Seven Amarna letters (EA 33–39) are addressed to Egypt by the king of Alašiya, whose name is not given, and one by his chief minister to the minister of Egypt (EA 40). The letters contain references to an exchange of gifts, which were delivered by sea (EA 39 and 40). This exchange amounted to the maintenance of commercial relations and one letter even mentions, in a broken context, Egyptian tradesmen (EA 34). This is what the king of Alašiya writes to the king of Egypt:

38 [. .uš-ši-ir] ki-ma ar-hi-iš39 [a-nakurA-]la-ši-ialútám-kà-ri-ia40 [ù 2] o1[ú-meštám-] kà-ru-ka ù41[1 m]e-i-it [x-x-]GA-GI it-ti-šu-nu,

“[let go] quickly [to A]lašiya my tradesman [and] your [twen] ty [tra]desmen and [one h]undred2 …… with them”.

All these Amarna letters date most likely from the reign of Amenophis IV (1379–1362), alias Akhenaten.

A somewhat earlier reference to Egyptian trade with Alašiya is to be found in an Ugaritic letter uncovered in room 77 of the main palace of Ugarit3 and addressed to Nimmuria, viz. Amenophis III Nebmare (1417–1379)4, by an official whose name is omitted.

In many villages and certainly in all the big towns in Iraq there are Government schools, in most cases for girls as well as boys. Newspapers are read and discussed, and in Baghdad the voice of the broadcaster may be heard in the land from loud speakers in most of the open-air coffee-houses, booming out weekly advice upon hygiene, care of children, and so forth. And yet the bulk of the women of the people, when it comes to matters which concern their physical life, are scarcely affected by the new ideas. At vital crises such as death, marriage, and childbirth ancient taboos are still observed and old customs still reign. A son or daughter who has been to school may protest or ridicule, but the still small voice is drowned in a torrent of talk from the elder women. Even a midwife who has learnt her craft in the Government training centres, of which there are now a growing number, though she may manage approximately to control essentials, humours her patients and their mothers, if she is wise, by observing the old taboos as far as possible.

In 1892 the Rev. G. J. Chester presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a freestanding figure in bronze of an Assyrian demon, which he said came from San el-Hagar, a small fishing village close to the mound of Tanis in the Egyptian Delta. Recently, when this figure was cleaned for the first time, a badly corroded inscription in Aramaic or Phoenician characters was revealed down the outside of each leg. Fortunately, it was still possible to make out some portions of the text. Although this does not provide direct evidence of the figure's identity, close similarity to a well-known inscribed figure of a demon in the Louvre, and the absence of any female characteristics which might denote the iconographically similar Lamashtu, indicate that this is the demon Pazuzu. See Plate VIII.

The figure is 10·8 centimetres high and represents the demon standing on a small rectangular base. Although the ears are human, the bulging eyes, wrinkled jowls, snout-like nose and protruding tongue give the face a leonine expression. A pair of goat's horns rising from the brow curve back to form part of a suspension loop on top of the head. The arms are raised on either side of the head with the ‘hands’ open, empty palms held forward. These are too worn to show certainly whether they were the animal paws usual on these figures. Though the double pair of wings is badly damaged, the feathers are carefully incised on both back and front of the surviving fragments. A pronounced ridge runs over each shoulder from the centre of the back to the chest, so that the wings appear to be strapped on to the body. The creature is ithyphallic, probably with a serpent's head at the end of the phallus. The thighs and legs, terminating in three talons, are rendered like those of a bird of prey. The demon has a scorpion's tail curled up to meet a short bar, which emerges from the lower part of its back, to form a second suspension loop.

The Babylonian day began and ended with sunset, apparently the disappearance of the rim of the orb. In practice the umu was divided into two, the light, or day, also UD, umu, and dark. Except at the equinoxes, light and dark are unequal in length. In the purely theoretical calendar year of 360 days, certainly never in official use after the beginning of the Third Dynasty of Ur, perhaps never before that, the twelve months of 30 days were given the names of the true lunar months used in the official government calendars which were adjusted periodically to relate 1st Nisan to the spring equinox. In the theoretical calendar 1st Nisan is always the equinox. Thus the night of 1st Adar was theoretically equal to the 1st Iyyar daylight in length. Light and dark, whatever their length, were each divided into three watches; thus the watch, EN.NUN maṣṣartu, also varied seasonally. The routine for reliefs of guards or observers in ancient times can be inferred from Egyptian practice; no precise information seems to be available from cuneiform texts, but it would be surprising if a team for the maṣṣartu was not divided into two, with alternate reliefs in each half-team. The seasonal variations in time-lengths for duty, and other necessities of daily life, required some measurement, by a standard, of seasonal beru and other time units.

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.

Splendid isolation and an austere environment allegedly saved Hatra on more than one occasion from the wrath of Rome. Even when the city finally fell to the Sasanians in AD 240 and Shapur carried off its portable wealth, its comparative remoteness prevented the wholesale destruction that happened, for instance, at nearby Ashur. So in 1985 UNESCO had no difficulty in recognising the ruins' value as a gem of world heritage.

Hatra's comparative isolation presents problems but also advantages for archaeologists. The problems concern the city's economy and subsistence with respect to its size and density in a hostile environment beyond the limit of dryland farming. Most prominently Hatra will have played an important role as a centre for nomad-sedentary political and economic exchange. The central temple of Shamash, which might have served as a focus of pilgrimage, will have added in some degree to its wealth, as reflected by its architecture and sculpture. According to some authors the city also played at least some role in long-distance caravan trade, which might have created further substantial revenue. But the important question remains: to what extent did Hatra's inhabitants complement their livelihood through cultivation

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.

This contribution to the volume in honour of Sir Max Mallowan has its starting point in texts found at Nimrud (Calah) during the excavations he directed there in 1949–57. The initial publication of texts soon after their discovery was invariably due to his personal encouragement and realization of their wide-ranging importance and interest. Indeed, his work at the site produced much new evidence for the political and cultural history of Assyria during the last four centuries of its power when it dominated much of the ancient Near East. Later generations may well attribute to his work there much of the change from the traditional picture of Assyrian kings as primarily the forerunners of military frightfulness to a new view of them as sensitive, able leaders, administrators and builders. It is true that they always needed to be alert to guard their personal position while they maintained law and justice in troubled times which then, as so often in the history of Mesopotamia, required the use of military resources to maintain territorial integrity and the economic basis on which it depended.

The vassal-treaties imposed by Esarhaddon illustrate the means by which the stability of the royal dynasty was maintained and the often precarious nature of the king's hold over his subject peoples. The stipulations presented to them both orally and in writing in May 672 B.C. called both for an initial affirmation of loyalty and for its periodic renewal.

In April–May 1974, the Polish Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology (director Professor Dr. K. Michalowski) carried out a first season of excavations on the central part of the citadel at Nimrud. The work was directed by the author of this article.

For introductory information on this work, the reader is referred to a preliminary report on the results of this first season now in press, and to a summary communication by J. N. Postgate which has already appeared in this Journal. M. Falkner has published an account of previous work on the site by Layard, Rassam, Loftus and Mallowan, and J. E. Reade, in a very important contribution, published for the first time two of the colossi which reappear here.

One of the main results of the work of the Polish expedition was the discovery of Neo-Assyrian colossi and reliefs, some of them with types of representation previously unknown. Most of these monuments formed the decoration of a building, till now only partly excavated, which was built by Aššurnaṣirpal II and restored by Shalmaneser III. To avoid confusion with the so-called Centre and Central Palaces, I propose provisionally to refer to this as the Central Building. For an over-all view of the excavations, see Plate VII. The photographs for the present study are all the work of Mr. Waldemar Jerke.

It is too early to make specific statements on the function of this building and its relationship to the NW Palace, but I hope that it will become possible after the excavation seasons projected for Autumn 1975 and Spring 1976. At present one feature of this building at least is clear, its similarity in plan (so far as rediscovered) with the NW wing of Sargon's Palace at Khorsabad, and with the wings of some other Assyrian state buildings designated by G. Turner as “Reception Suite, Type F”.

In addition to the tablets which record offerings made to the major deities in the Ningal-temple during festivals, there are a few which similarly mention one of the minor deities, Ningal-á-anda, who was sometimes omitted from the previous lists (IV(d)). It would be interesting to discover how far these gifts were consumed by the priests themselves, as in the Old Testament ritual, and to what extent they might have sufficed for their maintenance. Unfortunately however, as we lack specific reference to the recipients and are unable to equate ancient values with a modern standard, we cannot solve this problem. The six tablets of group Vb are all very much alike. They first list butter, cheese, and dates as daily offerings and the same in smaller quantities as monthly special ones; an example is No. 58. The other documents combine these two chief issues (with figures correcdy increased); even No. 59, on which níg-díb-itu-da is omitted, is no exception since the figures show that both kinds are included. Often še-zibib and lubricating oil are added, and once (on No. 59) milk.

Modern discussion of what identifiable astronomical phenomenon lies behind the biblical story of the so-called Star of Bethlehem was effectively begun by the astronomer Johann(es) Kep(p)ler (1571–1630), mathematician to Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor 1576–1612. In the years 1604–5 a supernova appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus and excited considerable discussion in Europe. Kepler kept a detailed record of his observations of the star. In the preceding year, 17 December 1603, at Prague he had also witnessed a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn with Mars moving into the vicinity soon after, which interested him in his capacity as court astrologer. The supernova appeared in the neighbourhood of these three planets. In medieval times the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, known as the “great conjunction” (recurring only once every 19·86 years on average), was regarded as of great astrological significance. Kepler calculated that a similar conjunction with Mars moving into the vicinity soon after had occurred in the year 7 B.C. = Julian year 39. On that occasion the conjunction had been a triple conjunction, a very much rarer event than the normal single conjunction.

This article deals with a class of shaped clay fragments, previously unpublished, taken from several Assyrian sites in the nineteenth century and now kept in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum. The individual fragments belong to knob-plates originally designed for attachment to the wall surface. In addition to the fragments of plates, the ceramic assemblage includes several large wall pegs whose knobs in shape resemble those of the plates. Glazed polychrome decoration occurs on the individual pieces and consists of floral patterns and geometrical and plain bands. Although the repertoire of ornamental motifs is limited, whole designs reconstructed from the plate fragments reveal a variety of fourfold symmetrical arrangements (see below). Three distinctive ornamental styles are evident on the British Museum pieces and, further, each style derives from a different site. Thus, several ceramic workshops manufactured the clay architectural fixtures that originally embellished select edifices. Cuneiform inscriptions preserved on several plate and peg pieces disclose that the date of manufacture for the entire assemblage is in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.). See Appendix A.

Although the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur remains among the best-known archaeological discoveries ever made in Iraq, it still offers many complex and teasing problems of chronology and interpretation. These have to be resolved before the evidence it offers may confidently be used to illustrate particular aspects of Sumerian custom and society in the third millennium B.C. On present reckoning this concentration of hundreds of superimposed graves, cut into successive levels of rubbish, extended over at least 600 years from about 2650 to 2050 B.C. In Woolley's view it included two groups of “royal” burials. The earlier, of the archaeological period Early Dynastic III A, is the better known of the two, comprising sixteen shaft-graves or “death-pits”, with multiple burials. They were separated by an interval of between four and five centuries, and by numerous single private graves, from the rather less well-known building complex described by Woolley as the “Mausolea” of the Ur III kings (c. 2112–2004 B.C.). In 1977 I attempted to elucidate the status and social function of the people buried in the Early Dynastic “royal” graves, suggesting that it was too soon to assume that all the rulers of Sumerian city-states at this time had been buried in this particular way. Not only is it to be doubted whether the men (?) buried in the three tombs 1618, 1631 and 1648 were of the same high rank as those in the other thirteen “royal” tombs, but they may even have been of men, and more particularly of women, whose status and special privileges had more to do with the character of the cult of the city-god of Ur than with any secular authority such as kings and queens in the modern sense.

The jewellery published here forms part of the Muncherjee Collection, a large assemblage of South Arabian antiquities formed by an Indian businessman and acquired some years ago by the Aden Museum. Until recently a group of this jewellery was on loan to the British Museum, and I was there able to study it by the kind permission of Dr. R. D. Barnett and with the generous assistance of his staff. I am also grateful to the Aden Museum authorities for granting me permission to publish the jewellery. The drawings accompanying this article are the work of Miss Ann Seawright. By reason of their accuracy and accomplishment, they are far more descriptive than any verbal catalogue I am able to compose.

This article is intended only as a preliminary study of South Arabian jewellery. The group here described forms approximately a quarter of that in the Aden Museum collection, and it is hoped that at a later date a more detailed study of the whole collection will prove possible. In the meanwhile, any comments and observations on comparative and related material will be most welcome. With the exception of epigraphic sources, a survey of any facet of the South Arabian civilization is seriously hampered by the lack of stratigraphically excavated material, and although much has been brought to light by other means, especially sculpture, few serious attempts have been made to analyse the complex art forms of this culture. Likewise in this article I do not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the stylistic origins and development of the jewellery, but restrict myself to a simple description of the various pieces, quoting where possible any relevant parallels or comparisons.

Studies of language contact in Mesopotamia have tended to concern themselves principally with lexical borrowing and structural influence, and to focus on the interaction of Akkadian with Sumerian and (in later times) Aramaic. This paper attempts to innovate on the field in two respects. First, studies of language contact in Mesopotamia largely neglect the sociolinguistic aspects of the phenomenon, which have been problematized with rewarding results in a large and ever-growing body of sociolinguistic literature. A masterly study by Adams has recently shown that sociolinguistic methods can successfully be applied to corpus languages, in his case Latin. Sociolinguistic aspects of language contact are the primary focus of this paper. Second, instead of the interaction between Akkadian and another language (Sumerian, Aramaic), we shall be concerned with that between dialects of Akkadian itself, which can be distinguished through phonology, morphology and, to a lesser extent, lexicon: Neo-Assyrian and two dialects of Babylonian. The Babylonian dialects, respectively vernacular Neo-Babylonian and so-called “Standard Babylonian” (German Jungbabylonisch), appear in different epistolary contexts. As the language of scholarship and belles lettres, Standard Babylonian occurs in learned citations, and was used to elevate one's language. We will encounter it frequently in letters written to the king by Neo-Assyrian scholars. Vernacular Neo-Babylonian was the base dialect of numerous letters by and to Babylonians. Characteristically Neo- (as opposed to Standard) Babylonian forms are usually not found in Assyrian letters.

The use of cuneiform as a recording medium survived in Babylonia some 500 years after the loss of political independence. Records from the Arsacid period, however, are not numerous nor have those published been subject to systematic study. The texts presented here are among the latest administrative records in cuneiform and are concerned primarily with recording the income and expenditures of the temples of Babylon. The texts were originally housed in the Bodleian library but now are kept in the Ashmolean museum. They were first described by R. Campbell Thompson in his Catalogue of the Late Babylonian Tablets in the Bodleian Library, where he described the tablets without giving copies or transliterations.

The temple accounts published here consist of an introductory statement giving the amount of the income of a certain temple for a specific period of time, which is usually either approximately one month or multiples of a month. This is followed by a list of specific expenditures and the remainder, which was then deposited or re-deposited, as the case may be, with a private banker. We know from other sources that the right to act as banker was leased by the temples for specific periods to private individuals, who put in tenders to the temple assembly for this right.

The text discussed here is one of only two identified fragments of Mesopotamian instructions for tuning a stringed instrument. Apart from its rarity, this text is important in several other respects. It confirms the reconstruction of the tuning cycle suggested by the other tuning fragment (UET VII 74), it appears to belong to a duplicate manuscript of the tuning cycle, it supports the argument for the presence of the verb nê'um (as opposed to enûm) in Akkadian terminology for tuning, and it offers a revised reading of the music-theoretical term nīš GABA.RI as nīš tuḫri(m).

In view of the fact that so many of the texts from Mesopotamia are concerned with offerings for the various feasts of the Mesopotamian temples it is surprising that we know so little about the actual mechanisms of offering and distribution of the sacrificial remains. For the earlier periods of Mesopotamian history we have virtually no information about offering procedures. We do not know whether the Sumerian priests destroyed the offering animals totally in the manner of a holocaust, whether they were consumed by the priests during the temple feasts or whether only certain pieces were offered to the gods during the sacrificial meal with the remainder being distributed among the temple personnel as a form of income—which we know to have been the practice in the later periods.

For the Old Babylonian period we are almost as ill-informed. We know, however, that certain cuts of meat were received from the temple by nadītu priestesses as “betrothal gifts” and we have lists of recipients of meat cuts, but in neither case do we know if offering animals were the source of the meat.

The earliest texts expressly concerned with the distribution of offering remains date to the Middle Assyrian and early Neo-Babylonian periods. These take the form of royal rescripts or temple ordinances regulating which temple officials are to receive what remains. The most complete and explicit of these is a temple ordinance for the Eanna in Uruk, composed originally during or shortly after the reign of Nabu-apla-iddin, which we possess in the form of a later copy.

The question of the geographical position of the biblical “Ur of the Chaldees” is one that has recurred from time to time within the last century since H. C. Rawlinson in 1850 first provided assyriological evidence to cast doubt upon the traditional and commonly accepted identification of the city with the site of Urfa. The basic facts and arguments have been restated many times: to recapitulate for the benefit of the non-specialist it may be said that the main points hitherto urged in favour of identification of Ur of the Chaldees with Urfa have been the similarity of name, classical and Arab tradition, the total ignoring of Babylonia in Abraham's quest for a wife for Isaac, and the reference in Josh. xxiv. 2 to “Beyond the River” (a term which in many cases means “Syria”) as the place of origin of Abraham.

The excavation of Tell el Muqayyar by Sir Leonard Woolley re-awakened interest in the problem, which was subsequently referred to by a number of writers, the general consensus of informed opinion being that archaeological evidence favoured the view that Ur of the Chaldees was indeed Ur in southern Babylonia; and in certain of his works Sir Leonard Woolley himself lent the weight of his learning to the view that the Ur with which Abraham was associated was none other than the famous cult-centre the ruins of which he had excavated. The view taken by Sir Leonard has been generally accepted since.

The famous Assyrian bas-relief showing a dying lion, missing for many years, has recently been presented to the British Museum. It was excavated at Nineveh in the 1850s but its subsequent whereabouts has been the source of much speculation. A photograph of it was taken by Mansell and Co. in the last century (Plate XV) and this photograph continued to be available; it has been reproduced in many books, which accounts for the notoriety the relief now enjoys.

The relief itself is cut down from a larger panel. It now measures 16·6 cm in height and 30·8 cm in length, and is 1·5–2·0 cm thick. At the back, on the right side, is a raised lip. The back itself is well-smoothed, but vertically scored lines are visible (Plate XVIa). On either side of the relief, there is clear evidence of saw marks where it has been cut down to size in modern times. It has probably been also cut along the bottom, but the evidence here is not quite so unequivocal. All along the top is a raised edge 0·5–0·8 cm wide that is probably the original top border of the relief; at any rate, it has the appearance of a finished edge with no signs of having been cut recently. At the bottom, the lion stands on a base line that does not quite extend the width of the slab. Probably in the last century the relief was set into a wooden frame (19·2 × 33·3 cm) with a walnut veneer (Plate XVIb). The frame is open at the back, but a vertical iron strip, held in position by four screws, keeps the relief in place.