian cylinder seal design adorns the front board of his book Notes from a Diary in Asiatic Turkey (London, 1898). This material joined the family collection, and it appears that he was the last of his line to pursue this interest, so that nothing was added after 1910. The collection remained in Alnwick Castle until the 9th Duke deposited it on loan in the British Museum in 1939. The easier access which this move was intended to create was, however, prevented by the outbreak of war. In 1950, when conditions had returned to normal after the war, thanks to the generosity of the present Duke and the initiative of Professor T. W. Thacker of the University of Durham, the whole Northumberland collection, with a few exceptions, was acquired for that University, where it is now housed in the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, close to its ancestral home.

Between 1987 and 1992, Iraqi archaeologists under the direction of the local Inspectorate of Antiquities undertook excavations at Nineveh. In particular, they excavated east of the mosque located on the smaller mound of Nebi Yunus and at the Nergal Gate, the middle gate of the northern city wall. At the Nergal Gate, an inscription of Sennacherib was found on two bull colossi and two paving stones. At Nebi Yunus, a few inscribed clay and stone objects were discovered in the ruins of the armoury, the so-called “Rear Palace” (or “Review Palace”). These included a slab of Ashurnaṣirpal II, a prism fragment of Esarhaddon, two human-headed winged bull colossi of Esarhaddon, a winged-bull of Ashurbanipal, and an unsculpted wall slab of Ashurbanipal. Then, after east Mosul was liberated from ISIS/Daʾesh occupation in early 2017, seven further inscriptions of Esarhaddon were discovered in looters’ tunnels under the destroyed mosque. All of those inscriptions are edited here.

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.

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.

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.

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.