After stone was abandoned as the material for the manufacture of weights in favour of base metals such as lead or bronze, specimens of ancient weights which have survived are too corroded to be of value for the determination of standards. We are dependent upon the weights of gold or silver coins for such knowledge as we possess. These coins have been in circulation and therefore subject to wear, whilst silver coins during their long burial in the earth have been in addition exposed to corrosion. They have lost weight. The method of fixing the standard of weight has in consequence been to select such coins as appear to have suffered little loss and draw conclusions from them. The weights of such coins, however, are variable, and no principle can be laid down to determine the particular coin which represents the true standard. For stone weights a sufficiency of specimens of which we know fairly accurately the original weight is often available to enable the problem to be solved statistically, but unworn coins are rare. In this paper an endeavour is made to draw conclusions as to the average loss of weight of worn coins from observed data so that statistical methods can be applied. This is done by means of an hypothesis for which an experimental verification is adduced from modern English coinage. From the hypothesis a formula is obtained connecting the original standard weight of a given series of coins with the mode derived from a statistical investigation.

Bei unserem Besuch der Ruinen am I. Jan. 1927 haben wir trotz der Kürze der Zeit versucht, die bisherigen Pläne (bei Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod, S. 407, und Zehnpfund, A.O. XII. 3-4, Plan I, nach Scheil in Mémoires Instit. orient, du Caire, tome I) zu vervollständigen. Das nebenstehende Plänchen, Abb. I, ist das Ergebnis jenes Versuchs. Sie beruhen auf einer rasch ausgeführten Triangulation, deren Hauptpunkt auf dem Zikkurrat-Hügel lag, und einer Abschreitung des Tempel-Plateaus. Von der im N. und O. wohlerhaltenen Stadtmauer haben wir nur ein kurzes Stück, sowie ihre Entfernung vom Tempel-Plateau abgeschritten. Das übrige Stadtgebiet konnten wir nicht besuchen.

During the spring of 1957, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq carried out a second short season of excavations at Balawat, ancient Imgur-Bel. The excavation of the temple of the god Mamu was continued and to the east of the cella two small rooms were uncovered. In one of these was found a collection of forty tablets, in varying state of preservation. Of this collection I publish twenty-nine, the others being too badly preserved to give a useful text.

The majority of the tablets were written between 697 and 671 B.C., during the reigns of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon. There are three isolated documents of earlier date: BT.101, 710 B.C.; BT.106, 734 B.C.; BT.131, 719 B.C. There is one isolated tablet of much later date, belonging to the reign of Sin-šar-iškun, BT. 105. It is noticeable that these tablets do not contain any of the names familiar from the transactions of the main group of documents.

Certainly one of the most striking features of the archaeological scene in Iraq today is the vigorous restoration work which the Directorate General of Antiquities is carrying out at various sites up and down the country. It is, of course, true that the repair and restoration of Iraq's ancient monuments has long been a perennial concern of the Directorate, but due in the main to the high costs of such work and the competing financial demands of the Directorate's many other responsibilities, it has proved impossible in the past to proceed on more than a modest scale. Since 1960 the situation has changed completely. In that year by making a special allocation to the Directorate of one hundred and twenty thousand dinars the Iraq Government recognised formally and materially that if the country's architectural heritage was to be preserved for later generations, and if the world-famous sites of Mesopotamia were to present attractions to foreign visitors comparable with those offered by equally famous sites in neighbouring Near Eastern states, something effective should be done to step up preservation, restoration and improvement. This admirable decision has since been upheld by further substantial annual disbursements, and in consequence the Directorate has been able to plan and to put into effect an ambitious and extensive programme including work both in Baghdad, and at Hatra, Babylon, Aqar Quf, Ur and Tell Harmal. As those of our readers who are familiar with these sites will readily realise, the problems to be faced and overcome by the would-be preserver and restorer are of a truly intimidating order in their number and complexity. It is, therefore, in tribute to the courage, ingenuity and skill of the responsible officers of the Directorate that we offer these all-too-brief notes on their progress to date.

The purpose of this article is to present a hypothesis that the moon-god, Sumerian Nanna, Akkadian Su'en or Sin, and Amorite Erah or Yarah, called Sin-Amurru in AbB II, 82:10-11, may have been the patron god of a major group of Amorites in the early Old Babylonian period, and to consider possible implications particularly in Kish and Assur. The work was mainly done by Wu Yuhong as part of his thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Philosophy at Oxford University. It arose from his questioning the prevalent assumption that the moon-god invoked in oaths with a king was the patron god of a city with temporal power, suggesting instead that the patron god of a semi-nomadic Amorite tribe need not be linked to a single, specific city. Some information and assessment has since been added. The work was supervised by Dr. Stephanie Dalley, who composed the article and included the implications for the Assyrian King List and a number of details to support the hypothesis.

It is well-known that close contacts between Greece and the Near East were already being forged in the Geometric Period (c. 1100–750 BC) and this resulted in objects of Near Eastern origin being imported into Greece well before the mid-8th century, for example ivories and metal bowls. It is assumed these Oriental goods and influences were transmitted to Greece and the islands via the Phoenician ports on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and to a lesser extent overland through Anatolia. In the subsequent Archaic Period (c. 750–500 BC), particularly in the so-called Early Orientalizing Period, these contacts were intensified and the importation of Near Eastern luxury goods is attested by the presence of ivory plaques for furniture, bowls, cauldrons, weapons and jewellery. In this period, too, Oriental forms and motifs were copied or adapted to produce objects in a so-called Orientalizing style. The problem is therefore twofold. The first difficulty is to distinguish between objects imported from the Near East and those produced locally but deriving their inspiration from the Near East (Oriental versus Orientalizing). The second problem is to decide, if an object is Oriental, which part of the Near East it comes from. It is clear that many different cultures are represented: as well as Assyrian and Babylonian, there are also Phoenician, Syrian, Neo-Hittite, Urartian, Phrygian, Iranian, Caucasian and Egyptian. It is often difficult to distinguish between the products of these cultures, even when the material is found in the Near East where there was considerable interchange of goods particularly in the early 1st millennium BC, and it is even more difficult when it is found in Greece. Pierre Demargne took a particularly pessimistic view. He wrote:

During 1985 and 1986, work in the Saddam Dam Salvage Project in the Tigris valley north of Mosul continued, although by now, with the filling of the reservoir to virtually its greatest extent, almost all the sites are under water, with the exception of a handful which are unlikely to be flooded after all. A considerable amount of exciting work was carried out at research excavations in other areas of the country also.

As always, we are grateful to Dr. Mu'ayyad Sa‘id Damerji, Director-General of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage, for permission to publish in Iraq these short reports, especially those concerning sites in the rescue project sponsored by the Iraq Government. We should like to thank also Dr. Abdul-Sattar al-Azzawi, Dr. Muhammad Baqir al-Husaini, Sd. Abdul-Qadir Hassan and other members of the Department's staff for the assistance they have rendered. Our greatest debt is to the excavators, who have liberally communicated information about their discoveries in advance of their own publication. We apologise for any errors we may have made in summarising their results.

The reports from the Saddam Dam Salvage Project have been collected by Warwick Ball, and those from other areas of the country by Jeremy Black, from information supplied directly by the excavators, amplified in many cases by personal visits to the sites.

Wenn im folgenden die Beteiligung nomadischer Gruppen an Handel und Handelsverkehr skizziert werden soll, so muß zugleich auf Umstände hingewiesen werden, die eine entsprechende Aussage erschweren oder relativieren. So ist es bereits problematisch, inwieweit wir aus der Bezeichnung von Menschengruppen mit einem Stammesnamen bzw. dem Namen einer Untereinheit eines Stammes auf eine nomadisierende oder wenigstens teilweise nomadisierende Lebensweise dieser Gruppen schließen dürfen. Selbst Anzeichen für eine auf Nomadismus deutende Wirtschaftsführung oder Verhaltensweise sowie der Aufenthalt in einem Gebiet, das nur eine periodische Weidenutzung gestattet, können nicht als beweiskräftige Argumente für eine Zuweisung dieser Gruppen zu den Nomaden gelten. Zweitens ist die bekannte Tatsache in Erinnerung zu bringen, daß uns von den Nomaden selbst eine inschriftliche Überlieferung so gut wie völlig fehlt. Das impliziert eine Quellensicht, die sich am Urteil der Seßhaften, und zwar primär der Stadtbewohner, orientiert. Die Folge sind sowohl ein Desinteresse an allen stammesinternen Angelegenheiten, die nicht im politischen oder ökonomischen Blickfeld der Seßhaften erscheinen, als auch eine Dominanz des negativen Aspekts bei der Darstellung der Kontakte zu nomadischen Gruppen. Das Besondere, vor allem das Störende und Feindliche, tritt in der inschriftlichen Überlieferung stärker hervor als das Normale, Gewohnte. So ist für die nachfolgende Skizze die Einschränkung zu machen, daß die Verwertbare inschriftliche Überlieferung nicht nur dürftig und einseitig ist, sondern oft auch nicht entscheiden läßt, inwieweit wir überhaupt berechtigt sind, eine Quellenaussage hier mit heranzuziehen.

The importance of control of the valleys of the Habur and Euphrates rivers to the Assyrians can hardly be over-estimated. The two river valleys are major routes from N. Syria and S.E. Turkey to southern Assyria and to Babylonia.

In the Neo-Assyrian period, control of the valley of the River Habur was won early, as the Assyrian armies marched westwards across N. Mesopotamia. Control of the Euphrates, between the confluence of the Habur and the Babylonian border, followed soon after.

We are particularly well-informed about the geography of the Habur and the Euphrates, below the confluence with the Habur, during the reigns of Adad-nerari II, Tukulti-Ninurta II and Aššurnaṣirpal II. Texts from the reigns of these three kings describe campaigns along the banks of these rivers and list each night's halting-place. These are usually described as “itineraries”. (Such texts are exceptionally rare from ancient Mesopotamia. Besides these three passages in the Assyrian annals, only two other lengthy, well-preserved itineraries in cuneiform have come down to us.) 2 Other, conventional passages from the Annals of Aššurnaṣirpal II are a valuable supplement to these texts.

This paper analyses the architecture of the large fortified building excavated at Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq, the first known example of monumental architecture from the Sealand Kingdom. It examines the development of this highly unusual building, analyses the spatial properties and apparent functions of the structure, reviews possible architectural parallels, and considers what the architecture might reveal about Tell Khaiber's role in the context of the Sealand state. The outer form and organisation of the building indicate a fortified structure with a high priority afforded to defence. The interior of the Tell Khaiber building is divided between a smaller, earlier structure, enclosing conventionally arranged architecture with apparently executive and administrative functions, and a larger extension, densely packed with accommodation for a large number of personnel. When considered alongside textual sources on the Sealand state, which provide evidence about the geo-political context in which the Tell Khaiber building was constructed, it is possible to suggest the role such a building may have had in the development of the Sealand Kingdom. The form of the Tell Khaiber building may also be important in understanding the nature of the contested border between the Sealand Kingdom and its Babylonian neighbours.

The three objects published in this article are the property of M. Jean Mariaud de Serres, to whom thanks are expressed for his willingness that they should be made available to scholarship. The one is an Old Babylonian private letter, measuring 61 × 45 mm, and is inscribed on both sides and three edges. It was sent by Ili-u-Šamaš, a man to judge from his name as known from other more explicit Old Babylonian contexts, to a lady, Šat-Emah. No other occurrences of this name have been noted by the present writer, though the type is a well known one. To judge from the mention of Sippar in lines 17–18 the sender seems to have lived there, or in the immediate vicinity. From the content of the letter it would seem that the addressee lived not too far from Sippar. She was certainly a land owner, and the sender was either the same or was involved in agricultural operations as a financier. After the address, the letter consists of a string of items continuing previous communications which cannot be elaborated from study of this letter alone. In view of the mention of Sippar one may wonder if the lady was a nadītum-priestess, since at this time they might own land. To judge from script and orthography, this letter is perhaps to be dated to the reign of Hammurabi or Samsu-iluna, but such an estimate can be only approximate. (For copy, see Fig. 1).

During the twenty-fourth century BC, Aleppo, centre of cult of the weather god Hadda, was administered by an overseer under the control of Ebla, whose major god was Kura. Although Hadda had a temple in Mari, the region of the Middle Euphrates was dominated by the cult of Dagan, while ʾAdabal was the god of the Orontes valley. The king and his family played a regular role in the rites of Hadda at Aleppo. Twice a year, a renewal rite required the replacement of his mace and pair of bull's horns. Besides the mace, a chariot and two bulls with human faces were attributed to this god, an iconography which lasted into subsequent centuries.

The story of the encounters of Gilgamesh with the ‘Ale-wife’ and with Ur-shanabi the ferry-man, in his quest for the secret of immortality, is partly preserved on tablets from the Nineveh libraries and from Babylon, and partly on a fragment of Old Babylonian date. This last was purchased, from among a group of tablets said to come from Sippar (Abu Habba), by Bruno Meissner, for the Berlin Museum in 1902. It provided the first tangible evidence of the existence of a text earlier than the ‘canonical’ Assyrian and, by overlapping part of the story already known, revealed something of the literary changes which had taken place during the intervening centuries. More recent discoveries have shown that there were several Old Babylonian text-types.

The Meissner Fragment is the lower part of a tablet with four columns, two on either face, containing fifteen and fourteen lines of the obverse and fifteen and fourteen of the reverse. Translations of the text may be found in the late Alexander Heidel's book and in A.N.E.T. The first column narrates the care of Shamash for Gilgamesh, probably included in Tablet IX of the ‘canonical’ version. In columns two and three the hero explains his search to the Ale-wife, who attempts to dissuade him with her famous carpe diem speech, a speech not inappropriate to one of that profession.

In May 1942 the Directorate-General of Antiquities decided to make soundings in the ancient site called ‘Aqar Qüf, whose ruined ziggurat is a familiar landmark in the plain about 20 miles to the west of Baghdad. There proved to be very little difficulty in tracing the four buttressed sides of the ziggurat itself, and on the south-east side the remains were found of a triple staircase of kiln-baked brick which had evidently led up to the summit, and corresponded closely to that of the Kassite ziggurat at Ur. Stamped bricks in the fabric of this staircase confirmed the identification of the site with the Kassite city called Dûr Kurigalzu.

Early in the following year the Excavations Committee of the Department, headed by Mr. Seton Lloyd, F.S.A., Technical Adviser, decided on further large-scale excavations at ‘Aqar Qūf. One reason for the selection of the site was an economic one. Owing to war-time transport difficulties it was essential that any excavating work should be in the vicinity of Baghdad. Secondly the work provided an opportunity both for visitors to Baghdad and Iraqis themselves to see an archaeological excavation in progress. Many hundreds of Allied troops visited the site while the work was in progress, and parties of school-teachers and students were frequently escorted round the ruins. Finally, the archaeological importance of the site has long been evident. It represents a period in the history of Iraq concerning which there are few sources of information, and whose chronology is still controversial. Furthermore, it is a period during which the international relations of the various Middle East States are extremely interesting, as witnessed, for example, by the Amarnah Letters'.

In Revue de Musicologie XLIX (1963), 3–17 (henceforth cited as RM XLIX), and again in Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger (= Assyriological Studies No. 16, Chicago (1965), 268–272, henceforth cited as AS 16), Mme. Duchesne-Guillemin has put forward a theory for the tuning of the Babylonian harp, based on a tablet from Ur, U.3011, and another tablet of unstated provenance in the University Museum, Philadelphia, CBS 10996. The CBS tablet contains a list of intervals with their names, repeated twice over, while the Ur tablet gives the names of the nine strings, presumably of the harp, followed by part of a similar list of intervals (extremely fragmentary). Starting from the observation that the third string has the name “thin string”, Mme. Duchesne-Guillemin infers that the semitone occurred between the third and fourth strings, so that the harp would have been tuned to a scale equivalent to our C major, running from C to the D in the octave above (using, as throughout this article, names of notes and scales in a relative not absolute sense). Observing further that the list of intervals contains three rising fifths followed by four descending fourths, she suggests that the list is a tuning cycle, in which the inclusion of thirds and sixths is explained by the principle that “c'est la superposition des gestes sur les mêmes cordes, pour les regler et les corriger, qui constitue l'accord” (her italics; see RM XLIX, 15), though this view is modified in RM LII. The inclusion of the tritone—an impossible tuning interval—she can only explain by the necessity for completeness (ibid). She remarks incidentally that the fourth string, named “Ea made it”, is to be identified with the Greek μέση.

The occasion of the seventy-fifth birthday of Professor Emeritus C. J. Gadd provides a welcome opportunity to add a humble footnote to one of the pages of his life's work.

In 1958 Professor Gadd published his model edition of the Harran inscriptions of Nabonidus, discovered in 1956 by the late Professor D. S. Rice whilst examining the ruined Great Mosque at Harran. Professor Gadd agreed with Rice and others that the find-place of the three stelae H 1 B, H 2 A and H 2 B disposed of any doubt which might ever have arisen, on the basis of Pognon's discovery of the related stela H 1 A at Eski Harran, as to the correctness of the traditional identification of Islamic Harran with the ancient city of that name.

Whilst the site of the ancient city of Harran is not seriously questioned, the position is otherwise with the site of the main temple associated with it, É.ḪÚL.ḪÚL. Although there is a tradition that the Great Mosque at Harran was built on the site of a pagan temple, it does not necessarily follow that it was built above É.ḪÚL.ḪÚL or its Sabian successor, since classical and Islamic reports indicate that there was more than one moon temple in the neighbourhood of Harran, in addition to other sacred buildings. Equally, there is more than one site in the neighbourhood of Harran for which there is archaeological evidence that the worship of the Moon-God was practised there in antiquity. Whilst Eski Harran may now be disregarded, Aşagi Yarimca and Sultan Tepe both have good claims to the possession of an Assyrian temple.

In the preceding number of this journal we described how in the Spring of 1949 we returned to the site of the famous N.W. Palace of Assur-naṣir-pal and set to work in chamber V where, more than a century ago, Layard had first unearthed the famous collection of Nimrud ivories. There, and in the adjacent chamber W, we found hundreds of mutilated fragments, most of them undecorated, which the workmen had cast aside and thrown back when the chambers were refilled with the soil that had come out of them. None the less our return to these rooms was worth while, for in the debris of V we found two unfinished plaques, Plate VI, 3, 4, which indicated that some of the ivories must actually have been carved at Calah, and in the same room, on an undug patch of soil about one metre above the level of Assur-naṣir-pal's pavement, we found the beautiful figure of the cow suckling its calf, Plate I, 2, 3. These three figures are all that we can illustrate here from Layard's excavations: the remainder was found by us in the newly discovered S.E. wing of the Palace which we began digging in the Spring of 1950. With these three exceptions, the rest of the collection comes from rooms FF, GG north of OO, HH, OO, and QQ, see text Fig. 1, and in every case the pieces were found lying in confusion on a pavement level which can with certainty be attributed to the reign of King Sargon, thanks to the fortunate discovery in room HH of a clay docket bearing the name of a limmu who is known to have held office in the year 715 B.C. Most of the pieces, including the Bull, ND. 762, and the remarkable head, ND. 763, Plates II–V, were found in room HH; see Plate X for a picture of the N.W. corner of that room and the objects as they appeared at the time of discovery.

Examples of Middle Bronze Age cylinder seals, categorized today as “Old Syrian popular style” have been documented since the mid-nineteenth century, albeit usually without any dating or provenance information. This particular subset of the vast array of ancient Near Eastern glyptic has recently been studied by the author and an acquisition history identified for many of them. Here the disparate paths that brought some of these seals into museums and private collections are explored to demonstrate, not only the vagaries of where these eminently portable objects end up, but to highlight the importance for modern scholarship of documenting such histories.

Das früheste konkrete Zeugnis von der Tempelsklaverei im Babylonien der hellenistischen Zeit findet sich im Protokoll einer Gerichtssitzung in Uruk (302 v. Chr.). Hier handelt es sich um einen Sklaven eines schon verstorbenen kinderlosen Mannes, der bereits früher dem Gott Anu zur Tempelsklaverei (širkûtu) geweiht war von einem Bruder des Sklavenherrn, der selbst schon verstorben war aber drei Söhne hinterlassen hatte. Es gab auch noch einen dritten Bruder, der bei seinem Tode einen Sohn hinterliess. Der letztere klagte auf die Überlassung eines Teils des besagten Sklaven, der sich auch weiterhin im Status širku befand. Das Gericht beschloss, ihm ein Drittel dieses širku zu übergeben, die anderen zwei Drittel aber den besagten Vettern zu überlassen. Daraus erscheint u.a., dass širku (ein Tempelsklave) ein gewisses Interesse für seinen ehemaligen Herrn auch weiterhin darstellte. Möglicherweise war es ein Interesse wirtschaftlicher Natur, d.h. der Sklave fuhr fort seinem ehemaligen Herrn in gewissem Mass zu dienen, oder der letztere erhielt irgendein Entgelt für ihn vom Tempel.

Ein weiteres Zeugnis für die Tempelsklaverei aus Uruk datiert von 219 v. Chr. In einem Vertrag über Besitzverkauf wird einer der Zeugen als rab širkē (Vorgesetzter von širku) bezeichnet. Es muss ein Freier gewesen sein, weil in der hellenistischen Zeit Sklaven oder širku nicht als Zeugen in Kontrakten auftreten.

Wenig früher, 225 v. Chr., wird in einer Urkunde aus Seleukia am Tigris (Tell‘Umar) eine Sklavenweihung (lúqal-(la)me) an širkûtu (in der Schreibweise lúŠeŠ-ki-ú-ta) erwähnt.

Ausser dieser Verträge über die Institution širkûtu in der hellenistischen Zeit, werden Angaben auch in dem Formular der Verträge über Sklavenverkauf erwähnt. Die Sklavenverkäufer bürgen dafür, dass die Sklaven, die entfremdet werden, nicht zu bestimmten sozialen Kategorien gehören, keine Freien sind usw. In der Aufzählung dieser sozialen Kategorien in der entsprechenden Klausel des Formulars steht širkûtu an erster Stelle.