The great site of Persepolis, though known for centuries past from the accounts of many travellers, remained until 1931 one of the very few of the great capital cities of the ancient Near Eastern world still untouched. Yet its monuments have formed the objects of serious study since more than a century; Ker Porter's careful drawings (1817) are by no means to be despised, but the pioneer work of Flandin and Coste, carried out in 1840–1841, before Botta and Layard had even found the famous capitals of Assyria, was not merely remarkable, it was in the first class. Following it came that of Texier in 1852. But only Flandin and Coste's great work can be compared with the latest handsome presentation of the subject, which is based on every modern scientific aid and incorporates the results of large-scale excavations, with the end in view of producing a definitive and complete record.

From the point of view of Sumerian cultural behaviour, the royal tombs excavated at Ur with such care and skill by Sir Leonard Woolley, were of epoch-making significance; they indicate with reasonable certainty that customarily the early rulers of Sumer were accompanied to the grave not only by some of their most precious personal possessions, but by a considerable human retinue as well. Needless to say, immediately upon this rather startling discovery the cuneiformists, and particularly the Sumerologists, began searching the documents for inscriptional verification of one sort or another, but without success. Moreover, in the past two decades, quite a number of Sumerian myths, epic tales, hymns, lamentations, and “historiographic” documents have become available, and it seemed not unreasonable to hope that one or another of these might shed light on the Sumerian burial customs relating to the royal tombs. But this hope, too, failed to materialise to any significant extent, which is not too surprising in view of the fact that the royal tombs date from about 2500 B.C., while the majority of our available literary documents were probably first composed about 2000 B.C. However, a number of the Sumerian literary works are concerned in one way or another with death and the Nether World, and the invitation to participate in the Woolley Festschrift offered an opportune moment to sift, collect, analyse and present the Sumerian ideas about death and “immortality,” in honour of the archaeologist who has done so much to make the long dead Sumerians “immortal.”

Around the middle of the nineteenth century B.C., according to a calculated guess, as much as 2,000 inhabitants of the City of Assur were in some way involved in OA Trade. Roughly one-third of this number lived in or regularly travelled to and in Anatolia. This involvement of so many people must have had a serious impact on Assyrian society. In this paper an attempt is made to point out some of its social effects. “Social” is taken in a broad sense, including some more economic aspects; social and economic facts of ancient Assyria cannot and should not be treated separately.

The treatment of this subject is hampered by some serious limitations. Diachronic comparisons, correlating social changes with the development of the trade, are almost impossible, because we know hardly anything about OA society before the period under review. We are also largely ignorant about the effects of the disruption of the trade at the end of Kültepe II. Changes and differences revealing themselves in the period Kültepe Ib are not necessarily “natural” developments, but may be due to the influence of the new king Šamši-Adad I, and to inner Anatolian developments.

The article addresses developments within the Astronomical Diaries, as regards their formal structure and the content of their historical sections, with a particular emphasis on ominous references. Although both the total number and length of historical sections increased significantly over time, the number of ominous references declined. A relationship can be posited between this development and on-going changes in the prevailing scientific worldview in first millennium B.C. Babylonia. The Diaries were deeply embedded in Babylonian traditions of knowledge production, rendering untenable assessments that deny any impact of Babylonian science of divination on them; at the same time, a characterization of the Diaries as a kind of database for diviners falls equally short.

Objects showing strong oriental influence in the large Etruscan tombs have been studied by many distinguished scholars writing over a long period of years and from many different standpoints—by Karo as a classical archaeologist and Lehmann-Haupt as an authority on Armenia, followed by Randall MacIver, Poulsen, Kunze, Schachermeyr, Herzfeld, Pareti, Curtis and Hanfmann. Nor must the pioneer work of Herzfeld on Urartu and Etruria be forgotten. Among the many Italian scholars working in the wider field of Etruscan studies we are especially indebted to the work of Giglioli, Minto and Pallotino. But certain basic problems still remain to be solved and in the light of the recent invaluable studies by Barnett on Urartian metalwork we can hope that an approach from a purely oriental angle may be able to make a new contribution to answering these questions, and may possibly supplement the suggestions concerning the chronology of these tombs recently published by Professor Hawkes.

The Middle Assyrian Tablet BM 130660 adds new material to the latter part of Tablet 12 of Utukkū Lemnūtu, which is imperfectly known from NA and LB sources, mainly from Kuyunjik and Assur. The gaps in the previous publications can now be restored from the MA tablet, together with unpublished duplicates from Kuyunjik, Babylon, Borsippa, and Nimrud.

The bilingual MA tablet is of particular interest because, although in SB dialect, it differs substantially from the NA and LB copies of Tablet 12. Although many of the MA textual variants are purely orthographic, the following types of significant variants can be distinguished:

First, grammatical variants in the MA Akk. may affect the meaning of a passage, such as the MA use of lipparis in place of liprus in the parallel texts (1. 26′). In some cases the MA grammatical variant may indicate a corrupt text, or a misunderstanding of the Sum., as in 1. 30′, in which the MA Akk. reads, “may the wise judges, holy ones of Ištar(?), exclude him from the house”, whereas the NA/LB recension reads correctly, “may the great wise judge Ištar exclude him from the house”.

The following article derives from field-work carried out by the authors at Nineveh from January to March 1987. This work would not have been possible without the kind permission of Dr. Muayyad Damirji, Director General of Antiquities, to whom we are most grateful. We would also like to extend our thanks to the many other Iraqi archaeologists who showed interest in our work and gave us assistance, in particular Dr. Abd as-Sattar Jabar al-Azawi, Muzahem Mahmoud Husein, Samir Dhahir Muhassin al-Saraf, Mohammed Ali Mustafa, Dr. Tariq Madhloom, Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof, Hazim Abdul Hamid, Fadhil Abbas Ahmed and Salim Yunis Hosein; to Professor David Stronach for the opportunity of working on the University of California at Berkeley excavations at Nineveh in 1989 and for assistance in completing our earlier work; to Dr. Jeremy Black, Nicholas Postgate, Dr. Roger Matthews, Tony Wilkinson, Dr. Julian Reade, Dr. Trevor Watkins, Professor Anthony Snodgrass and Professor Malcolm Colledge for their academic and/or logistic support; to Dr. P. R. S. Moorey and the other participants in a seminar held in Oxford in October 1989 for their valuable discussion and comments; and to Jim Roberts for his translation of works in Arabic.

The excavations at Kish from 1923–33 are an important episode in the annals of British archaeology—or to express it more accurately Anglo-American archaeology. For it was a combined Oxford University—Field Museum Expedition to Mesopotamia which conducted the excavations at Kish during these years. Much material was brought to light as a result of these excavations, but the reports from the period on the archaeological finds left much to be desired in terms of accuracy and completeness.

It is only in the past two decades after a long hiatus that the interpretation of the records and material from the expedition has been put on sound modern archaeological footing. This has resulted mainly from the labours of two scholars, P. R. S. Moorey of the Ashmolean Museum and McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago. In addition to the two monographic treatments of the archaeological record of Kish, Moorey's Kish Excavations 1923–33 and Gibson's The City and Area of Kish, one of the most interesting products of these studies is Gibson's article The Archaeological Uses of Cuneiform Documents which appeared in Iraq 34 a decade ago. Using Professor Gurney's card catalogue of the tablets in the Ashmolean collection as a basis Gibson outlined the “patterns of occupation at the city of Kish” as shown by the cuneiform tablets. The most important conclusions in the article concern the texts from the Chaldean and Achaemenid periods and their effect on the assessment of the archaeological data from Late Babylonian Kish.

It is proposed to anticipate the publication of the complete catalogue of the epigraphical material found at Nimrud during the 1950 season by this short account of two historical inscriptions.

While clearing Room U of the “Governor's Palace” a single kiln-baked fragment of a tablet was uncovered about 1 metre above a brick floor. The circumstances of stratification therefore suggest that this tablet lay in rubbish which was part of the filling used to raise the level of the Governor's Palace, probably after the death of King Sargon. See also Iraq, Pt. 2, 163 f., for evidence of stratification and successive floors of occupation. ND. 400 would seem to come from a large tablet similar to K 3751 found in 1873 by G. Smith in the Nabu Temple to the south-east of this room.

The excavations by the State Organization of Antiquities at a small shrine at Hatra proved to be important in various aspects. The shrine, which is located to the east of the Great Temple, is oriented towards the west. The excavator believes, on architectural and archaeological grounds, that it has two building phases. In the first, the shrine consisted of a broad cella built of ashlar masonry with three entrances on the west side; the middle opening is the widest and is decorated with an arch. The façade with three entrances is also found in shrines V, IX, X. The lintel of the central entrance bears an Aramaic inscription stating that certain persons had constructed the shrine and dedicated it to the worship of GND’, the Arab god of Fortune. The narrow staircase, which led to the roof, is enclosed in the thickness of the southern wall. This architectural feature was not found in the rest of the small shrines, the staircases of which were built along one side wall, but it is common in the larger temples, i.e. Šaḥiru, Šamaš, and the Great Iwans in the Great Temple enclosure.

The floor of the rectangular niche, which had the same function as the cella, is reached by a few marble steps. The excavator has found fragments of a cult statue, an inscribed relief of a priest, and an altar. Like most of the small shrines, in its early phase the shrine had a low bench, made of marble, running along the inside of the broad cella's wall.

During the excavations at Abu Salabikh between 1975 and 1989 cuneiform tablets of Early Dynastic date were found in a variety of contexts. Those from 1975–76 were published in Biggs and Postgate 1978, and were added to the sequence of Inscriptions from Abu Salabikh as numbers 516–32. Here all the remaining pieces from later seasons are now published, extending the sequence from IAS 533 to 556. In the first part of the article the distribution of cuneiform tablets across the site as a whole is considered, along with the question of what this may imply for the function of the buildings in which they were found. The second part of the article is an edition of the newly published pieces, and this is followed by an index to the proper nouns and words attested in all the administrative texts from the site.

The question of identifying cultural symbolism of any period is tortuous without textual or verbal evidence. It is particularly difficult when dealing with an ancient society removed by thousands of years and vast distance in space. Such is the case when interpreting the art of Mesopotamia. Occasionally, textual references help to illuminate possible meanings of imagery. More often than not we are left with nothing but our own culturally conditioned perceptions to explain what we see. However, alternative readings suggested by gender studies raise new ways of approaching familiar scenes. In a recent article I argued that the appearance of a fruiting date palm in the so-called “Garden Party” relief of Ashurbanipal (r. 668–631 BC) from the North Palace at Nineveh helped to situate the scene within a queen's garden. Despite the fact that the climate in Assyria is unfavourable for date-palm cultivation, the image of the tree, closely associated with a goddess, symbolized the feminine space of the garden. I would like to take this proposal further and suggest that the fruiting date palm is a marker of femininity in other images from ancient Iraq and, in addition, that the conifer tree can appear as a symbol of masculinity.

In the early spring of 1956, a peasant working in the fields enclosed by the town wall of Nimrud, at the foot of the akropolis, on its south-east side, came upon several fragments of a large block of white limestone. The shape of the larger fragments and the circumstance that several fragments were inscribed in cuneiform writing at once made it clear that they formed part of an Assyrian statue. Under the supervision of the guard who looks after the interests of the Iraq Department of Antiquities and the Nimrud Expedition, the fragments were brought to the Expedition House on the tell, where they awaited the arrival of the team of archaeologists who were to conduct the seventh expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

The expedition took the field on March 4th, 1956; and Professor M. E. L. Mallowan, its Director, entrusted me with the publication of the statue inscription. For this permission I acknowledge my sincere appreciation. Publication has been postponed until the present time owing to the circumstance that photographs of the restored statue, now on display in the Iraq Museum, have only recently been made available through the good offices of the Directorate General of Antiquities of the Republic of Iraq. I express my gratitude to the Directorate General for providing me with these photographs.

Archaeological evidence from Ugarit shows that a lot of goods were imported to this kingdom from Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Cyprus, the Aegean, the Syrian coast and inland, Egypt and other countries, but only the written sources can give us a clear picture of the amounts of goods, the trade-routes, methods of transportation, the structure of prices etc.

We shall not enter here into a discussion concerning all the goods and their prices known to us from the alphabetic-Ugaritic and Akkadian texts from Ugarit; we shall deal here with only one of the principal goods, the metals, and study the question of transportation of commercial goods in this kingdom in the XIV–XIII centuries B.C. Unfortunately we do not yet know the prices of grain in Ugarit, and therefore this basic product is not included in the study of prices.

The Uruk Mound at Abu Salabikh is a low-lying mound of approximately 10 hectares, located to the south and west of the main Early Dynastic mound and almost directly south of the West Mound (Fig. 1). Nowhere does the mound rise more than three meters above the surrounding land, and it is disconcertingly easy to overlook amidst the canal banks.

Prior to 1985, investigations of the Uruk Mound had been limited to a few soundings and small-scale scraping, by the Oriental Institute team in 1963 (Crawford 1964, 13; Biggs 1974, 5) and T. Cuyler Young assisted by Carl Phillips in 1981 (Postgate & Moon 1982; 1984). This work proved enigmatic, failing to reveal coherent architectural plans. In 1985 it was decided to try some further work on the mound, with several aims in mind. First, we wished to find out whether larger-scale scraping would reveal coherent architectural plans. Second, through surface and sub-surface collections of artifacts we hoped to date the occupation of the mound more precisely. Finally, by locating squares in different areas of the mound, we sought evidence for variation in terms of date of occupation and use of different areas.

A total of 5½ weeks of work was carried out on the mound during the 1985 and 1986 seasons. Twenty-eight 10 × 10 m squares were surface collected, and 14 of these were also scraped and their sub-surface artifacts collected and examined (Fig. 2). All of these units were placed judgmentally, with an eye to sampling diverse areas of the mound as well as to expanding the scraping in areas that had well-preserved architecture.

In recent years the discovery of two Late Babylonian tablets listing the names of the nine strings of the harp, and of musical intervals, and the interpretation of these tablets in a series of articles by Mme. Duchesne-Guillemin and Mrs. Draffkorn Kilmer, have brought the subject of Babylonian music into the forefront of discussion. My own responsibility for the publication of one of the tablets and my interest in the subject led me to consult a musicologist, Mr. David Wulstan of Magdalen College, Oxford, and as a result of our discussions Mr. Wulstan decided to propose a new interpretation of the two tablets. His article was already written and had been submitted for publication, when Dr. Edmond Sollberger discovered among the tablets from Ur still awaiting publication in the British Museum an Old Babylonian fragment of a musical treatise of a rather different kind. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Sollberger for generously ceding to me the right to publish this important tablet. It provides welcome confirmation of most of the conclusions already reached by Mr. Wulstan, and his article, as published in this volume, has needed very little revision.

The fragment, numbered U.7/80, is a flake measuring 100 × 89 mm. and containing parts of two columns of text. The surface is very slightly curved, but not enough to make it certain that it is from the reverse of the tablet. The terms used for the strings and intervals are (as far as they are preserved) identical with those already known from the two tablets mentioned above.

The archive of Iltani from Tell al Rimah in northern Iraq consists of 150 letters and fifty economic records. It almost certainly falls within the period of Cappadocian trade known as Kültepe Ib; one līmu name, Ṣabrum, is common to this archive and the texts of Kültepe Ib. This single name cannot be considered a certain link, since it has no patronymic in the records of Iltani; however, the name Kaneš occurs in two of the letters, and this gives support. The letters show that Hammurapi of Babylon was at that time the overlord of Iltani's people; Zimri-Lim's court at Mari is never mentioned, and so a date between Hammurapi's 32nd and 38th years is very probable. This is likely to be within the period of Kültepe Ib according to several scholars.

Of the forty letters between Iltani and her husband the ruler Aqba-hammu, ten are concerned with cloth, garments and workers in the local textile industry. A further eleven letters to Iltani from various different people are likewise concerned, and some mentioned textiles in fairly large amounts. Of the economic records, four concern textiles, two of them in large quantities, and the ration lists name groups of textile workers. From the letters alone one may deduce that textiles were important business at Rimah; compare the letters of Šibtu and her female contemporaries at Mari in which cloth and garments are mentioned usually as single items for personal use. Further comparison of the two groups of letters from Mari and Rimah makes it clear that the ruler and his wife were more closely concerned at Rimah than at Mari with making cloth and garments, and distributing them.

This is a catalogue of the cylinder seals and jar sealings from the excavations at Tell al Rimah during the years 1964–1971. Theresa Carter is publishing a complete catalogue of the small finds, in which the few early stamp seals will be included. The seal impressions on the Middle Assyrian business economic archive published by H. W. F. Saggs and D. J. Wiseman in Iraq 30 (1968) will be published later in one group, as there are too many for this article.

The majority of the cylinder seals in the catalogue are representative of the main historical levels which were excavated; these are: (1) Old Babylonian from about the time of Šamši-Adad, Phase 3 in the Temple (Area A) and Level 6 in the Palace mound (Area C); (2) Mitannian, Phase 2 in the Temple, and Level 5 in the Palace mound, (house levels overlying the O.B. Palace); (3) Middle Assyrian, Phase 1 in the Temple and Levels 2–4 in the house levels of the Palace mound. There is a meagre Late Assyrian occupation on the Temple mound, on the Palace mound below, and Area D, but the only considerable structure was the shrine built on to the north side of the Ziggurat, from which most of the Late Assyrian seals came. The only seals from Area D came from a tomb of the Mitannian period.

The 1984 season of excavations at Tell Brak numbered among its discoveries the eight inscriptions that form the subject of the present note. Prior to the 1984 season a small group of mostly fragmentary Old Akkadian inscriptions was recovered during the course of the three pre-war seasons conducted at the site by M. E. L. Mallowan, while an inscribed seal impression dating to the same period and a Late Uruk numerical tablet were found during the 1978 season. The group now presented contains material of considerable importance, and consists of two pictographic tablets, two stamped bricks, three cuneiform tablets, and a fragment of an amulet. This material, which falls into the Uruk, Old Akkadian and Middle Babylonian periods, is presented in chronological order.

Tiglath-Pileser III's palace at Nimrud is the only building, among those discovered by Layard in the last century, so far to have received the thorough treatment by modern scholars which they all deserve. Barnett and Falkner's handsome publication brings together almost all the information now available, and the supplementary remarks which follow could hardly have been made without it.

It does not seem to be generally known that the legs of two figures from the vicinity of the palace are still visible in position at Nimrud. One set belonged to a bull facing west (Plate XVIIIa), and the other to a lion facing east (Plate XVIIIb); both are inscribed with the remains of Ashurnaṣirpal II's standard inscription. The figures were probably winged and human-headed; like the bulls and lions outside Ashurnaṣirpal's throneroom, they clearly stood back to back on a façade buttress, to one side of a central door. There is, however, a narrow space between them, and this must have been occupied, as in the palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib, by the figure of a genie: obviously the one found, in just such a position, by Rassam. As Rassam's genie faces left, towards the west, the other buttress of the façade, with a genie facing right, should also have been situated in that direction. This supposition would at least make sense of the way in which the three free-standing monuments in the area were arranged: Ashurnaṣirpal's fragmentary “obelisk” will have been placed directly in front of the central door of the façade, Shalmaneser's “Black Obelisk” will have been added outside the eastern side-door, and the statue of a courtier found to the east will have been in a less imposing position further along the wall.