The fifth season of excavations at Tell al Rimah lasted from March 9th to June 9th, 1968. The work was sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and supported by contributions from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels, and the British Academy. The staff included Mrs. Joan Oates, who undertook part of the conservation work and shared the recording of the pottery with Miss Carolyn Prater (now Mrs. Postgate) who has subsequently been engaged in the preparation of a pottery corpus; Miss Barbara Parker, epigraphist and photographer; Miss Elizabeth Dowman, in her third season as conservator and registrar; Mr. Christopher Walker, epigraphist; Mr. Edward Blandy, photographer and assistant surveyor, and Mr. Roger Whitney, draughtsman, who also helped with the recording of the pottery. Dr. and Mrs. Richard Ellis assisted us during the first part of the season, and Mr. Julian Reade, who was principally engaged in a study of material from Tell Taya, gave valuable help at the end. The Representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities was Sayyid Manhl Jabr, whose energy and local knowledge were of the greatest value to us. I must acknowledge my debt to all my colleagues, and to the staff of the Directorate General of Antiquities, especially the Director General, Dr. Faisal al Wailly, and the Inspector General of Excavations, Professor Fuad Safar.

The work at Tell Abada was a part of the intensive rescue operation conducted by the Iraqi State Antiquities Organization in the Hamrin basin where about seventy archaeological sites are to be flooded by a dam now under construction.

The work at Abada started in the middle of December 1977 and lasted until the end of July 1978 without any interruption. The excavations were conducted by the writer assisted by Mr. Ali Hashim Khairi and Mr. Jurjis Muhammad Fadhil (Archaeologists); Mr. Salih Al-Tu‘ma was the foreman. They all worked with exceptional industry despite the severe climatic conditions, especially in winter and summer, and many thanks are due to them all. I would like also to express my warmest thanks and gratitude to Dr. Muayad Sa‘id, head of the State Antiquities Organization, for his greatest interest in the work and his constant encouragement and invaluable advice. My thanks are due also to Dr. Joan Oates for her sincere help and advice. The photographs were taken by Mr. Yasin Al-Mashhadani.

Tell Abada lies to the east of the Diyala River, 12 km southeast of Al Sadiyah. It is situated in a large agricultural plain along the Zagros foothills. In the vicinity are a number of small villages whose Arab inhabitants rely on cultivation and herding for their subsistence. The most important crops grown are wheat and barley. In general the climate of the area is very cold and stormy in winter and hot with dust storms in summer. Although winter rainfall is marginal for agriculture (235 mm per annum, recorded at Jalaula 1956–1958), the rain can be very heavy so that in winter the wadis flow as rushing torrents.

Folk specialists in snake-lore may exercise their interests in several directions. They may seek out, detect, handle, and remove snakes; they may manipulate them for entertainment; they may possess, claim, or confer impunity in the handling of snakes and immunity to their venoms, and they may possess or claim special powers in the treatment of snake poisoning; finally they may train apprentices to these various ends. Such specialists (professional snake-charmers apart) are often persons endowed with supernatural power in other spheres of activity. They may be seyyids (descendants of the Prophet), fakirs, holy men, practitioners of folk-medicine, dervishes, sorcerers, or persons possessed of holiness or baraka for any reason. Common terms used of such people in Iraq are sheikh and seyyid.

Such specialists fall naturally into several groups. There are the frankly insane, the victims of dissociation and the subconscious; there are the ignorant simpletons who have so far been lucky, and to this category belong the conscientious but deluded religionists; there are the informed and quick-witted rogues who know their species and take care to handle the harmless snakes only, and lastly there are the genuine charmers, who have specialist knowledge and skill, who know their natural history and who handle poisonous species, over which they have obtained safe control either by the taming of familiarity and gentle handling or by extracting periodically their fangs, or venom, or both. The last group may also immunize themselves to specific venoms by inoculation. In Iraq the writer did not encounter or hear of any of this last type.

This article aims to open up a discussion of the term hanšû as applied to land in the Neo-Babylonian period. With this in mind, a complete list of the hanšû references known to us is included, to aid any further study of the term. Hanšû is found in the following forms, 50, 50ú, 50ú.meš, 50meš, 50meš.e, 50e and 50e. meš, and is so far attested from the cities of Babylon, Borsippa, Dilbat, Hursagkalamma, Nippur and Uruk. It appears from the reign of Marduk-apla-iddina II to that of Darius.

Turning to the dictionaries, we find hanšû to be “land held in feudal tenure by 50 men”. One thinks of a parallel with the Late Babylonian bīt qašti texts, in which groups of men, known individually as bēl qašti, held land in return for military duties. Approaching hanšû with this in mind, we should look for the duties that these fifty men performed in return for their land. Further, we should look for other aspects of feudalism in Neo-Babylonian society. Yet it is exactly these which are not to be found. One is made aware of a strong temple interest in land, and the ownership of land by private individuals is also very well attested. In contrast, however, evidence for the activities of the crown in relation to land (or the army) is meagre. Royal land, the pīhat šarri, did exist, but we have gained little idea as to its extent or as to how it was exploited. Thus, if we are to argue that hanšû land was feudal land, held by fifty men who performed feudal duties, the proof must come from within the hanšû texts, as external proofs are not to be found.

Now that Palestinian archaeology is subjected to a period of enforced inaction it would appear to be an appropriate moment to publish a short résumé of what is known of Palestinian temple plans.

The development of Palestinian shrines seems to follow a certain consistent plano The earliest recorded shrine appears to be that of Jericho, Stratum XL It consisted of a single inner chamber entered through a narrow ante-room from a columned portico (Fig. 1). Only the post-holes remained, so the posts were probably of wood; in the centre of the inner chamber were two similar holes probably to hold posts to support the roof. The building had plastered walls and mud floors; the floors were laid upon a bed of limestone chippings several centimetres deep, and both the walls and floors were finished with a smooth lime surface coloured brown or red and burnished by rubbing with a smooth stone. Within the entrance and extending beyond the precincts were found numerous plastic clay and mud figurines representing chiefly domestic animals, among which can be recognised cows, sheep, goats, pigs and dogs (?). Other models suggest a cobta's head, the male organs, small cones and a model pillow. In the forecourt were a number of trap-like openings which resemble sheep-pens. This shrine had been rebuilt more than once—Garstang has suggested as many as five times; which shows that once an area was sacred it tended to be regarded as such by future generations.

“Terracotta …, Amulet in the form of a cylinder seal … This terracotta object is an example of the kind of thing that is so crude that no one wants to publish it, with the incidental result that we probably have a somewhat distorted idea of the average standard of production in some periods; many authentic amulets or seals of this quality have probably been presumed to be fakes.”

Julian Reade's comment defines precisely the opinion held by archaeologists regarding clay seals. It also helps to explain why museums and private collectors have not acquired clay seals which were generally regarded to be, if not crude and insignificant, possible forgeries. The number of clay seals excavated in archaeological sites impels us to examine them more thoroughly than has been the case so far.

Up to 1973 Assyrian rock reliefs found in Turkey numbered only a few. Those of Cudi Dağ and Birklin (“the Tigris Tunnel”) were published early in this century, while a further relief at Eğil in the province of Diyarbakir has been long known but not satisfactorily published until recently.

In 1973, the author undertook systematic surveys with the help of assistants in the Adana Regional Museum, Cilicia, and was able to locate a Neo-Assyrian rock relief at Ferhath-Uzunoğlan Tepe, near Kozan in the province of Adana, which he reported and subsequently published. Later, in 1974, while on survey in the province of the Hatay (Antakya), he located what appeared to be a Neo-Assyrian open-air sanctuary at Karabur, with four rock reliefs depicting gods and in one case the human figure of a worshipper. These too were reported and published.

This paper deals with gods, magistrates and laws. It centres on one example from the Roman-Parthian period. Its title derives from five Hatrean Aramaic inscriptions which record legal statements on capital punishment at Hatra, a city in the steppe of northern Mesopotamia that came to flourish suddenly (and briefly) in the second and early third century AD. I will argue that the information in these inscriptions about the divine world, institutional aspects and legislation can contribute to our understanding of the interaction of various cultural spheres of influence at Hatra. As such, this information may throw some light on the modes in which one can study the civilization of a Near Eastern city in the Roman-Parthian period, and it may help us to understand the gap left by the archaeological record. The paper aims to locate the inscriptions in the framework of the divine world of Hatra, and it will also make suggestions as to their contribution to our understanding of processes of urbanization in the “Classical” Near East. A detailed look at this material can help us to comprehend more fully the history of the Levantine lands in the period during which the Roman imperial armies spread over the eastern provinces. In the words of Fergus Millar, it is necessary to look beyond the range of sources generally used to define the field of Classical studies, “to discern the material development of human life and settlement in the whole vast range of different areas which at one time or another came within the orbit of Graeco-Roman civilisation”.

Hatra was of course brought within the power of the Roman empire only late, a few years before the Sasanian conquest in AD 240. By then — so we are told by Cassius Dio (LXVIII 31, 1–4; LXXVI 10–12) and Herodian (III 1, 2–3; 5, 1; 9, 1–7) — the city had already won renown for withstanding attacks by Trajan and (probably twice) Septimius Severus, and also by the Sasanian king Ardashir. The second Sasanian attempt, however, ended its existence as an inhabited city. When the historian Ammianus Marcellinus passed by its ruins in AD 363, on the way back from the emperor Julian's disastrous Persian campaign, he saw “an old city situated in an uninhabited area and deserted for a long time past” (25.8.5).

Students of comparative religion and historians of historiography have for some time now been debating the value, or even the validity, of an “historical outlook”. Within the swamps of this impossibly large debate, one of the few points of seeming bedrock is that the historical outlook which is characteristic of Western civilization was alien to the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Hebrews possibly excepted. One awkward fact which this consensus must leave out of account is that in first-millennium Babylon there was something which looks like historical writing—the chronicles. So far as I know, they have been completely ignored in this debate.

On the other hand, the chronicles have occasionally been singled out for high praise. Students of ancient historiography who, like myself, must depend on translations of the cuneiform texts, have generally supposed that of the many genres represented by these texts the most “historiographic” are the chronicles. One historian concluded that “the great Neo-Babylonian Chronicle” was indeed “the apogee of ancient Near Eastern historiography (exclusive of the Old Testament) and deserves to rank in importance with such milestones as the histories of Thucydides, Orosius and Ranke. Secular history as we know it today here first appeared”.

The second season of excavations at Tell Taya lasted from the beginning of December, 1968, to the end of February, 1969. They were again sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which provided equipment and the loan of the Rimah dig-house, and were financed largely from the School's Jebel Sinjar Fund, set up by an anonymous donor to assist research on northwest Iraq during the third millennium B.C.; part of a grant to the writer, given by the Gerald Averay Wainwright Fund (Oxford University) for work on this period, was also used.

The staff consisted of the writer as director; Mr. Hugo Blake, who worked mainly on site Si, as assistant-director; Miss Nina Shaw, who was responsible for the conservation and registration of objects, and also did much of the photography; and Miss Ann Hechle, who recorded the pottery. Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Postgate were with us for a time, and in the absence of inscribed material the former undertook part of the surface survey while the latter helped on the excavation generally. All members of the staff, however, did far more than this bare list of assignments might imply, and I am deeply grateful for their devoted perseverance through what was said, at Tel'afar, to be the worst winter in living memory. The Iraq Directorate-General of Antiquities was represented by Sd. Mahfudh Abdullah and Sd. Nehad ar-Rawi, and we were as usual indebted, both to them and to many other government officials in Baghdad, Mosul, and Tel'afar, for their invaluable interest and support.

This is the second article in a series detailing archaeological results from salvage excavations conducted in northern Iraq during the 1980s and early 1990s. An introduction and background information to the overall salvage project and specific information on fifteen excavated sites in the northern Jazirah, near the Iraq-Syria border and mostly within T. J. Wilkinson and D. J. Tucker's North Jazira Survey (NJS; see Wilkinson and Tucker 1995), were provided in the first article (Altaweel 2006). In that article the project was called the Ray Jazirah Project (RJP), and the fifteen sites were referenced as RJP 1–15. Since then I have been informed that a more appropriate name is the Jazirah Salvage Project. Nevertheless, for consistency with the last and future articles, the RJP initials will be maintained for referencing archaeological sites and the project in general.

This report provides data for the second set of excavated sites in the North region of the RJP. As in the first article, my role has been to provide this information to a wider audience prior to publication in Arabic and to conduct comparative analysis of the source material with other archaeological sites. I have attempted to maintain fidelity to the original source material, including using Iraqi conventions such as the system of numbering levels and ceramics, with only my commentary added to help in the interpretation of the data. In a similar manner to the previous report, very detailed descriptions on any one site will not be provided; rather, the primary purpose is to give summary data on the excavation results, with significant emphasis, where possible, on the ceramic remains. A list of the sites' occupation history and a table listing RJP sites with corresponding NJS sites (Table 1) are provided prior to the discussion of archaeological results. This report includes some additional details from a previously discussed site (RJP 5). The new sites discussed, including the first fifteen sites in the earlier article, can be seen in Fig. 1 according to their RJP numbers.

Classical sources describing the Hanging Gardens give a wealth of detail which has never matched up with information from cuneiform sources or archaeological finds. This study reconciles them. In doing so it shows how some confusions in Classical accounts may have their origin in Akkadian sources, and are not due simply to misunderstanding and error.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the world in Classical tradition, were marvellous not merely for being raised upon vaults, but also for an innovative system for watering them. Popularly attributed to Nebuchadnezzar II, of the 6th century B.C., they are not mentioned in any of the copious and remarkably complete written sources for that king's reign, nor have they come to light in extensive excavation of his palaces in Babylon, carried out by a large German team over more than a quarter of a century.

This study begins by examining the archaeological and documentary evidence for lavatories (toilets) and foul-water drains in ancient Mesopotamian dwelling houses. It goes on to investigate the use, etymology and history of the Akkadian word asurrû: in the Old Babylonian period it served mainly as a term for a kind of foul-water drain or “sewer” but later shed that meaning.

The Russian excavations at Karmir-Blur, conducted since 1939 jointly by the Institute of History of the Armenian Republic and the Hermitage Museum, are the only excavations of an Urartian site of any importance as yet made under scientific conditions. A summary of the first part of their publication was published in this Journal in 1952, and it is in keeping with the importance of this excavation that a further summary, covering the seasons 1949 to 1953, should be made available to English readers.

Part II describes the seasons 1949–1950, during which the expedition continued work on the citadel and a sector of the town of , especially on its domestic quarters, and showed that this city was one of the principal administrative centres of Trans-Caucasia (Fig. 1). Particularly important was the discovery of two great storerooms, numbered 25 and 28, used for storing wine in vast pithoi (jars), the total content of which is estimated to have been about 150,000 litres of wine, apparently the equivalent of 600 akarki—the Urartian unit of liquid measure. It is pointed out, however, that King speaks of building even greater wine cellars, capable of holding 900 akarki. Remains of grape pips point to the cultivation of grapes of the type of Voskeat (Chardji), Mschali, Ararat (Hachabash) and also some black grapes.

It is appropriate that the eleven letters here published, mostly concerned with imperial and military administration in the Assyrian Empire, should be dedicated to my teacher Professor Sidney Smith on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday, since to him I owe both the origin of my interest in this subject, and also invaluable assistance in my initial steps towards the interpretation of letters of this collection.

This publication, like that of previous sections of my ‘Nimrud Letters, 1952’, is to be taken as provisional only, since there still remain to be edited and published almost another hundred letters or fragments of letters, the contents of which may throw further light upon letters already published or necessitate some modifications of conclusions previously drawn from them. I am planning to publish all the Nimrud Letters in book form, with full grammatical and historical discussions, and to assist towards this project I have already collated all those Nimrud Letters previously published which are now in the Baghdad Museum; since these letters have been cleaned since I originally copied them, collation has in a number of instances produced improved readings.

The public availability of photographs of the entire British Museum Kuyunjik collection has allowed the identification of many hitherto unplaced fragments. Some of them are particularly relevant for the reconstruction of passages in a number of ancient Mesopotamian literary texts. These are published here for the first time. They include three new fragments of the Gilgameš epic, one or two of the Theodicy, several of the Diviner's Manual and of the Rituals of the Diviner, several prayers previously only poorly known, and fragments from the seventh tablet of the exorcistic series Muššuʾu.

The Middle Assyrian tablet fragment BM 98496 (Th 1905–4–9, 2), published here by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum, was excavated by Campbell Thompson at Nineveh in 1905, and a correct description of it as a bilingual arranged in parallel columns was given by L. W. King in his Supplement to Bezold's Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum (1914). An excellent photograph of the best preserved side appeared on Pl. iii of this volume. Despite this initial publication the text remained unnoticed until R. Borger drew attention to its similarity to KAR 118 and 119, bilinguals of Tukulti-Ninurta I (HKL I (1967) 659). J. S. Cooper also voiced the same opinion in ZA 61 (1971), 2. The present writer's interest arose from studying a copy of the text by F. W. Geers in Chicago, since there were plain allusions to the Assyrian King List (henceforth AKL), and these are the earliest attestation of this historically and chronologically important document.

This article uses both textual and archaeological evidence to examine the role of unbuilt land in the Babylonian city. Detailed study of such land is vital not only for understanding urban living conditions but also for any attempt to estimate urban population based on density of occupation of residential areas. By classifying and investigating unbuilt land according to its physical properties, modes of use and conditions of ownership, it is possible to reassess its role in the lives of the city-dwellers.

Knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern history is largely based on written records preserved on clay tablets, but tablets have often been separated from other archaeological artefacts, with erratic consequences. This paper discusses the treatment, distribution and evaluation of tablets since the first major discoveries in 1850, the problems and potential advantages of identifying clay sources and methods of manufacture, the challenges of preserving and recording tablets found in different conditions in the field, and the development of cleaning and long-term conservation techniques. Early experiments in firing tablets at the British Museum and at Babylon were followed by the systematic work of Friedrich Rathgen in Berlin around 1900. While his methods were gradually accepted in principle, there was limited communication among specialists, and independent procedures evolved. The debate on best practice continues.