Dr. Barnett has long taken an interest in the recovery of Mesopotamian mythology, and many is the time that he has suggested to us that the enigmatic scene on a cylinder-seal represents “a myth now lost”. It is a pleasure therefore to dedicate to him the first edition of a newly recovered fragment of an Old Babylonian myth concerning the fixing of the destiny of Girra, the god of fire and giver of light to man, after his defeat of Elamatum.

BM 78962 (Bu 89-4-26, 257) is one of a collection of tablets purchased by E. A. W. Budge in Baghdad, and said by him to include tablets from Sippar and Tell ed-Der. The collection includes the Old Babylonian Atrahasis tablets BM 78941 and 78942, the provenance of which has been discussed by Lambert and Millard. It seems reasonable to assume that BM 78962 like them comes from Sippar or Tell ed-Der and to date it on palaeographical grounds to the reign of Ammisaduqa or thereabouts. The content of the tablet was quite obscured by dirt and salt until 1973 when it was baked and cleaned by Mr. C. A. Bateman.

In 1965 Richard D. Barnett, then keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum, asked me to undertake the compilation of a catalogue of the Sippar collection of cuneiform tablets in the British Museum. This collection, containing more than 30,000 tablets, was obtained by Rassam and others towards the end of the last century and at the beginning of this one. Most of the Sippar collection consists of economic texts from the Neo-Babylonian period. However some texts from other periods and other genres and even texts from other sites are included. Since 1965 I have spent almost every summer working on the Sippar catalogue. The project is now drawing to a close and the resulting catalogue will appear soon in three volumes. It seems only fitting that I use this opportunity to honour Richard D. Barnett by publishing a most interesting text from the Sippar collection.

The text published below is a deposition by a man named Bel-epuš in which he divides all of his worldly goods between his wife and his servants. The reasons he may have had for writing this deposition are suggested below.

Dr. Richard Barnett has had a long-standing interest in Urartu, manifested most recently in his chapter in the new Cambridge Ancient History, and early represented by his article on “The Excavations of the British Museum at Toprak Kale near Van” over thirty years before, in 1950. Among the finds in the important Toprak Kale collection in the British Museum were parts of what Dr. Barnett described as a “bewigged garment of lead”, and this piece (BM. 123870) has become familiar from his illustration (Pl. XXXVa).

It was found during the excavations conducted on behalf of the British Museum at Toprak Kale in 1880 by Captain E. Clayton and Dr. G. C. Raynolds, who undertook the work at the request of Hormuzd Rassam, in whose name Sir Henry Layard had obtained an excavation permit. Clayton and Raynolds excavated two main areas on Toprak Kale, one representing the Temple of Haldi, and the other, some fifty feet to the south, where a “pavement” was uncovered and a number of ivory objects and fragments of ivory and bronze were found, in Clayton's words, “in this excavation near the level of the pavement …” Though he makes no mention of lead, the lead fragments under discussion were associated with the ivory, and were presumably mistaken by him for fragments of bronze. This group is probably to be dated in the later part of the ninth, or the eight century B.C.

The extensive use of glass inlays on ivories and as separate inlays together with ivories, presumably on the same furniture, is one of the features characteristic of Western Asiatic ivories dating from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. Their introduction marked a clear departure from second millennium B.C. traditions of ivory carving and their disappearance after the eighth century B.C. coincided with the end of the Golden Age of Western Asiatic ivory carving.

In this discussion I intend to call attention to some phenomena connected with the use of glass inlays on and together with ivories from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. rather than presenting a full review of the subject — a project beyond the scope of the present study. It will be shown that the distinction between non-inlaid and inlaid groups of ivories in Phoenician style has a bearing on their attribution to different workshops and possibly also on their chronology.

This seal, one of the earliest with a linear alphabetic inscription, was found in 1959 at Kibbutz Revadim in the Shephelah (Fig. 3). Its find spot lies about three kilometres west of Tel Miqne (Khirbet el-Muqanna'), identified with Ekron of the Philistine Pentapolis. The seal is a scaraboid of hard limestone, most probably mizi hilu, measuring 16 × 13 × 7·5 mm, intended for a ring, as indicated by the two drilled holes that do not meet. The back and sides of the seal are plain. The base carries the owner's name and a scene engraved in a linear, schematic style (Fig. 1, Pl. XLII).

The seal was published in 1961 by R. Giveon, who assigned it to the wellknown class of late Iron Age (mainly 8th—7th century) personal seals from Palestine and neighbouring countries. In an article published a year later, F. M. Cross, on palaeographic grounds, dated the seal to the 12th century. His view won wide acceptance. In this paper, offered with gratitude and admiration to Richard D. Barnett, whose student I had the privilege to be, I wish to re-evaluate the Revadim Seal and its date.

Perhaps no other site in the region of northern Syria and south-eastern Anatolia played as important a role in the history of the early first millennium B.C. as Carchemish, “on the banks of the Euphrates.” It is one of the best-documented sites of the period, due to a combination of Neo-Assyrian references and the excavated material of the site itself, including inscriptions, reliefs and large-scale architectural projects initiated by the rulers of Carchemish. All of these documents attest to its immense wealth and power.

The site was first explored in the 1870's on behalf of the British Museum, once George Smith had determined that the modern town of Djerabis must be ancient Carchemish; and was subsequently excavated and published under the Museum's auspices. Several encyclopedic compendia published in recent years have summarized in cogent syntheses the information known about Carchemish. Nevertheless, I would like to include this present review of the material as a tribute to Richard D. Barnett – whose own work has been closely associated with the site in particular and with North Syria in general – in order to add a few points regarding the nature of Carchemish and the role played by the state in the history and art-history of the times.

Any attempt to reconstruct the proper chronological sequence of the military achievements of Tiglath-pileser III is greatly hampered by the fragmentary state of his annals uncovered during the century of excavations at Nimrud. Only portions of the text incised on sculptured stone slabs and designed to decorate the monarch's newly built palace have survived. Naturally, this deficiency has greatly enhanced the value of the non-annalistic records of Tiglath-pileser, namely the “summary” (or “display”) inscriptions written on stone slabs and clay tablets. Composed – like the annals – towards the very close of his reign, the texts of this genre relate the military exploits according to a geographical rather than strictly chronological sequence. The enumeration of the conquered lands usually adheres to a set order: it begins with the South (=Babylonia), proceeds to the East (=Namri and Media), then to the North (=Urartu and Ulluba), and concludes with the West (=from North Syria to the border of Egypt).

The redating of certain Hittite texts – notably the Indictment of Madduwatta and the annals of Tudhaliya and Arnuwanda – from the end of the thirteenth century to the turn of the fifteenth has been one of the most discussed Hittitological subjects in recent years. The sudden availability of sources covering a previously poorly known period in Hittite history has naturally brought about an intense preoccupation with the Early Hittite Empire, largely overshadowing the less “fortunate” side of the redating, the “deprivation” of the main body of sources relating to western Anatolia in the second half of the thirteenth century. The situation is aptly demonstrated in the most recent comprehensive study on Arzawa, where the chapter dealing with the period after Muwatalli to the end of the Hittite Empire barely covers 16 pages, in contrast to the far more abundant documentation on the fourteenth century.