Les rapprochements entre le matériel ethnographique et celui découvert dans les fouilles archéologiques ont souvent aidé à identifier des techniques anciennes ou des objets dont le mode d'emploi s'était depuis longtemps perdu dans nos régions. Récemment, cette méthode comparative appliquée à l'étude du matériel céramique harappéen avait aussi permis de reconnaître, dans cette très vaste série d'ustensiles, ceux qui avaient pu être utilisés dans la chaîne de production de certains dérivés laitiers. Le travail ci-dessous forme en quelque sorte la suite de cette première étude, mais il repose cette fois principalement sur l'interprétation de scènes pastorales puisées dans l'iconographie mésopotamienne qui est l'une des principales sources documentaires sur la vie quotidienne ancienne de cette région.

Les ovins, on le sait, sont bien adaptés aux écosystèmes arides et forment la plus grande partie des troupeaux des régions de steppes et de savanes. Il n'en est évidemment pas de même dans les zones humides ou irrigables, le long des fleuves ou des marais, que ce soit en Mésopotamie ou dans les vallées de l'Indus, où le bétail est presque entièrement composé de bovins. Par conséquent, comme la gamme des sous-produits du lait de vache n'est pas tout à fait la même que celle du lait de brebis, l'économie des régions à bovins majoritaires diffère aussi sensiblement de celle des zones arides. Les différences sont surtout apparentes lorsqu'il s'agit de laitages conservables qui ont fait l'objet, non seulement d'un commerce régional, mais aussi parfois d'échanges avec des contrées éloignées moins favorisées par leur géographie.

The tablet presented here in honour of C. J. Gadd is the property of Signor Giancarlo Ligabue of Venice. The writer wishes to thank this gentleman for permission to publish it, and also to express his gratitude to Signora Ligabue-Mazza for making necessary arrangements so that the original could be studied at leisure. Thanks are also due to Dr. Franz Köcher, who read through the first draft of the purely medical portion of the Middle Assyrian tablet and from his unique knowledge of this kind of text made valuable suggestions and supplied references to similar passages. He is not, however, responsible for the opinions expressed.

This tablet, of baked clay, is one of the small number of Middle Assyrian library tablets, and contains 62 lines of script, most of them perfectly preserved. The writing begins on the obverse, is continued on the reverse and top edge, and the four last lines are put on the left edge (Plates V–VI). The first thirty-one lines prescribe treatment for a pregnant woman suffering from colic. Rulings divide this section into four subsections. The first two prescribe treatment for two consecutive days. The third offers further treatment in case that of the first two days was ineffective. The last offers still another treatment for the same trouble, not specifically related to the previous ones. Line 32 is a kind of colophon, which may have been composed for the first time by the scribe of this tablet, or he may have copied it from his original. In either case it proves that these treatments were part of a larger whole, but for some reason (the third word of the line is unintelligible) the rest was not known or was disregarded. Lines 33–62 contain two incantations for use with women in childbirth, taken from a source different from that of the prescriptions.

Since the present writer could not go to Iraq and himself pick out samples for investigation of the plant food in the above described site excavated by Diana Kirkbride, a small series of samples was brought to Copenhagen by the excavator. Although this may be described as an emergency measure, the slender results justify the labour involved. A widened investigation would probably improve the picture quantitatively, but hardly very much qualitatively. The question was whether that meagre tract was exploited for agriculture in the Neolithic, and the findings prove that this was the case.

The samples consisted of a small collection of house debris, plaster and clay, as also some earth samples suitable for notation.

Two different categories of house material were examined: a crude, sandy plaster, probably made up of gypsum and clay with many small pebbles in it; and a fine-grained levigated (wall ?) plaster of a yellowish-white colour, to an extent of c. 80 per cent soluble in acetic acid and thus mainly calcareous.

The coarse material was copiously tempered with husk and straw fragments (tibn), but gave few usable imprints. The yellow plaster, heavily tempered with the same material, produced a small number of determinable imprints of spike parts of cereals. All imprints in this material are characterized by a thin rusty-coloured coating representing the decomposed vegetable matter.

In Vol. XII (1950) of Iraq I published as much as was then available of the results of Rassam and Clayton's excavations at Toprak Kale. I also summarily described the material from the excavations of Lehmann-Haupt and others at the same site. Since then, some items missing in 1950 have come to light in the British Museum, while others not then fit for publication have been cleaned and repaired. In addition, I have now obtained access to Russian publications, with which I was then unacquainted, dealing with the subject.

War, and imminent battle in particular, put any Babylonian or Assyrian king, whose rule and security very much depended on successful campaigns, in a precarious situation. While careful military planning certainly helped to defeat one's enemies, victory in the end was determined by the gods. Before entering battle, oracles were consulted to make certain that the king's decisions had the gods' favour, and a number of other rituals could be performed to ensure that the gods supported the king's cause. These rituals — dubbed “war rituals” by modern scholarship — are not very well known, and the texts attributed to this group are a rather mixed set of royal rituals related to the king's campaign and to potential aggression by enemies. They include traditional Babylonian rituals to be performed before setting off on a military campaign or immediately before a major battle, as well as specifically Assyrian rituals for the same purpose. It is not suprising that two of these texts include the performance of divination rituals, while others focus on the binding of substitute figurines representing the enemies and also use figurines representing the king himself. In line with the general ideology of war, the rubrics of the rituals clearly indicate that the reason for the king's military action is the enemy's aggression against his land, and that the king himself only acts in defence of his own land's borders. It seems that all these texts, apart from the Assyrian rituals in the narrow sense, were assembled in a “series ‘battle’” (iškar tāḫāzi) that is mentioned in the famous letter of an Assyrian king demanding the collection of various scholarly texts from the Ezida and scholars' houses in Borsippa. The same text refers to rituals (or a ritual) “So that in Battle Arrows do not Come Near a Man” that are also known from the catalogue of exorcistic texts (KAR 44 //). Apparently they were not thought to be part of the iškar tāḫāzi; but in the letter the two text groups are named together within a longer list and they were certainly closely associated with each other. Special namburbi rituals could be performed on campaign to avert evil indicated by accidents of the king's chariot, but there is no reason to assume that they belonged to the iškar tāḫāzi too. Other namburbi rituals were used to protect the land's borders when an earthquake had signalled an imminent invasion of the enemy.

In 1913 the British Museum Expedition had excavated a Late Hittite cemetery at Yunus, just outside the walls of Carchemish, and as the work drew to a close and the graves on the outskirts of the cemetery became sparse and poor, my foreman Gregori Antoniou and I started to prospect for a fresh site in the neighbourhood. Beginning from the graveyard on which we were still employed we went inland towards the little village of Yunus (= Eminik), examining both the top of the plateau and the slope down to the mill-stream (see sketch-map, Carchemish, 11. 37); on the high ground about half-way to the village, which is cultivated ground, we noticed quantities of potsherds covering an area of about 100 metres by 50. Gregori, who found the first pieces, hailed them with joyful confidence as Mycenaean-joyful because in this strange land they brought memories of his native Cyprus, confidence because his fifty years and more of excavations in the eastern Mediterranean had given him a working knowledge of antiquities such as few possess. That Mycenaean wares should be found on the banks of the Euphrates sounded incredible, but when I looked at the sherds which Gregori held out to me and saw the smooth buff clay with its decoration of lines and curves in lustrous black and brown paint I was almost convinced, and it needed an examination of the back of the sherds and the recognition of the fact that they were of hand-made pottery to make me realize that we had to deal with a prehistoric and not an Aegean ware.

It is now over thirty years since the Oxford (Weld)—Field Museum Expedition to Mesopotamia closed its excavations, after ten seasons' work (1923–33), at Tells Ingharra and 'Uhaimir: the site of ancient Kish. Throughout these excavations Professor S. Langdon acted as director of the expedition, rarely appearing in the field, but maintaining a constant interest in the progress of excavation and publishing all epigraphic material and a number of interim reports on the archaeological results. From 1923–6 E. Mackay was director in the field, from 1926–33 L. Ch. Watelin. Mackay's transfer to India and subsequent preoccupation with work there, Watelin's premature death, in January 1934, and Langdon's primary concern with epigraphy have meant that the archaeological discoveries of this expedition were very unevenly published. This is particularly true of the work on Tell Ingharra, the primary area of excavation, where a very important archaeological sequence was revealed between 1925 and 1932. Watelin's reports on this work were published in Excavations at Kish III, 1930; the temple, and Excavations at Kish, IV, 1934: the ‘Z’ area and the ‘Y’ soundings. As he made clear, even these reports were only intended as an interim record of work still proceeding.

Students of the history of Urartu and its art encounter some difficulty in associating the surviving Urartian artefacts with the chronology as known from the epigraphic record. The collections of cuneiform inscriptions of König and Melikishvili which serve as a basis for the chronology are in need of some revision and up-dating, while the Hieroglyphic script occasionally employed, to which Barnett has recently drawn attention, in the absence of a decipherment affords no assistance. In recent years archaeologists conducting research into Urartian civilization have begun a series of scientific excavations in the area, and it is to be hoped that these will result in a considerable expansion of knowledge on this subject. In the meantime any additional information in the shape of inscribed objects is to be welcomed.

As part of ongoing research into the significance of light in ancient Mesopotamian architecture and ideology, a reorientation of the main external gateways of city temples can be identified, occurring from around the beginning of the Ur III period. This change in orientation allowed temple gateways to receive direct sunlight onto their external façades during the morning throughout the year. One possible explanation for this architectural change is found in the legal practices of the late third and second millennia B.C. It is proposed that access to sunlight, and therefore the presence of the sun god, was significant for the taking of oaths and the administration of law at temple gateways from the Ur III period onwards, thereby promoting a south-easterly orientation for these gateways. With this in mind, the careful provision of morning light access to the doorways of the neighbourhood chapels of residential Ur may be taken as evidence for the local neighbourhood administration of some legal functions. This in turn suggests a possible cultic and legal basis for the formation of these localised subdivisions of urban communities.

The years 1977 and 1978 witnessed a spectacular increase in the number of archaeological excavations in Iraq, both Iraqi and foreign. The chief reason for this was the intensive rescue operation mounted by the State Antiquities Organization in the Hamrin basin, where many ancient sites are threatened by a dam now nearing completion. The conspicuous success of this operation, in which foreign excavators were able to take advantage of the generous allocation made by the Iraqi government, will be apparent in the following pages. The amount of work did however make it impossible for Mr. Postgate to prepare a separate report for 1977, since he was in the field at the time. Hence we have to offer a biennial report, covering more than 60 sites.

The reports have been collected and edited by Mr. J. N. Postgate and Mr. P. J. Watson, both members of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. Our gratitude goes not only to them, but to all the directors and other archaeologists who have generously contributed to the collection. In some cases we have failed to collect a report, and in this case a brief note is included; this, and a certain unevenness in the length of the reports, is an inevitable result of the size of the undertaking, and we wish to apologize to those directors whose sites are not properly covered. The collection is divided into two parts: normal excavations (including three sites in the Haditha dam area), and sites in the Hamrin basin rescue project, each arranged in alphabetical order. We wish to express our gratitude here to Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof and Sd. Sabah Jasim for their assistance in collecting reports on the Hamrin and Haditha sites respectively, for which they are the overall directors. Information has sometimes been culled from the Organization's journal Al-Athari, and in this case the source is acknowledged at the end of the report. Otherwise the data come from personal visits, written reports submitted by the excavators, and contributions to the Babylon, Assur and Hamrin conference in Baghdad in December 1978.

In a previous article we discussed the recently excavated upright-handled jars and stemmed dishes from Abu Salabikh (Moon 1981). In the following pages we attempt to follow the wide distribution of these two pottery types by presenting similar material from other Early Dynastic sites. Occurrence of both in association clusters about Northern Babylonia, so a good starting point is provided by Kish, where upright-handled jars and stemmed dishes were first commented upon.

As with so many sites dug in the earlier part of the century, available records leave much to be desired. “Ingharra was badly excavated, the excavations were badly recorded, and the records were correspondingly badly published” (Lloyd 1969, 48). However, the attention to detail afforded by Mackay's description of the upright-handled jars and stemmed dishes is admirable (Mackay 1925, 23–37; 1929, 130–156). And while the caution that is the privilege of hindsight must now be applied to some of the deductions, there is no need to reiterate pure description.

As part of a long-term research project consisting of scientific investigations of the various types of glasses excavated at Nimrud, the author of this report undertook a study of three of the nine painted glass plaques included among the finds at Fort Shalmaneser. This research is being conducted in co-operation with Mr. J. J. Orchard who, in Part I of this paper, has illustrated the plaques and discussed them in detail. As is the case with so many Mesopotamian glasses, the objects involved here are very heavily weathered, which complicated matters greatly. Such objects are not only extremely fragile and difficult to handle, but also the original glass— where any remains—is completely obscured by decomposition products. Moreover, in this instance, because so few of these plaques have been found, it was not possible to remove samples for all of the experiments which might be expected to yield useful information. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, several interesting findings have come out of our experiments.

The orthostats from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) at Nimrud are among the most outstanding works of art from the Ancient Near East. Today they are to be found in museums all over the world and are looked at every day by thousands of visitors. Numerous books and articles have been written about their style, their meaning and their reconstruction. Thus one would think that nothing could have escaped the eye of observers. Nevertheless, some details have been largely overlooked by researchers. Among these is the incised decoration on the edges of the garments of some of the figures depicted, showing a wide range of simple geometric and floral designs as well as complex mythical and narrative scenes. It thus forms a valuable part of the repertoire of Neo-Assyrian artistic motifs and can help us understand the essence and meaning of Neo-Assyrian political art. The evidence of these incised decorations is not only of importance for the history of art but is also fundamental to the understanding of the significance of the clothes and of the figures wearing them, forming an integral and essential part of the mythical symbolic character of the figures.

In a previous report we summarized the results of excavations undertaken by the Directorate-General of Antiquities at the site known as ‘Aqar Qūf during a short preliminary season in 1942 and again from February to March in 1943. During the whole of this time work was restricted to the temple area in the vicinity of the ruined ziggurrat. Excavating was resumed at the beginning of October 1943, and the third season lasted until February 10th, 1944. The field staff remained almost unchanged from the previous season and consisted of Taha Baqir, M.A., Curator of the Iraq Museum, as field-director, Mohammed Ali Mustafa, architect, Ata Sabri, registrar, and Izeddin Sanduq, assistant surveyor. Most of the excellent photographs were taken by the Department's photographer, Antran Ivan. As before, excavations were conducted under the guidance of Mr. Seton Lloyd, F.S.A., Technical Adviser to the Directorate-General.

This preliminary report is devoted to the excavation season of Autumn, 1978, although it does also include mention of a grave discovered accidentally on the North-East Mound in November, 1979, while we were not supposed to be digging, only studying at the site. The work in 1978, which in fact lasted from the beginning of October until 10th January 1979, was supported by generous grants from the British Academy, the British Museum, and the National Geographic Society, Washington D.C.; we are as grateful as ever to these institutions for their continuing support. Our team was composed of Mrs. Ellen McAdam and Messrs. R. Bewley, A. R. Green and A. Sheen (site supervisors), Mr. and Mrs. R. K. Vincent, Jr., (photographer and graves recorder), Miss Catherine Sease (conservator), Miss Frances Wollen (cataloguer) and Miss Siriol Mynors (pottery recorder). We were joined for a month by Dr. Rosemary Ellison, who initiated a sieving and flotation programme, and after Christmas by Mr. R. G. Killick, who completed the planning of the West Mound. As representatives of the State Antiquities Organization we were lucky to have Sd. Nadhir Al-Rawi and, for the second time, Sd. Ali Hashim: to both of them we were all much indebted for their untiring help and cheerful collaboration. During the season we were especially pleased to have visits from the members of the Isin and Larsa expeditions, as well as from Dr. T. C. Young, Jr., our better half in the Hamrin.

Preliminary report on the eighth season's work in spring, 1983. Principal results can be summarized as: new information on the nature and extent of the building in Area A (? late ED palace); completion of excavation of Grave 162 which contained 5 equid skeletons; excavation in ED II housing and cross-section through ED II city wall on east side of Main Mound; recovery of another 4,000 sq m of city plan north of Area E, locating streets and house plans and identifying the north-eastern corner of the Central Complex.

The work of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq at Abu Salabikh was resumed at the beginning of March, 1983, and the team left the site on 7th May. Many thanks are once again due to the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage under their President, Dr. Muayad Sa'id Damerji, and to Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-Azzawi, Director-General for the Southern Region. We were fortunate to have with us as Representatives of the Organization Sd. Kamil Alwan Shehab and Sd. Hassan Khdheyr Hashim, to whose good-humoured patience we were all much indebted, and we are also very grateful for the benevolent assistance of Sd. Muhammad Yahya, of the Diwaniyah Inspectorate. As in previous seasons we received generous support from the British Academy, the British Museum, and the National Geographic Society, Washington DC, and once again we also received very material support from Dragage S.A. at Shomeli. A great debt is owed to the staff of the Expedition for their support and hospitality in Baghdad.

In presenting the following account of the coins found at Nimrud in the excavations of 1957, I should like to thank Prof. M. E. L. Mallowan for his kindness in inviting me to study and record the material. Some of the coins, notably those from the small hoard of tetradrachms (nos. 6190–2 and 6195–7 below) found in the Hellenistic levels of Trench O, south of the Nabu temple, have been illustrated in I.L.N. Nov. 23rd, 1957. Here I illustrate all the coins that seem to deserve it; few of the bronze pieces come into that category, as is apt to be the case with excavation coins.

There is absolutely no doubt that D. T. Potts does not agree with the conclusions — based on long-term fieldwork in the al-Ḥajar region of south-eastern Arabia (Fig. 1) — that Gordon Stanger and I recently published in Iraq (Orchard and Stanger 1994, Orchard 1995), and he has said so most forcefully in a “Reply” also published in this journal (Potts 1997). Stanger and I have read Potts's article with considerable interest and, given that his arguments are not only flawed but also confused, and that he often places emphasis on the wrong things, such as on the calibration of carbon-14 dates rather than on the provenance of carbon-14 samples, and on architectural detail rather than on the location and layout of monuments, we have come to the conclusion that his piece requires an equally firm response. Stanger's comments on Potts's statements regarding the climate of the al-Ḥajar region form Part 2 of this article.

In Potts's “Reply” two attitudes predominantly govern his arguments. The first is high indignation that anyone should have the temerity to “challenge” what he regards as “the foundations of Arabian Prehistory”, an indignation that affects the entire tone of his article and culminates in a particularly hostile concluding statement (pp. 70–1), to which I shall return later. The second, and more regrettable, is a propensity to ignore the archaeological landscape, which is truly extraordinary given that Potts is discussing a region where landscape archaeology is of fundamental importance.

Our work at Tell Brak in 1987 and 1988 included investigations in all three periods of major interest on the site, the fourth, third and second millennia B.C., but this brief article is not intended as the regular biennial report on all our discoveries, for two reasons. There is unusual pressure of space in this volume of Iraq, and we have also called a temporary halt to excavation in 1989 in order to prepare Volume I of a series of final reports on the excavations, which will deal with the Mitanni and Old Babylonian periods and will, we hope, be in press when Iraq 51 appears. We must, nonetheless, express our gratitude for generous financial support to the British Academy, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (H. Dunscombe Colt Archaeological Institute Gift and Armida Colt Gift), and the Crowther-Beynon and C. H. W.Johns Funds of Cambridge University. We also offer our sincere thanks to all our friends and colleagues in the Directorate General of Antiquities in Damascus, Aleppo, Deir ez Zor and Hasake for their invaluable cooperation, and particularly to Dr. Afif Bahnassi, then Director General, and to Dr. Adnan Bounni, who has always taken a close and encouraging interest in our work, and to H.E. the Governor of Hasake province, who generously arranged for the loan of a mechanical shovel to remove our dumps in preparation for extended excavation in the next season. Our thanks are also due to Sayid Ibrahim, our Representative in 1987 who has always been most helpful in administrative matters, and Sayid Mohammed Muslim, Representative in 1988, who was an invaluable member of the expedition and, in particular, a most effective site supervisor on part of the building with which this article is primarily concerned. We must record our personal appreciation of the great contribution made by our colleagues, J.-M. Meunier, who was Assistant Director of the excavations in 1987 but was unfortunately unable to join us in 1988, and Jesper Eidem (epigraphist and site supervisor) and Helen McDonald (registrar and draftsman) who were with us in both seasons. In 1987 Mrs. Risë Taylor Andreasen was our very skilled conservator, John MacGinnis and Timothy Matney served as site supervisors, and Miss Susan Oates as archaeological assistant; Dr. Önhan Tunca also joined us for a month as site supervisor. In 1988 we were fortunate to have the assistance of David Warburton and Miss Wendy Horton as site supervisors, and Miss Fiona Burtt as finds assistant. We are extremely grateful to them all for their hard work and good company.

The remarkable Assyrian monument known as the “White Obelisk” was found by Rassam in July, 1853 at Kuyunjik and immediately attributed to Aššurnaṣirpal II (883–859) whose name (admittedly without titles or patronymy) appears in the inscription. In 1883, Pinches gave a detailed description of the Obelisk with a tentative interpretation of its inscription, but it was only some 80 years after the discovery that the first, and only, full edition of the monument appeared. In it, Unger rather forcefully argued for a much earlier date, namely the reign of Aššurnaṣirpal I (1050–1032). This dating, widely accepted, was later challenged by Landsberger who showed that the textual evidence certainly favoured the original attribution to Aššurnaṣirpal II.

Since then, philologists have generally been following Landsberger while archaeologists, with the notable exception of Frankfort, held for Unger's thesis. Recently, however, a more cautious attitude has begun to prevail among archaeologists. Thus, although in his Die Kunst des Alten Mesopotamien (1967), 126–128, Moortgat demonstrates that the White Obelisk cannot be ascribed to Aššurnaṣirpal II, he nevertheless adds a question mark after “Assurnasirpal I” in the caption to the illustration in the same volume (Pl. 251). Similarly, Hrouda, while upholding his earlier attribution to Aššurnaṣirpal I in his most recent work, adds in a footnote: “Zuweisung unsicher.” Finally, the scholar to whom we pay homage in this issife of Iraq, and who is one of the latest to have discussed the White Obelisk, has come down in favour of Landsbefger's dating to Aššurnaṣirpal II, explaining the stylistic oddities of the monument as due to the Ninevite craftsmen who carved it very early in the king's reign, and who may have been less skilled than their colleagues at Calah.