In his study on Mesopotamian inheritance F. R. Kraus remarked that greater clarification on inheritance rights might be achieved from the demographic, economic and sociological statistics yielded by specialized study of the texts. I shall here deal with the data emerging from the Old Babylonian Sippar material and my interpretation of these data, focusing solely on the question of kinship and the rights of inheritance and approaching the problem more from an anthropological perspective than a legal one.

As Robin Fox in his Kinship and Marriage states, “every society makes some provision for the transfer of property on death and the transfer is usually to a kinsman … If ‘next of kin’ are to inherit, then nearness of kinship has to be defined; and among these near kin some order of preference has to be set up”.

The site of Merquly is located in a mountain pass c. 40 km north-west of Slemani (Sulaimaniyah), Iraq. Excavation at the site in 2009 revealed a fortified structure whose rooms at multiple elevations reflect a terraced structure adapted to the steep landscape contours of its setting. Both architectural preservation and quantity of finds were relatively limited; however, despite the nearby presence of a prominent Parthian period rock relief, ceramics suggest a later Sasanian date for the site. The authors discuss the 2009 season's results, and consider possible parallels for the preserved architecture, although further work is needed to securely date and characterize the site.

As has been shown and extensively dealt with in early and more recent scholarship, Neo-Assyrian palatial wall reliefs went through many thematic changes throughout their two hundred and fifty years of existence. One of their conspicuous traits was a gradual abandoning of magical-religious subject matters, represented by protective supernatural beings, in favour of larger and more detailed historical compositions — mostly of a belligerent nature — revealing, for the first time in antiquity, a truer sense of narrative display. As the narrative-historical themes were rightly considered to be an innovative and prominent contribution of Assyrian imagery to the history of art, extensive efforts have been devoted to the study of these compositions within the context of Assyrian palaces.

In the present contribution I intend, however, to concentrate on the “losing” side of Assyrian palatial decoration, namely to focus on the visibility of apotropaic fantastic creatures rendered on wall reliefs and to offer some explanation for their gradual expulsion from the pictorial display of the Assyrian palace. Following Porada, in this essay these hybrids are called demons, in accordance with the Greek term daimon. Benevolent demons appear already in early ninth-century Neo-Assyrian wall reliefs, both in temples, as shown by a small number of slabs from the Ninurta Temple at Nimrud, and much more commonly in palaces, in particular within the North-West Palace.

Dear colleagues and friends,

It is with great emotion, as you can understand, that I stand before you today to pay homage to Barbara Parker, whose death is a great loss to us all. I am particularly honoured to be allowed to speak here in the famous Institute of Archaeology where she spent a great part of her own life, first as a student and then as a member of staff. My thanks go first to Professor David Harris and Professor David Oates, who invited me, and also to you, her colleagues and her friends brought together here. Each of you has many more qualifications to speak about her than I do, so I am peculiarly touched and grateful to have been chosen to evoke a personality I loved and admired for more than forty years.

Thanks to the Rencontres Assyriologiques Internationales, founded in 1950 by Georges Dossin and Jean Nougayrol, I met Barbara Parker year after year, in Paris or elsewhere. I was curious to see which Rencontres Barbara took part in. I found that for at least thirty years she had missed hardly any, especially after she came back from Baghdad, where from 1949 to 1961 she was Secretary-Librarian at the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. It was during the 24th Rencontre, in Paris in 1977, that Barbara informed me with an astonishing simplicity in the elevator going up to the Conservation of the Musée du Louvre that she had married Sir Max Mallowan. I was very happy, but a bit amazed, to learn the news in such a matter-of-fact way. That discretion and that modesty were a characteristic of her personality. For the same reason she never gave a lecture, but came to meet the other scholars and listen to their papers. I am quite sure that she would not like this homage to turn into a panegyric, but how can I neglect to mention the soundness of her work from both an epigraphic and an archaeological point of view, a double speciality which is so rare nowadays? I verified this again, looking through the collection of offprints she sent me from 1955 onwards, as well as the posthumous article on a cylinder seal from Central Asia sent to me recently by Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, who co-authored it with her for the Festschrift für Ruth Mayer-Opificius. Her main field was, of course, the study of the documents discovered in Nimrud and in Balawat in the 1950s, cuneiform tablets and seals. But she was interested in other aspects of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Assyrian reliefs and temple furniture. She published the cylinder seals and the bronze figurines of dogs found at Tell al-Rimah. The article on those figurines (Mallowan 1986) was her contribution to the Studies in Honor of Edith Porada, who unfortunately also left us recently.

The “temple-state theory” of Mesopotamian economy was first propounded by A. Deimel. Unfortunately, he unjustifiably considered his reconstruction to be normative for the whole area and the entire history of Mesopotamia. Subsequent research by Gelb and Diakonoff has shown that temple holdings and economy were but one form of economic life during the third millennium. It would appear that in the course of the third millennium a large part of the “Gross National Product” was in fact produced by the holdings of private owners, the community lands owned by clans, extended families or, to use Diakonoff's term, obschinas. Little attention has, however, been paid to the fact that only a minor share of these products could have been accumulated, re-invested or utilized through long-distance trade by private entrepreneurs. Temple economy most probably participated in the accumulation, redistribution and mobilization of goods to a much larger degree than its own production.

The problem of why, how and when economic goods, and later still, land itself came into the ownership of the temple, an originally non-economic organization, is still open to debate. According to Gelb, land was owned by the tribe, the clan or the community during the early—not defined more precisely—periods of Mesopotamian history, in the time of the primitive communities. He went on to propose that land came under temple ownership when with the fully established centralized state organization and more advanced agricultural economy, the village land controlled by tribes and clans gave way to public land controlled by the crown, temple and nobility. Diakonoff suggested that temple estates gradually absorbed public or community holdings during the Uruk IV–III period at the latest, but perhaps at an even earlier date. Both opinions give a terminus ante quem rather than a chronologically exact date.

Between 11th and 25th October 1977, an archaeological survey sponsored by the Institute of Archaeology, London University, was made in the area around Tell Rifa‘at. Thirty-four sites were studied. They were chosen because they were all marked on the 1:50,000 map with the title “Tell”. Twenty-four of them were found to have tells of ancient human occupation, while the rest could have gained the title because of their situation on some rocky prominence. The main purpose of the survey was to determine the settlement patterns in the area for every period of its past. A special interest of the expedition was the topography of Bit-Agusi, the Aramaean kingdom which flourished in the area in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.

My report on the twelfth season of the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition at Kish is based upon the weekly reports of the Field Director, M. L. Ch. Watelin, supplemented by further study of the objects after their arrival in Oxford. I have been able to make use of Dr. Milne and Professor Margoliouth's report on the coins and of Mr. Harden's study of the pottery. The drawings and letterpress for the pottery are entirely Mr. Harden's work. He had meagre assistance from scientific works on the pottery of the Sassanian period, and we desired an accurate classification for this period, for which the abundance of the pottery recovered in the Sassanian site during the last two seasons provides sufficient material. The excavations at Kish have enabled him to classify pottery of the periods Neo-Babylonian, Old Persian, Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanian.

This article presents editions of all the extant Babylonian incantations against field pests. The sources date to the first millennium BC and many have not been published before. They are mostly tablets of the Neo-Assyrian period, from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, but the corpus also contains some Neo-Babylonian fragments from Nineveh, as well as a tablet from Sultantepe (ancient Huzirina) and two Late Babylonian tablets from southern Mesopotamia. Some of the pieces certainly belong to a series called in antiquity Zu-buru-dabbeda “To Seize the Locust-Tooth”, a compendium of incantations and rituals designed to combat by magic means the destruction of crops by locusts, insect larvae and other pests; other pieces are parts of related and similar texts. Some of the rituals require the observation of the Goat-star rising above the eastern horizon, which suggests they were performed at night as a precautionary measure during the winter months of the barley-growing season.

The purpose of this paper is to give a brief survey of the representations of camels in the Assyrian bas-reliefs of the first millennium BC. The available evidence consists of actual sculptures in museum collections and also of original drawings made by the excavators, who did not bring back all the reliefs they found, but did make drawings to record many of those now still in the soil. The British Museum holds the drawings made by Austen Henry Layard and draughtsmen working under him at Nineveh and Kalḫu (Nimrud). These, conventionally referred to as Or.Dr. (Original Drawings), are mounted in seven bound volumes in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, and copies made from a selection of these were published in Layard, Monuments I [steel engravings] and II [lithographs]. The appropriate drawings have been published, together with those actual reliefs which were removed from the sites and which match them, in the volumes by R. D. Barnett and his collaborators on the sculptures of Tiglath-pileser III, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. The appropriate references to these volumes are given in the entries below. Drawings made by Eugène Flandin of the sculptures of Sargon found at Khorsabad are kept in a bound volume in the Département des Antiquités Orientales in the Louvre, and have been published in Albenda, Sargon. Steel engravings taken from these were published in Botta and Flandin, Monument. Photographs of the actual reliefs from Khorsabad dispersed in different museums, which have appeared in various publications, are republished in the volume by Albenda.

The ancient city of Uruk holds a pre-eminent place in the history of early state development in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BC. However, extensive evidence survives to indicate that the city underwent a very separate cultural flowering during the late first millennium BC, synchronous with the rule of the Seleucid successors of Alexander III of Macedonia.

Traditionally, the Seleucid period has been viewed as one of extensive cultural interaction (e.g. Colledge 1987), when the beneficial impact of Greek “Hellenism” was felt throughout western Asia (e.g. Droysen 1836; Tarn 1951). For this period, Babylonia, and particularly Uruk, are exceptional, both in the quality of preservation and the scope of work that has been conducted there. In addition to Uruk's substantial archaeological remains, we have the added survival of a variety of textual material relating to numerous administrative, economic and ritual activities. If we are to discuss processes of cultural interaction, it is imperative to attempt an integrated study of archaeological material and textual records, and although each type of evidence is limited by constraints of interpretation, a co-ordinated analysis will allow us to address various aspects of the impact of Seleucid domination.

The German excavators have published a wealth of material based on their investigations at the site, including an extensive ceramic corpus for the Seleucid period. The most recent publications of this material have coincided with a shift in approaches to the interpretation of Seleucid rule in western Asia, where attempts to avoid the oversimplification of traditional explanations of cultural interaction are now desirable. An interpretation of the Uruk ceramic material aiming to avoid generalised preconceptions is similarly possible.

At present, all the metalwork excavated at Nimrud by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq between 1949 and 1963 is being catalogued with a view to publication. As the amount of gold jewellery is relatively small, and because as a group it seems to form an easily separable entity, it has been decided to isolate it from the main corpus of metal objects and publish it independently. The authors are grateful to Professor Sir Max Mallowan for permission to publish this material, to Dr. Isa Salman, Director General of Antiquities and to Dr. Fawzi Rashid, Director of the Iraq Museum for permission to examine the gold jewellery now in Baghdad and for their unfailing help, when the work was undertaken in the Iraq Museum.

It must be stressed that this article is confined exclusively to gold jewellery. Apart from pieces of gold-leaf used in overlaying ivory, which were found in some quantity, a few other pieces of goldwork were excavated, which cannot be recognised as jewellery and will appear in the main corpus of metal objects. Considering the extent of the excavations at Nimrud, it is immediately surprising that so few examples of gold jewellery were found: the only reasonable explanations for this paucity would seem to be firstly that Kalhu was very thoroughly ransacked in the years marking the end of the Neo-Assyrian empire, and secondly, that the communities settled on the mound after 612 B.C. were not sufficiently prosperous to have much enjoyed articles such as gold jewellery.

During 1981 and 1982 an immense amount of archaeological research has been undertaken in Iraq and reports on some fifty sites are included below. Most of this research has been done by the Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage either on its own or in co-operation with foreign expeditions on the Salvage Projects. The Hamrin Dam Salvage Project has continued on two sites of exceptional importance, Tell Haddad and Tell Suleimeh. The Haditha Dam Salvage Project has continued at full strength and the Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project has now started. By the end of 1982 nine sites had been investigated and by June 1983 that number has more than doubled. At the same time sites elsewhere in Iraq have not been neglected, both those threatened by development and those investigated for research and tourism.

In the compilation of these reports we are very grateful to Dr. Mu‘ayyad Sa'id, the President of the State Organization, for permission to publish them in Iraq. We would also like to thank Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof, Dr. Muhammad Baqir al-Husseini, Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-‘Azzawi, and Sd. Abd-ul-Qadir Hassan, the Directors-General for the Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern Regions, for the considerable assistance they have given us. As usual our greatest debt is to the excavators of the various sites for freely telling us about their discoveries. We must also apologize to them for any mistakes we have made in summarizing the results from the excavations.

New evidence allows us to demonstrate that a regional trade connected North Syria with both central Anatolia and Babylonia well into the 17th-Century bc. Archaeological evidence indicates that a specific type of vessel, the globular flask, was produced at Zincirli Höyük in the mid-17th century for the purpose of storing and transporting wine. The simultaneous appearance of these vessels as far afield as Kültepe and Sippar-Amnānum lines up with Late Old Babylonian attestations of alluḫarum-pots in 17th-c. texts from Sippar, Babylon, and Dūr-Abiešuḫ. These, we argue, must refer to the same vessels called aluārum in earlier Old Assyrian texts from Kültepe from the 19th century. Taken together, this evidence points towards the existence of a previously unsuspected trade network centered on the ancient Syrian state of Mamma that thrived in the decades between the collapse of the Old Assyrian Trade Network and the accession of Hattušili I. Through a dialogue between textual and archaeological materials, we are not only able to reveal the persistence of long-distance exchange for a century previously believed to lack it, but provide more context for the political transformations taking place at the end of the Middle Bronze Age.

The proposal to develop an Iraqi-British project to protect and promote cultural heritage in Southern Iraq was first mooted at a lunch in the British Museum on 24 September 2007, involving Major-General Barney White-Spunner, Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, and John Curtis, Keeper of the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. The lunch had been arranged to provide Major-General White-Spunner with recent information about the state of the Iraqi cultural heritage, as he was due to be deployed to Iraq in February 2008 as Commander-in-Chief of British troops and General Officer Commanding the Multi-National Division South-East. At the lunch, it was suggested that the greatest need would be to arrange for the inspection of archaeological sites and, if necessary, to arrange for the protection of them, and also to consider facilitating the reopening of some provincial museums. It is known that archaeological sites particularly in Southern Iraq suffered grievously from looting, particularly after the Second Gulf War, and most provincial museums were sacked following the First Gulf War in 1991 and again in 2003. Major-General White-Spunner immediately recognised the importance of these proposals and appointed a project manager, Major Hugo Clarke, to work up a scheme with John Curtis. The project has been made possible by a generous grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, that has covered all costs except those incurred in Iraq, which have been met by the British Army.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the long-standing topographical enigma of the identification of Gaugamela. In this study, a GIS method known as viewshed analysis is employed to solve a certain historical problem.1 According to ancient sources, on the eve of the battle the approaching Macedonian army and the Persian troops that were waiting on the battlefield could not see each other because of intervening hills at a distance of c. 12 km. However, the two armies gained a full view of their respective positions once the Macedonians reached the hills c. six km away from the Persian positions. Our analysis shows that the identification of the battlefield near Tell Gomel, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, is consistent with the visibility requirements of the ancient sources, while the previous identifications of the battlefield in the vicinity of Karamleis and Qaraqosh (Stein 1942; Sushko 1936; Zouboulakis 2015, 2016) feature poor results in terms of expected visibility.

This paper presents the results of the work of the new field initiative launched by the British Museum at the Darband-i Rania pass in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The pass is located at the northeastern corner of Lake Dokan, where, though now subsumed into the lake, the Lower Zab flows from the Peshdar into the Rania Plain. It is a strategic location on a major route from Mesopotamia into Iran, and control of both the road and the river must always have been important. The aim of the work, which commenced in autumn of 2016, is to explore a cluster of sites that commanded the pass, with a particular focus on the first millennium b.c. Excavation is being carried out principally at two sites: Qalatga Darband, a large fortified site at the western end of the pass, and Usu Aska, a fort inside the pass itself. The occupations of these two sites are predominantly Parthian and Assyrian respectively. Smaller operations have also been carried out at Murad Rasu, a multi-period site situated on a headland across the waters on the southern shore of Lake Dokan. The results have included the discovery at Qalatga Darband of a monumental complex built of stone and roofed with terracotta roof tiles containing the smashed remains of Hellenistic statuary. Other features indicative of Hellenistic material culture are Mediterranean-type oil-presses and Corinthian column bases and capitals. At Usu Aska remains are being uncovered of an Assyrian fortification of massive proportions.

Though much Roman glass from Palestine and Syria exists in museums and collections, there are very few instances in which we know anything about the circumstances of its finding, and in still fewer instances are groups from the same tomb still preserved together. In recent years some tomb-groups of the early and later Roman period have been published in the Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine, and I myself was recently enabled, through the kindness of Mr. Henri Seyrig, to publish two groups of the later 1st century A.D. from Yahmur, near Bairut. These are the only published examples known to me from this area, and it therefore seems worth while to add two other probable groups to the list, one from Tyre and the other from Galilee. Both are late Roman, probably 4th century A.D.

This group was given to the Ashmolean Museum by the late Mr. C. D. E. Fortnum in 1888. It consists now of eight glasses (A.M., Fortnum collection, G. 22–29). In a MS. catalogue prepared by Mr. Fortnum himself nine pieces are mentioned, but one, described as a “cup, semi-globular of pale green glass of similar character to no. 23 [see below] but smaller” is now missing and I do not believe it ever reached the Museum. Fortnum adds in his catalogue: “The above nine pieces were found, presumably together, in the neighbourhood of Tyre, where I bought them.” He therefore believed them to be a group, and since, with one exception [see G. 29 below], they look thoroughly homogeneous both in ware and in date we may well accept them as such.

During the campaign at Tell Brak in the spring of 1988 the present authors conducted a survey of tells in the vicinity of the site. Although comprehensive, the work was primarily intended to supplement the 1978 survey by K. Fielden, who investigated the sites surrounding the main tell at Brak itself and those on the lower Jaghjagh between the junction with the Wadi Radd and the modern town of Hassake, with a particular view to fourth and third millennium settlement (Fielden 1978/9).

Within a rectangle of c. 170 km covered by the survey almost all the ancient settlements are found in a roughly triangular area half this size (its base being the lower Jaghjagh/Radd to the south and its apex immediately south of Tell Barri). Identifying this area as the “hinterland” of Brak is merely a locally suitable generalization, as Brak belongs to several systems, one being the macro-system of large urban centres scattered across the Habur Plains and adjacent areas, and another the micro-system of smaller settlements in the immediate vicinity of Brak itself. Brak was an important centre from prehistoric times until the late second millennium B.C., but its role necessarily changed through time, and the concomitant changes in the extent of the area economically and politically dependent upon it remain difficult to recognize. In this sense the area covered by our survey can be seen as partly arbitrary, partly reflecting some real limits. To the south, the French 1: 200,000 maps indicate further small sites on the southern fringe of the area visited, and further west on the lower Jaghjagh, beyond the area investigated by us, are numerous sites clustering along the banks of the wadi and its small affluents, many fairly large and with material of late fourth millennium and third millennium date. This area is relevant when studying the Brak hinterland, but it cannot be evaluated before the publication of the evidence collected by K. Fielden. The area to the north certainly overlaps, at least for certain periods, the hinterland of Tell Barri. Directly west and east of Brak, the cartographic gaps within and beyond the present survey are real or nearly so. To the west/northwest the modern village may obscure evidence, but apart from sites on the first affluent of the lower Jaghjagh there seems to be a fairly wide area here with little ancient occupation. Finally, to the east our area meets that surveyed by Meijer, and his map shows only two additional tells (Meijer 1986, Fig. 1, Nos. 269a and 269b), both Islamic. The two neighbouring sites (our Nos. 33 and 34) appear to be geomorphological features and not tells. The area covered should thus include most of the sites belonging to the micro-system of settlement around Tell Brak.

It has been recognized in glyptic and other studies (for example Ogden, 1982 and Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1992) that considerable advances in engraving technology were made once the bow drill, originally used vertically with a cap stone, had been adapted so that a cutting wheel could be fitted to a spindle mounted between fixed bearings (an arrangement similar to a “horizontal engraving spindle” or a “fixed lapidary lathe”). In some recent publications it has been suggested that this key innovation occurred as early as the fourth millennium B.C. (see for example Nissen, 1977; Collon, 1986; Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1992). In this paper we present some observations which we have made on Mesopotamian cylinder seals; they suggest that the introduction of the wheel occurred considerably later, probably not until the Old Babylonian period in the first half of the second millennium.

The designs engraved in intaglio around the convex sides of cylinder seals have been extensively studied by antiquarians and archaeologists since the end of the eighteenth century (see Collon, 1987). More recently consideration has been given to the techniques used to shape and polish the seals and to drill their perforations. The seals were usually made from natural minerals or stones and some of the major lapidary methods employed in Mesopotamia during the 3000 years or so of cylinder seal production, a time span which stretched from the Chalcolithic period to the Iron Age, have been identified (Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1978 and 1989 etc). Advances in lapidary methods, which allowed harder stones such as hematite and subsequently quartz to be commonly worked for seals during the second millennium, appear to reflect the advantages gained by the availability of emery, a more efficient abrasive material than quartz (Heimpel et al., 1988). Other advantages appear to have been gained by the change from stone-based lapidary techniques to those employing metal (copper alloy) tools (Gwinnett and Gorelick, 1987).

As shown in the following pages there has been considerable archaeological activity in Iraq over the last two years. The rescue operation mounted by the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage in the Hamrin Basin has continued during the whole of this period, although on fewer sites, and a considerable number of new sites have been discovered and excavated in the Haditha Dam area. Rescue work has also continued in areas threatened by city development or road building, and our list of sites for these two years is almost as long as for 1977 and 1978.

Our thanks go, as ever, to the President of the State Organization, Dr. Muayad Sa'id Damerji, for permission to include these summary reports in Iraq, and to all those excavators and others who have helped us in assembling them. As well as the individual directors, we would like to thank Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof and Dr. Muhammad Baqir al-Husseini, respectively Directors of the Hamrin and Haditha Projects, for their assistance. We would also like to take the opportunity of apologizing to those expeditions whose results we have been unable to include for lack of time or because of difficulty in communication: the chief casualty is the important work at Basra, now under the direction of Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-'Azzawi, Director-General for the South of Iraq, and the reports on a number of other sites are less detailed than we would have wished.