This article is concerned with the seals and seal impressions on clay labels and business documents discovered at Nimrud during the five seasons of excavations conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, from 1949-1953. The seals, and particularly the impressions of seals on dated tablets, and a few bullae provide a valuable addition to our knowledge of the development of Assyrian seal engraving. One of the aims of this study is, of course, to obtain as close a dating as possible for the different types. For this we have previously been dependent on the few seals in public and private collections, dated by inscription; on the seals and impressions from the excavations at Assur, dating mostly to the thirteenth century B.C., and to the ninth-eighth centuries B.C.; on the few seals found at Khorsabad, presumably not later than the reign of Sargon; and on the impressions upon clay sealings found by Layard in Sennacherib's palace at Quyunjik, (a few of these Layard illustrated and others he described).

The new material leaves inevitably a number of gaps and problems; one of the principal gaps seems to be the lack of evidence for seals made at the time of Tiglath-pileser III; for example, we do not know whether the delicate engraving of seals such as ND.305 (Pl. XI, 1) was practised in his reign. The stone reliefs from Nimrud of Tiglath-pileser III are evidence of a distinctive development in design, and a comparable development in the art of seal engraving might be expected.

The twelve letters here published have been selected on a geographical basis, the common feature being that they all appear to be concerned with the regions west of Assyria. The evidence is against all the letters of this group relating to the events of the same campaign, or even of the same reign, although it is possible to show correlations between certain letters of the group.

To only two letters can a precise date be certainly assigned. For some others, internal evidence supplies good ground for a closely approximate dating, whilst for the remainder direct internal evidence as to the date appears to be lacking, and an approximate dating can only be assigned after consideration of the evidence concerning the Nimrud Letters as a whole. This evidence, insofar as it has yet been studied, is that nothing has appeared which necessitates postulating a date after the reign of Sargon, whereas about twenty letters have already been noted containing allusions on the basis of which they can be placed either in the latter part of the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III or in the first half of the reign of Sargon. There is thus a prima facie case for dating the collection as a whole between about 740 and a few years before 705 B.C., the precise terminus being probably the year in which Sargon transferred his capital from Calah to Dur-šarrukin.

The copper shaft-hole pick from Khurab, Makran, is one of the most intriguing finds relating to the history of the camels. It is, in my opinion, quite certain that the animal figurine above the shaft-hole depicts a camel of some kind. The attitude of the seated beast, with its steeply rising thick neck, and slightly raised head, is characteristic and does not occur in any other mammal. In addition, there are the rounded nose and the thickened cheek.

There are, however, two species of camel, the Bactrian with two humps, and the single-humped dromedary. The Khurab beast has only one hump and thus might perhaps be regarded as a dromedary. But every other feature speaks against such interpretation.

The neck, for instance, is thick and provided with a flange and a “ruff” of locks of thick hair in front, as found in the Bactrian camel. Moreover, the hump is situated above the pelvis, a position occupied by the posterior hump of the Bactrian, and much too far back for the dromedary. The question has from time to time been raised whether this hump is a genuine part of the figurine. Mr. Lauriston Ward has assured us that the hump is definitely part of the original artefact and not a lump of corrosion. It requires interpretation, therefore, as part of the animal. One might argue that it merely indicates the raised hindquarters of the seated beast, but the distinct individuality of the “hump,” which rests on top of the outline of the back, deprives this assumption of any anatomical foundation.

The study of ancient religious beliefs is beset with difficulties because we do not know with absolute certainty what the peoples who inhabited the Near East in very ancient times really intended to convey by the designs they depicted. That those designs were not merely decorative but had a special symbolic or apotropaic value seems to be beyond question. In consequence of this ignorance of ours there is a tendency to accept explanations which seem to afford fairly satisfactory interpretations of many of these problems, and also an endeavour to expand them to the utmost to make them cover, directly or indirectly, as wide a field as possible. When an example occurs which cannot be forced to conform to the rules laid down by the explanations, it is said to be a peripheral work, or the mistaken rendering of an ignorant craftsman, or even a forgery.

From time to time, however, a book appears which deals with the subject of the religion of the ancients in some or all of its aspects, and which is fulL of new ideas, sometimes of a revolutionary character. Whether all the views enunciated by the author are accepted or not such a work has the salutary effect that it compels the reader to revise his preconceived ideas and to study carefully the opinions expressed in order to determine whether they should be rejected or accepted as a whole or with modifications.