I would like to express my thanks to Bendt Alster and Takayoshi Oshima for giving me the opportunity to add a few comments on their article. Within the limits of these pages, I will restrict myself to certain general subjects and one theme in the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend.

As Alster and Oshima suggest above, the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend is obviously a written improvisation. However, improvisation has little to do with whether the text is to be taken in a serious (Hecker, Dercksen) or trivial (“humorous”) manner (Van De Mieroop, Foster, Cavigneaux, Alster and Oshima) nor does it relate to accuracy (see Alster and Oshima, fn. 17). Rather, it relates to the mode of composition: whether or not a fixed text was followed, whether or not there was a written model (see Alster and Oshima, fn. 17). In my opinion, this text is a written “improvised” composition based on oral traditions (see also Alster and Oshima, pp. 2 and fn. 8, 6 and 8, Cavigneaux 2005: 596). In this period, orality and literacy existed alongside each other. This written composition may have developed from an oral set of thematic scenes, the building blocks of traditional oral literature. The episodic structure of the narrative reflects such a concatenation of scenes. These oral building blocks could be varied at will according to the needs of the moment, modified to suit the new purposes and new places. It can be deduced that such legends were known orally from internal evidence — the words placed in the mouth of Sargon in this Old Assyrian composition, “Why should I enlarge (upon this theme) in an inscription? Where do (peoples) noi know me (a-«a»)-nu-um lá i-tí-a-ni, suggested reading of Aage Westenholz), that I am the King, that I conquered the Upper and Lower Lands?” (ll. 63–5). In this writer's opinion, these lines indicate that the author implies that Sargon's fame is so well known that it does not need to be written down.

The expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq began its fourth successive season on March 8th, 1952, and continued to work until the first week in May. The discoveries made during the course of this campaign were of extraordinary interest. Buildings and sculpture of high merit, ivories unsurpassed in quality, and inscriptions that enabled us to obtain a living and sometimes a personal picture of life in Assyria during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., provided an ample reward for the effort expended in excavations. It must, however, be stressed that the discovery of so much material was a direct consequence of the fact that we were enabled to operate with an average of not less than 200 workmen, thanks to the financial help provided by various institutions. Once again, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gave us a generous measure of help and we are glad to take this opportunity of thanking the Trustees and the Director, Mr. Francis Henry Taylor, for their whole-hearted co-operation. This happy association with our American colleagues is also in large part due to the personal interest which Mr. Charles Wilkinson has taken in our progress.

This paper looks at a group of fire installations in a preliminary attempt to analyse an economic sub-system which played some part in the life of a third millennium town in Southern Mesopotamia. It is hoped that this analysis may identify some problems which will be relevant when considering the direction of future research strategy at that site.

The fire installations in question all come from the area of Abu Salabikh known as 5I; this area lies in the dip of the saddle between two higher areas, Area A to the North, and Area E to the South. Area A is occupied by houses of ED III date and Area E by a public building of similar date. 5I is entirely different in character, the walls of the buildings are thinner, the plans less regular and we appear to be in an area of private housing with a number of narrow lanes. The pottery from the area is of ED I date and there is some evidence from the plans for rebuilding which suggests that here at least the period was of some duration. This is reinforced by the presence of a grave (Grave 193) which contains some typically ED I pottery but which was dug from a level completely eroded away.

In the summer of 1947, we made a journey through South-Eastern Turkey, from Cilicia to Lake Van, to see the antiquities of the region. We hoped to find there traces of some types of early pottery, which would give an indication of the range of the civilizations to which they belonged. In the course of our investigations, we sketched potsherds from some thirty mounds of village ruins throughout the area, and recorded some complete vessels in the Van Museum. This account gives briefly our conclusions.

Our first concern was with the well-known painted wares of the Near East, generally labelled Chalcolithic, and thought to belong to a period before the invention of the potter's wheel, and before the common use of metals. There were three important sites where, about the turn of the century, these potteries were found for the first time in a stratified context. All three excavations—Susa, Anau and Tall Halaf—were in country of a similar and very particular character. To describe this landscape may give a clue to the nature and origins of the civilizations which flourished there in these early times.

The step-topped, free-standing square monument called in modern literature the Broken Obelisk was found by Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh, near the Ishtar temple on the mound of Kuyunjik. It is the earliest monument of this kind, and it differs in its pictorial rendering from the later, so-called Assyrian obelisks. Whereas the succeeding examples display reliefs on their four sides, creating consecutive narratives, the Broken Obelisk exhibits a single, motionless relief on its front, the subject of the present paper (Börker-Klähn 1982, Nos. 132, 138–45, 152; Bär 1996, 57-68, 88–99, 101–5, 148–65).

My aim here is to shed light on the motif of the king holding prisoners of war by means of lead ropes and to examine the bearing of this motif on the status of the royal image in pictorial renderings. According to different interpretations of the scene, the king holds a ring and rod (Börker-Klähn 1982, 178, No. 131 with earlier bibliography), or a ceremonial mace (Russell 2003, 4) as well as lead rope(s) with which he binds prisoners of war standing in front of him (e.g. Pritchard 1969, 300, No. 440; Strommenger 1964, 437, PI. 188, bottom; Börker-Klähn 1982, 178; Collon 1995, 117; Russell 2003, 4). My initial interest in the iconography of the Broken Obelisk was aroused by the fact that on it the so-called ring and rod symbols of kingship granted by the gods, are held by the king, whereas usually they are held by a deity in compositions conveying the very act of the divine giving (Hallo 2005, 150–1, 161; Suter 2000, 6–7; Ornan 2005, 12).

It was in 1937 that we heard in Kuwait that a large stone bearing a curious inscription had been brought by a Badawi from Hasa. After it had passed through several hands I eventually acquired the stone, and sent a description of it and a copy of the inscription to Mr. Sidney Smith at the British Museum (see Plate I No. 1). The inscription, which is in a South Arabian script, was translated as follows1 by Professor G. Ryckmans of Louvain:

“Monument et sepulture de ‘Aws-hani-’lat, fils de Sa'id, fils de Ghassanat, du clan de Yad'ub de la tribu de Šawdab (ŠWDB).”

The Badawi who brought the stone to Kuwait said that he had found it at Thaj, a small village twenty-five miles S.W. of Sarrar in central Hasa.

During the 1990 season of excavations at Tell Brak, the lower part of a cuneiform tablet (TB 11021) was found in the “Mitanni palace” in Area HH. The fragment was immediately identified as Hurrian by Dr. Jesper Eidem, who kindly ceded his primary rights to the present author. I am much indebted to Dr. Eidem for his generosity as well as for his readiness to supply his hand-copy of the tablet for study and publication (Fig. 1). I should also like to thank the Directors of the excavations at Tell Brak, Professor David Oates and Dr. Joan Oates, who gave the permission to publish the important new find and provided excellent photographs (Plate XXXII). I am also grateful to Dr. Diana Stein for reading my text and improving my English.

The territory west of Mosul, which includes the strange isolated mountain range of Jebel Sinjar, has always been somewhat off the beaten track. Under the Ottoman Empire it was the theatre of the dissidences of the Yazidi Kurds and the Shammar Arabs against the Turks. At the present day it is still remote, being left aside by the newly developed motor routes, though it is skirted by the Mosul-Tall Kochek highway connecting Baghdad with Stambul and Europe; this is shortly to be replaced by an extension of the railway. In the winter of 1907 Friedrich Sarre and Ernst Herzfeld, proceeding from Buseirah on the Euphrates to Mosul, passed through the town of Balad Sinjar, where they spent two days, made measured drawings of the shrine of Sittna Zenab and the minaret of Kutb ad-Dīn and collected some inscriptions. Then they went on to Mosul, covering eighty-five miles in three days' riding, which gave them little opportunity to leave the road. Nevertheless, their Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris Gebiet of 1911 is still the only archaeological survey of the district.

This paper argues that the peripheral recensions of the Ballad of Early Rulers reflect Mesopotamian forerunners, and do not represent re-workings by the local scribes. The Ugarit recension is based on an Old Babylonian forerunner, and the Emar recension is based on a Middle Babylonian version that incorporated material from other scholarly sources. To support this contention, the Babylonian literary and scholarly background of the early rulers is discussed, and a reconstruction and analysis is offered of the Mari section of the Sumerian King List, in which two rulers of the Ballad appear. The textual history of the Ballad contributes to the general debate regarding the origin, date of composition and transmission of Mesopotamian literature and its reception throughout scribal centers, not only in Ugarit and Emar, but also in Ḫattuša, Canaan and Egypt during the Late Bronze Age. A new copy of the Emar Ballad manuscript by Andrew George is offered at the end of this paper.

One of the most intriguing finds made by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur was a large number of seal impressions on clay the discovery of which he described in the Antiquaries Journal XII (1932) p. 389 as follows:

“… in the uppermost levels there were found remains of the latest period in the city's history, ruins of private houses of the Persian age, and below their foundations the graves of the occupants of the houses. The house remains were scanty, scarcely ever sufficient to yield intelligible ground-plans, but it was clear that for the most part the buildings reproduced with minor alterations the houses of an earlier date whose walls were standing at a lower level. They produced no objects of importance, but the graves did yield a certain number of glazed vases, beads and seals. One clay coffin found in the low ground between the trenches, flush with the modern surface, proved very interesting. It had been plundered, and only a few fragments of bones and no clay or other vessels or beads were left in it, but at the bottom of the coffin there was a collection of nearly two hundred seal-impressions on clay. That these were really a collection was evident, for the lumps of soft clay had been pressed against the gems (the finger-marks were plain on the back and there was no hole through which a string could have been passed and had afterwards been baked so as to make the record permanent; they were illustrations of the specimens in a collector's cabinet.

The site of Fara, ancient Shuruppak, lies approximately halfway between Nippur and Uruk at the very core of the Sumerian urban heartland. The city was renowned as the home of Utnapishtim who survived the flood and went to live in Dilmun where he was visited by Gilgamesh. As was the case with so many Mesopotamian mounds excavated early this century, Fara was investigated in a less than ideal manner. Almost thirty years passed between the first season of excavations by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in 1902-3 and its publication (Heinrich 1931), while a second season by the University of Pennsylvania in 1931 received only brief coverage in print (Schmidt 1931). A great many of these inadequacies have been rectified with the recent publication of H. Martin's book on Fara (Martin 1988), the culmination of her earlier work on the site (Martin 1975; 1983), in which she has presented and discussed a considerable amount of new information concerning these early excavations, particularly with regard to the provenances of artifacts. Martin has also established the chronology of occupation at the site, with a foundation in the Jemdet Nasr period, extensive Early Dynastic I–IIIa occupation, a fairly rapid decline thereafter and a virtual abandonment at the end of the Ur III period (Martin 1983). In the present study of Early Dynastic administration at Fara the extent to which I have made use of Dr. Martin's work will be readily apparent. Additionally, this study is founded on a spell of research carried out by the writer at the Vorderasiatische Museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in July 1987 during which 1,015 Fara sealings were examined.

The recovery of the Assyrian Empire from the time of confusion and hardship had begun, though slowly, as early as the end of the tenth century B.C. But Assyria's real expansion dates from the time of Aššurnaṣirpal II (883–859 B.C.). He recovered Assyria's former settlements in the land Na'iri, which had been seized by the Aramaeans in the days of his predecessors, and founded new colonies in North Syria. Likewise, his son Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) restored the old Assyrian bases on the Euphrates and added to the colonies that he had built in the same region, designating them as his “royal cities”.

Yet the rising power of Assyria and its expansionist policy did not go unchallenged. The people whom the Neo-Assyrian kings attempted to subdue mustered their considerable strength to fight against the destructive might of the Assyrian army, and their strongly fortified cities were among the major sources of their power of resistance, as we are told in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. Kaprabi in the land of Bit-Adini, for example, is described as a well fortified city that had “hovered like a cloud in the sky”, while Pitura on the Tigris was, “exceedingly difficult; it was surrounded by two walls; its citadel had the form of mountain peak”. All these strong cities are designated as āl dannūti, “fortified city”, in the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. When the ruler of a city is known, the city is designated as “his fortified city”, while a city of tribal people, whose country is only loosely organized, is usually called “their fortified city”, whether the name of the ruler of the city or land is known or not (see Table I).

The mound of Kuyunjik contains the longest known archaeological sequence of occupation in Mesopotamia, spanning all periods from the sixth millennium BC until at least the thirteenth century AD. The prehistoric periods have been comprehensively studied by Gut (1995, 2002) and the general sequence of excavation, occupation and principal architectural finds reviewed by Reade (2000), yet despite a few exceptions (Curtis 1976, 1995; Reade 1998, 1999, 2001; Simpson 1996), the pottery and other finds from the Seleucid period onwards have thus far attracted surprisingly little study. For these periods though, the material culture is characterised by a strong mixture of Classical and Oriental traditions; thus, first-century AD graves contained gold face-coverings and the remains of diadems, both hinting at the eastern extension of practices more commonly found in the eastern Roman provinces, but Western lamps, glassware, ceramics and even a Roman military badge also occur at the site. Some of these betray direct political and military control, whereas others reflect a mixture of imports and local imitations; an appreciation of this rich cultural mix is important for the clearer understanding of Nineveh in Late Antiquity.

Nineveh almost certainly held a Roman garrison at the extreme eastern limit of its empire but following the humiliation of the apostate Julian's Mesopotamian campaign of 363, it must have been ceded as part of the handover of five trans-Tigridian Roman provinces containing Nisibis, Singara, Castra Maurorum and fifteen unnamed forts to Shapur II (309–379). Thereafter the material culture from Nineveh finally acquires an Iranian character and, until its capture in 637/38 or 641/42 by an Arab army generally believed to have been commanded by ‘Utba bin Farqad, it flourished as a Sasanian town, bridgehead and fortress on the east bank of the Tigris (cf. Robinson 2000, 36–7). The datable finds of this period include four hoards of silver and bronze coins (Simpson 1996, 95–6); several personal seals, bullae and elaborate cutlery of Sasanian type (Simpson 1996, 97–8; 2003, 362–3, Fig. 3); a range of plain, mould-blown and cut glass (Simpson 2005); and four helmets, the latter hinting at the military component of the settlement referred to in the Arab sources (Simpson forthcoming, b).

This article presents the results of excavations conducted at the site of Umm al-Aqarib, in the Dhi Qar Governorate of Iraq, in the years 1999–2002 and 2008–2010. Despite significant practical difficulties, the excavations revealed an Early Dynastic city of major importance, with monumental architecture including two large temples, called here the White Temple and Temple H, and a palace. In interpreting the excavation results, the author argues that Umm al-Aqarib, and not Jokha (Umma) as has previously been thought, was the central settlement of the kingdom of Gišša during the Early Dynastic III period, and that the White Temple, the largest yet known from Early Dynastic Sumer, is to be identified as the temple of Šara, city god of Gišša.

In order to live one must eat and if one is to live a full and active life the food that is eaten must supply all the nutrients required to maintain the body in a healthy state. An appreciation of the importance of diet has led to many modern studies in this field. The methods used include an examination of the environment of the country concerned; of its economic basis—for example whether it is mainly an agricultural or an industrial country, what food is available and whether such food is locally grown or imported; dietary surveys, usually at family level, of the food intake of the population and clinical studies to assess the health of the individual. The information gained in these surveys is used to assess the adequacy of the nutritional intake of the population. It has proved difficult to set up an accepted standard by which to judge adequacy of diet, but the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has produced tables of recommended daily intakes of nutrients which can be taken as a practical guide.

Some of these methods can be applied to ancient Mesopotamia in order to see whether the diet there can be considered adequate. Examination of the palaeoethnobotanical and palaeozoological evidence from excavated sites, together with references in cuneiform texts and representations of plants and animals on cylinder seals and reliefs, give information about the environment and the economic base. This was agriculture with cereals such as barley and wheat as the main crops and sheep, goats, cattle and pigs the main domesticated animals. Clinical studies of individual people are not possible: obviously no one is available for measuring and weighing or to supply blood and urine samples for tests! It may be, however, that the study of skeletal material will in future enable the likely height and weight of a population to be calculated and provide some information about calcium and Vitamin D deficiencies. It is impossible also to carry out the kind of dietary survey in which families are studied and their food weighed before eating so that exact food intake can be calculated. But by studying the botanical and faunal remains, cylinder seals and reliefs, and the cuneiform texts, it is possible to get some idea of the range of food which was available, which foodstuffs were utilized and how, and to a certain extent who ate what.

The invention of writing in southern Mesopotamia at the end of the fourth millennium BC had many and long-lasting consequences. As far as the Early Bronze Age is concerned, one of the most remarkable of these consequences is that the cuneiform writing system that gradually emerged in southern Iraq during the first part of the Early Dynastic period spread to northern Syria around the mid-third millennium BC. A flourishing scribal tradition was already firmly established throughout the Syrian Jezirah and inner Syria by the advent of the Akkadian period.

It is difficult to establish the reasons and mechanisms that led the elites of northern Syria to borrow the practice of writing from their counterparts in southern Iraq. The steps in this process are even more unclear. Hence the aim of this paper is to gather material evidence that may help us shed light on those questions. As an archaeologist, I will not discuss here the content of epigraphical finds, but only their context and chronological attribution according to the chronological divisions in northern and southern Mesopotamia respectively.

Though for over two millennia much has been written and said about the Hanging Gardens, they remain elusive. Neither the extensive excavations at the city of Babylon nor the abundant contemporaneous cuneiform records have yielded convincing evidence for these gardens and their associated structures. Herodotus says not a word about them. Instead, we have the descriptions of five later writers, who were themselves quoted and paraphrased by others and whose accounts of the gardens are often opaque, contradictory, and technologically baffling at best.

Briefly and in approximate chronological order, the principal sources are as follows: first, the Babyloniaca of Berossus, written about 280 BC, which does not survive save in quotations and condensations from it in other sources, among them two works by the first-century AD Josephus, who twice quotes the short note about the gardens; second, the listing in “On the Seven Wonders”, a text preserved solely in a ninth-century Byzantine codex whose Hellenistic source, often doubted, may be Philo of Byzantium, Alexandrian author of engineering treatises about 250 BC; third, a long description by Diodorus Siculus in the mid-first century BC, which he apparently based on the undoubtedly second-hand accounts in the now lost History of Alexander by Cleitarchus of Alexandria and on the fanciful description of Babylon by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC; fourth, a passage in Strabo's Geography of the early first century AD, which he may have based on a lost text of Onesicritus, a contemporary of Alexander the Great; and fifth, a passage in the mid-first century AD History of Alexander written by Quintus Curtius Rufus, probably also based on Cleitarchus and Ctesias.

Although there has been much speculation about Urartian trade and the influence it might have had on countries to the West, I hope to show there is no evidence for such exports. On the contrary, Urartu seems to have been the receiver of some goods made in the South-West (either through trade or through plunder or imposition of tribute) and the producer of other goods which found their way to the North-east. The points of this paper have been made before, but in the face of new contentions to the contrary, it may be useful to restate them. Among small objects from north Syria commonly found in Urartu one might mention faience scaraboids with the emblem of the moon god of Harran.

The hypothesis that Urartian goods were widely traded to Greece and Italy through Syrian ports or overland via Phrygia is mainly based on the appearance, at a number of Greek and Italian sites, of copper or bronze basins with sets of four carrying-rings fixed by means of attachments in the shape of “sirens”, i.e. male or female busts rising out of a circle with bird's wings and tail. The most common obviously non-Greek and non-Italian type of female siren is characterized by a squat neckless head with thick short curls, huge eyes and nose, puckered mouth and receding chin.

In 1962 the authors published a photograph of a dagger from Iran (of unknown provenance) in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, at the same time pointing out that this was an example of the application of the technique of ‘casting on’. Since then we have received a radiograph of this dagger, kindly taken by the United States Naval Ordnance Laboratory, and this clearly shows the junction between the tang of the blade and the cast-on hilt. (Plate XII, 1, 2 and Fig. 1, 7.)

The technique of casting on can be fairly simply explained by reference to this particular dagger. The blade and tang were first cast and the casting was then trimmed, hammered and polished. Subsequently a mould was prepared around the upper part of the blade and the tang, into which was poured the molten metal which would provide the handle of the dagger. After this second mould had been removed the handle would then be trimmed and polished. Had the work been carried out with very great care indeed there would be complete metallic bonding between the blade and handle, but in practice this is very difficult to achieve and there is almost inevitably some oxidation of the blade and tang with the result that a thin film of metallic oxide separates the two parts. Although technically a weakness, from our point of view this is fortunate since the oxide being less dense to X-rays it allows us to see the line of junction very clearly.