One of the most interesting discoveries of the French excavation conducted by Monsieur Parrot at Mari was the beautiful seated figure of Ur-nanshe, “the great singer”, She sits on a basketry seat or cushion smiling, her feet neatly crossed and her hands folded; by her office she recalls the scene on the famous so-called “Mosaic Standard” found by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur, which Professor Mallowan has suggested is itself part of a musical instrument. In this scene a woman with long black hair, also with folded hands, stands singing behind the figure of a musician playing a large, bull-headed lyre with eleven strings. The musician wears a long garment and across his chest an ornamental band or baldric, which is continued on the lyre behind the bull's head. It seems likely that this band is a support for holding the lyre. The musician holds the lyre high and close to his shoulder and sweeps it with his fingers (Plate XII, a). This type of musical instrument was, of course, also well known at Mari, as a fragment of inlay found by Monsieur Parrot shows.

This paper examines the meaning of three animals—the lion, the bull, and the mušḫuššu-dragon—as depicted on the walls of the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way at Babylon. These animals embody multiple layers of meaning but are associated with specific deities and all possess apotropaic qualities. The animals served traditionally as guardian figures placed at the entrances to Mesopotamian temples and palaces. This study focuses on their apotropaic roles which are evoked by the specific architectural context in which the animals are placed. It is suggested that the images of these animals underscored the importance of both the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way as a crucial route into the symbolic heart of the city.

Les recherches récentes ont permis d'identifier certains symboles personnels des rois néo-assyriens. Parmi les figures emblématiques on trouve le lion et le taureau dont le rôle est primordial dans l'art et la poésie de la Cour pour symboliser le pouvoir du monarque. Il est évident que le scorpion, symbole des reines, donc du harem royal, est à mettre en parallèle avec le lion et le taureau, symboles des rois. Il reste à savoir si d'autres symboles ont été attribués aux membres de la Cour.

Cet article porte, en premier lieu, sur les figures symboliques de la maison royale et en identifie deux nouvelles, le symbole en forme d'oméga et le dromadaire, qui sont associés à Sîn-ah-uṣur, le frère favori et grand vizir de Sargon II. Notre interprétation essaye de prouver que les symboles figurés reconnus sur les briques à empreinte et les sceaux provenant de Dûr-Šarrukîn et de Kalhu ont permis d'identifier les symboles de dignitaires. Ces figures constituaient l'emblème ou la marque de propriété des membres de la maison royale (le roi, son épouse et son frère) et des dignitaires de la Cour. Tout cela permet d'interpréter de nouveau les figures symboliques dont l'importance apparaît de premier ordre dans l'idéologie royale à la Cour de Sargon II.

The study of ceramics in the mediaeval Middle East has traditionally been divided into two separate fields, those of archaeology and art history. Archaeologists have generally focused on the finds from their own sites, seeking only precise comparanda for publication. High-quality glazed ceramics such as lustre-wares were made in a restricted number of centres and distributed over a very large area, and thus may be a small percentage of the total ceramic assemblage. No archaeologist constrained to analysis of material from their own site has ever had the opportunity to examine the fine wares as a complete corpus. Broad all-encompassing approaches to the fine wares have only been attempted by art historians utilizing traditional connoisseurship techniques and focusing on the whole vessels which have appeared on the art market since the nineteenth century.

This paper represents the reporting of a component of a larger study that is the first attempt at providing a chronology for Middle Eastern élite glazed wares dating from about 700 to 1340 (all dates are in the “common era” or AD) based on the methodologies of archaeological ceramic study. This forms part of a comprehensive multidisciplinary study, including the application of the scanning electron microscope (SEM) with X-ray spectroscopy and petrographic analysis.

The student of ancient Mesopotamian society is blessed not only in having access to written evidence, but in having that evidence frequently preserved in significant archaeological context. Although all artifacts both derive meaning from their context and aid in the interpretation of this context, none can equal the cuneiform tablet in informative power. Only partial understanding is possible from a study of the texts and the other archaeological data when the two are divorced; as the texts reveal the actions of the ancient structures' inhabitants, so the archaeological remains represent the physical manifestation of these recorded actions. In the following pages we will take advantage of this unique blessing and attempt an examination of Old Babylonian residence patterns as they are reflected in house property transactions and their accompanying architectural modifications.

Although Mesopotamian archaeologists spend much of their time clearing buildings, determining construction techniques and identifying architectural modifications, relatively little attention has been paid to the social and cultural implications of these structures. Domestic architecture reflects the social needs of its inhabitants and as such is a sensitive indicator not only of variations in wealth but of variations in social organization. Since real cultural change is manifested by changes in social, economic and political organization, and not necessarily by stylistic changes in artifacts, we must use all of the tools at our disposal, in this instance textual and ethnographic, to penetrate the implications of architectural remains. It is hoped that this study may move us one step closer to this goal.

During the 1965 season of excavation at Tell al Rimah, Middle Assyrian tablets and fragments amounting to 115 registration numbers were discovered. Of those included, however, almost half are minor fragments which, entered in the excavation catalogue in view of the possibility of their supplying joins, have no independent value as epigraphic material. A number of joins have been made subsequently, and the tablets and larger fragments bearing sufficient consecutive text to provide some information (in some cases only personal names) now amount to 56. With the exception of four, which in view of problems arising from the preliminary study of my copies are left to await collation, all these are published herewith, together with a few minor fragments which either bear the name of a limu, or might be placeable as joins.

The great majority of the tablets come from Phase I level of the courtyard on the south side of the temple. Of the others, TR. 2903 and TR. 2913 are from site A, Shrine, Phase I, whilst TR. 2904 to TR. 2912 inclusive are from site A, Trench Ab, Courtyard, Phase I. It may be noted that the legible documents amongst TR. 2903 to TR. 2913 appear to have belonged to the same group of families as the tablets of the main archive.

In general this article concerns harps and lyres in Mesopotamia. We begin by considering sound holes on harps and proceed to inquire into the names of both types of instruments and the geometrical shapes associated with the instruments and sound holes.

On the sides of the vertical harps on the Assyrian Palace reliefs in the British Museum one observes a characteristic geometrical figure inscribed in a consistent manner. The figure resembles a rectangle the sides of which are concave (Plate Xa).

The oldest (653 B.C.) vertical harps shown on these reliefs are played by seven members of King Teumman's Elamite orchestra (S. W. Palace at Nineveh, BM 124802, detail here, Plate Xb). Most of these harps are marked with a pair of concave-sided rectangles. There are six clear marks, five places are too eroded to show distinct marks and three places seem to lack marks. The sculptor's skill and care varies from harp to harp and the workmanship seems generally poor for the instruments where the rectangles are missing.

The new program of excavations of the Syrian-American Expedition to Tell Hamoukar, Hassake province, northeastern Syria, began with an initial season in Fall 1999. The project includes among its goals the study of the expansion and contraction of settlement on the site, as well as the relationship of the urbanization process on Hamoukar to regional settlement trends. Our initial step was to document the chronology and scale of this process through a controlled surface collection on Tell Hamoukar itself. In addition, we made some initial attempts at documenting the archaeological landscape near the site by recording traces of ancient roads (hollow ways) and making controlled collection of field scatters.

A fragment of a sculptured miniature column was found in Shrine 10 situated to the west of the Great Temple at Hatra. This shrine has been assigned to Nergal on epigraphical and iconographical grounds. The fragment comprises the upper part of the column with a rectangular capital (measuring 8.7 × 7.7 cm.) surmounted by a hollow incense receptacle (diameter 6 cm., height 3 cm.). The fragment is carved with low reliefs on four sides. On one side is a relief of a male figure (Plate XXXIII a), the legs of which, below the knees, are missing. He stands to the front with the head slightly turned to the left. His head is dominated by a mass of hair drawn to the back as indicated by very shallow incisions (Plate XXXIII b). An eagle with completely spread wings stands over the head. The figure wears an oval-shaped beard, the end of which is broken off. The features of the face are summarily and crudely indicated. Over his shoulders, he wears a chlamys fastened on the right shoulder with a brooch. The folds of his garment are visible on the shoulders and on the upper right arm. The rest of the body is left uncovered. A small rectangular object protrudes from his chest, but its purpose is not known to me. The right arm is raised to shoulder level, and with his hand he grasps a double axe, its upper end chipped off. He wears a plain bracelet on his right wrist. His left arm bends at the elbow and he holds in his hand a thick rope or a leash connected to an animal, of which the top part of the head is missing. The animal, carved frontally, could very well be a dog. The carving of the body of the figure is successful, for it shows some understanding of modelling, even though the figure is rather small to show further details. The muscles of the abdomen slightly bulge, indicating the movement of the right arm.

As work continues on the Neo-Babylonian library recently discovered within the precincts of the temple of Shamash at Sippar, it is becoming clearer that much of its contents is already well known to us. Only a very small number of completely new texts have been identified so far, and our reaction to the material retrieved is at present much as that of a previous generation of scholars to the Sultantepe tablets. We are confirmed in our belief that the major products of the Babylonian literary tradition are, in varying states of preservation, already to hand. A corollary of this belief is that future discoveries of Neo-Babylonian libraries should be expected to yield more literature not so much by furnishing new literary texts as by filling the lacunæ in texts of the established corpus. It goes without saying that since many known texts are still in a very poor state of preservation this is an exciting prospect.

The importance of the Sippar library, then, will principally lie in its capacity to restore known but damaged texts to a more satisfactory state of completion. This capacity is already well demonstrated by the inauguration of this series of texts from the Sippar library with a surprising new source for the composition previously known as the Weidner Chronicle. The present article continues this pattern, though with less unforeseen results, by publishing a manuscript of Tablet II of the Babylonian Creation Epic. The tablet came from niche 5 C of the library—that is the third niche from the ground in the fifth row from the left. Enūma eliš II has remained until now the least well preserved of the Seven Tablets of Creation, the middle part being very badly damaged. Four sections of disconnected text were separated, as it seemed, by three gaps of uncertain length. The line-count of the Tablet was itself unknown.

The Bronze Age settlements of Baluchistan comprise an assortment of cultures and local wares which stylistic comparison with stratified sites in Persia and Iraq is gradually reducing to a workable chronology. Material, for the most part collected from the surface, abounds: the difficulty lies in its interpretation. With the close of the Bronze Age, however, the problem becomes not so much the interpretation of the material as its scantiness. Throughout Baluchistan there are signs of widespread disturbances during the second millennium B.C.: of cultures dying out and villages destroyed or occupied by alien inhabitants. Across the eastern border the Harappan cities of the Indus Plain were overrun by a semi-barbarian people from the west in or about the fifteenth century B.C. Between that date and the Persian invasion of the North-West Frontier Province some ten centuries later the course of events in Baluchistan is obscure. Of particular interest, therefore, is a new ware from Londo and other sites, which on account of its affinities with Persian pottery as well as on other grounds may be provisionally dated to around 1200-1000 B.C.

The inscribed objects published here have never been adequately published anywhere, or, in one case, never published at all. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to describe each of the objects in detail and to publish the inscriptions in full. Two of the inscriptions are on stone mace-heads of a distinctive type, and are significant for the dating and derivation of such mace-heads. This will be discussed, and since little has been written about the site of Sherif Khan (ancient Tarbiṣu), the history of modern excavations there will be traced and a brief sketch will be provided of the ancient history of the city.

The first excavations at Sherif Khan were by Layard, who worked there in January and February, 1850. They were reopened by Rawlinson in the spring of 1852, and all the objects considered here come from his excavations. They can be identified from a report sent by Rawlinson to the Trustees of the British Museum on the 21st April. 1852.

This curious composition, translated here for the first time, has a certain number of unusual features not found elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature. The poem is a monologue by a deity, in all probability Nanše (see commentary on line 153) who, as “mother of the fish,” has built a new house for them, and invites all of them to come and spend the night there, where they will find a comfortable place of rest and will be safe and secure from all the animals which usually prey on them. It is always difficult to place works of Mesopotamian literature in the categories devised by classical rhetoricians. The anthropomorphic descriptions place our composition close to the fable, but it cannot be considered as such, because the classical definition of a fable always includes some kind of action, and no action at all is involved in our text. In some other respects we may consider our poem as lyrical: it is based on the author's sentiments evoked by the multiple aspects of aquatic life, and on the emotional appeal of a “sweet home.” Other secondary themes interwoven with this are the “naming of the fish”—to be compared perhaps with Adam naming all living creatures in the Garden of Eden or, more probably, it is simply a display of erudition—and the attempt to explain how water birds prey on fish, in spite of the fact that both of them are under Nanše's protection.

The elusive Ninevite 5 culture of northern Mesopotamia has repeatedly defied attempts by archaeologists to fathom its mysteries. In this article the relationship between the painted and incised styles of Ninevite 5 pottery is investigated with the help of Hercule Poirot who was present when Ninevite 5 was given its name. The evidence from earlier excavations and from recent rescue work in northern Iraq is examined and a new verdict on the development of the Ninevite 5 pottery styles is reached.

It may be said for most Mesopotamian excavations that information contained in cuneiform documents has not been fully used to give cultural elaboration to the bare outline derived from architecture, artefacts, etc. In the era of large expeditions, ending in the 1930's, texts would often be collected, turned over to an epigrapher, and published separately from the main archaeological report. Most often, the epigraphic volume would contain little or no information as to the find-spots of the texts. Likewise, tablets with dates would be, and still are being, published with the notation “seal impression” but without a drawing or photograph of the sealing, thus depriving archaeologists of precise means of determining style change, regional variations, etc. Economic texts and other mundane, relatively simple documents are routinely published in hand copy, sometimes transliterated, but almost never translated. In this way, many details of everyday life, reflecting economic and social systems, remain unavailable to the archaeologist or non-philologist who would find the information extremely interesting and useful. In short, once inscribed material is given over to the epigrapher, the archaeologist seldom refers to it again other than to date a particular level, or identify his site. Rarely are tablets studied by the archaeologist as the most valuable artefact in relation to other artefacts. Likewise, the epigrapher loses the valuable information on context in the interpretation of his texts.

In this article, I hope to demonstrate that much information can be derived by the archaeologist from texts even without detailed content analysis. He need know only the date, the subject or class, and the locus of tablets in order to have at hand an extremely useful tool to refine judgments made on the basis of pottery and other objects. Such information also allows checks to be made on archaeologically derived hypotheses dealing with the function of various parts of a site.

My purpose in this paper is to examine the proportions of standing figures in Neo-Assyrian art using methods similar to those that have proved effective on the art of ancient Egypt. In Egypt artists developed a canon of proportions for the human figure during the Old Kingdom, and by the 12th dynasty they had introduced a squared grid system as an aid to obtaining these proportions. Standing figures were drawn on a grid consisting of 18 squares between the hairline and the baseline, and key points of the body lay on or near particular lines. The junction of the neck and shoulders related to horizontal 16, the breast to 14, the elbow of the hanging arm to 12, the small of the back to 11, the lower border of the buttocks to 9 and the top of the knee to 6. The width across the shoulders was six squares and between the armpits four squares, so that the upper arm was a square wide.

Standing figures continued to be drawn on an 18-square grid at least into the 19th dynasty and probably throughout the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. By the 25th dynasty the grid system had altered, and the 18-square system was replaced by one in which the squares were five-sixths of their size in the early system, so that there were now 21 squares between the base and top of the eye. Before this, however, from the mid-18th dynasty onwards, bodily proportions began to change, and this process can be charted by the changing relationship between some of the key points of the body and the lines of the grid. The levels of the small of the back, the lower border of the buttocks and the top of the knee all rise above their original positions, while the width across the shoulders was often reduced by roughly half a square and the width of the upper arm became less than a square wide.

A third season of excavation by the joint Kuwaiti-British team took place at the Ubaid-related site of H3 in northern Kuwait during the spring of 2001. Permission to excavate was again granted by Dr al Rumayhi, Secretary General of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, to whom we are most grateful. The work was only possible because of the generosity of a number of funding bodies: the NCCAL in Kuwait; the British School of Archaeology in Iraq; the Institute of Archaeology, University College London; the Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust; the Central Research fund of London University; the Society for Arabian Studies; and, above all, Kuwait Shell, our industrial sponsor. The success of the season was due to their generosity and to the dedication and skill of all members of the two teams.

Objectives this year included the continuation of work in the multi-cellular building in Area A identified in the second season, and the uncovering of the building visible on the surface in the adjacent Area C. The multi-cellular building proved to be structurally complex and had an unexpected depth of deposit in its chambers. These deposits proved to be extremely rich in finds which will greatly enhance our understanding of the site when analyses are completed. In Area C, the new building was defined and excavated to its base although its relationship with the adjacent building(s) in Area A remains to be defined. Limited work was also carried out in the previously excavated military dug-out, or foxhole, Area F, where work was completed. Two teams worked in Area A which was subdivided this season into an east and a west sector, while a third team investigated Area C.

This paper makes available some of the main results of Hormuzd Rassam's excavations at Borsippa (Birs Nimrud and Ibrahim al-Khalil) and Kutha (Tell Ibrahim), supplementing the broad accounts in his own book Asshur and the Land of Nimrod and in his other publications. Further technical information on Rassam's expeditions, with full references to records that I have consulted in the British Museum central archive, may be found in my introduction to Erie Leichty's Catalogue of the Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, Volume VI, pages xii–xxxiv. In compiling the account given here, I have had the benefit of advice from several scholars including, especially, Donald Bailey, John Curtis, and Irving Finkel. The drawings are by Ann Searight. There is a list of the objects illustrated, with additional discussion, at the end.

Hormuzd Rassam was born in Mosul in 1826. During much of 1845–54 he worked on the British excavations in Assyria and Babylonia, first as Henry Layard's assistant and then as agent of the British Museum under the nominal supervision of the consul, Henry Rawlinson, in Baghdad. He later continued to serve the British crown, and eventually settled in England. In 1878 he recommenced excavations in Mesopotamia on behalf of the British Museum. He worked under a permit which allowed him to export everything he found except duplicate objects, which were to be surrendered to the Ottomans; most of his finds are now therefore in the British Museum.

The excavation of a group of tablets, regrettably mainly broken, from the Ezida temple of the Nabû complex of buildings at Kalhu (Nimrud) has been described with evidence of their provenance by the excavator M. E. L. Mallowan. In a summary of the then identified texts given by me in 1968 one of these fragments was seen to be “a Gilgamesh epic type” text. The text ND 4405/4, now in the Iraq Museum (IM.67577), has subsequently been cleaned and a new copy made and collated (Plate XXXVII; with a photograph on Plate XXXVIII). During a recent seminar on the series ša naqba īmuru this tablet was identified as providing the missing section of the Epic of Gilgamesh tablet I, column i, fines 17–52 with traces of the beginning of I ii, ll. 40–44, 49–50, iii 1–3. There is sufficient overlap with the already known text of Gilgamesh I, i. 17–20, which lines are repeated at the end of the epic (XI, 304–307), for the location of this new part to be made with certainty and thus for the development of the opening of the epic to be traced despite the unfortunate break in the left side of the tablet. Since the new text provides twenty-five additional lines it justifies publication without further delay.

When, in their contributions to the revised Cambridge Ancient History, two eminent archaeologists independently thought it best to refer only in passing to the enigmatic structure at Jamdat Nasr in central Iraq excavated by Langdon in 1925–6, further discussion of it needs more than usually precise justification. Frankfort put the matter explicitly: “Its plan has not been sufficiently elucidated for guesses regarding its function to be profitable.” The charge is indeed accurate; but is the implied sentence of complete and continuing obscurity fair? May not contents be as revealing of function as plan? This building was indeed not only badly excavated, but also inadequately and obscurely published. Its contents, however, were adequately published, and have since been widely recognized as a distinctive component of Mesopotamian culture in the last quarter of the fourth millennium B.C. Outstanding among them was a collection of archaic tablets which constitute very nearly the oldest, and most coherent, administrative archive yet retrieved from antiquity. These tablets alone will continue to send scholars from time to time back to the building whence they came. My purpose here is simple and threefold: to make Langdon's plan more easily accessible and as complete as possible on the basis of the surviving original draft; to set out concisely what further information there is on these excavations and those of 1928; and finally to attempt not so much to resolve the “temple-palace” dilemma as to set discussion of this building on as firm and broad a basis of evidence as is now possible. For the purposes of this paper I accept the opinion of Delougaz that the pottery found at Jamdat Nasr, though not necessarily a homogeneous group, belongs largely to Diyala Protoliterate “d”.