Poetry is built upon two seemingly contradictory literary foundations; one of density or compactness, as the German word Dichtung well signifies, and the other of repetition. A poet repeats a word, phrase or motif to condense ideas into a small space.

My purpose in this paper is to suggest that there was in the Ancient Near East a literary convention of telling the story of the origin of mankind in a doublet. The first part of the story relates the creation of mankind in more general and abstract terms, whereas the second part of the story narrates it in more specific and concrete terms. The technique of bringing the two independent parts together into a unified narrative is quite similar to the way in which a bicolon in poetry is composed, namely, by the juxtaposition of two similar materials according to the principle of parallelism of the members. The difference is in the quantity of literary material. For this purpose, I would like to present three examples. A synoptic outline of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Hebrew stories is as follows:

The Sumerian story, Enki and Ninmah, describes the creation of man in two parts. These two parts of the story are parallel, being analogous to the two lines of a bicolon. If we label the members of this parallelism in respect to the key motifs of creation as,

A = Gods

B = Creation

C = Mankind

D = Decreeing of fate

E = Prescription of work to mankind,

The bas-reliefs to which attention is drawn in this article both stood originally in the palace of Sennacherib (705–681 B.C.) at Nineveh, and were removed to Europe during the nineteenth century. The history of the excavations which produced them is a familiar one: Layard, the man primarily responsible, reckoned that he had exposed nearly two miles of sculpture in this building alone, and he was naturally unable, without adequate time, money, or assistance, to record and publish all his discoveries fully. So far the only widely accessible book to include more than a small selection of the wall-slabs has been Sidney Smith's Assyrian Sculptures in the British Museum from Shalmaneser III to Sennacherib; interest otherwise has until recently been sporadic and, on the whole, highly discriminating. It is only now that a full publication of Layard's notes and drawings is being prepared, by Dr. R. D. Barnett of the British Museum, and even so the partial re-excavation of the palace by Dr. Tariq Madhlum has already revealed how incomplete these are. The slabs from Nineveh fall into two main categories: those taken to London as parts of long narrative series, and those left in position to await reexcavation. There are, however, in the British Museum and elsewhere, many other fragments whose importance is not dependent on their context, and it is to this group that the two slabs discussed below belong.

The remarkable ruin-field of the Abbasid city of Sāmarrā’, on the banks of the Tigris 125 km north of Baghdad, and the residence of eight Caliphs between 221/836 and 279/892, is one of the most significant Islamic archaeological sites. But in neither Arabic nor western languages is there an adequate overall description of the remains. It was for this purpose that at the end of 1982 the president of the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage, Dr. Mu’ayyad Sa‘id Bassim, agreed to a project of planning the remains of Sāmarrā’ from historical air photographs, as an adjunct to the major project of the State Organization there, the “Project for Developing the Twin Cities of Sāmarrā’ and Mutawakkiliyya”.

There are two basic reasons why a project of this kind is important at present. The first is that even 75 years after Viollet put his first soundings into the Jawsaq al-Khāqānī there is much that remains untouched and unplanned, although the plan is there to see on the surface. The second is that many archaeological sites in the Arab world are being affected by the tremendous pace of development of the past few years. Sāmarrā’ is more vulnerable than most, because of its vast size, and because the modern small town of Sāmarrā’ is placed in the middle of it. Naturally modern Sāmarrā’ wishes to grow. Although it is fortunate that a development agreement has been successfully concluded between the municipality of Sāmarrā’ and the State Organization for Antiquities, a kilometre of ruins in each direction has been destroyed, and the dumping of rubbish from the town continues in further areas. Moreover, the wall mounds at Sāmarrā’ can be easily destroyed by ploughing; and agricultural development, even in the relatively barren landscape of the east bank of the Tigris, is an important factor. Archaeological remains which are well known are less likely to be destroyed than those which are not.

The 1973 season at Umm Dabaghiyah took place under weather conditions different from those of the two preceding ones. The exceptionally good Spring of 1972, and subsequent heavy dew, enabled the scrub vegetation to come up and thus to hold the surface soil in place despite high winds and a practically total drought. In 1973, we had neither rain, apart from a few sparse drops, nor a single thunderstorm, while the real dust-storms started only late in May despite the high winds that were a constant factor. The only interruptions to the work were caused when gales blew the soft soil from both dig and dumps across the excavations, but very little time was lost through this.

The British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the British Academy, together with the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and the University of Sydney gave generous grants towards the work. The following team, under the direction of the writer took part: Mrs. Harriet Martin, Mr. Peter Fames, Mr. Hilary Stuart-Williams, site supervisors; Mr. Douglas Rawlinson Hobbs, surveyor, draughtsman and photographer; Mrs. Gwyneth Rawlinson Hobbs, conservator; Hr. Søren Berthelsen of Aarhus University, pottery classification; Mr. Peter Dorrell, geomorphologist and photographer; Mr. Richard Hubbard, environmental studies. Sayid Ismail al-Hajara represented the Directorate General of Antiquities for the second time, and again proved invaluable both as a site supervisor and general supervisor; we are indeed grateful to him. During the season we again had the pleasure of welcoming the Director General of Antiquities, Dr. Isa Salman, and the Inspector General of Excavations, Dr. Fuad Safar when they visited the excavations. We are most indebted to them for their encouraging cooperation and genuine interest in the site. We should also acknowledge the friendly help of the Government officials of Hatra.

The copper shaft-hole pick from Khurab, Makran, is one of the most intriguing finds relating to the history of the camels. It is, in my opinion, quite certain that the animal figurine above the shaft-hole depicts a camel of some kind. The attitude of the seated beast, with its steeply rising thick neck, and slightly raised head, is characteristic and does not occur in any other mammal. In addition, there are the rounded nose and the thickened cheek.

There are, however, two species of camel, the Bactrian with two humps, and the single-humped dromedary. The Khurab beast has only one hump and thus might perhaps be regarded as a dromedary. But every other feature speaks against such interpretation.

The neck, for instance, is thick and provided with a flange and a “ruff” of locks of thick hair in front, as found in the Bactrian camel. Moreover, the hump is situated above the pelvis, a position occupied by the posterior hump of the Bactrian, and much too far back for the dromedary. The question has from time to time been raised whether this hump is a genuine part of the figurine. Mr. Lauriston Ward has assured us that the hump is definitely part of the original artefact and not a lump of corrosion. It requires interpretation, therefore, as part of the animal. One might argue that it merely indicates the raised hindquarters of the seated beast, but the distinct individuality of the “hump,” which rests on top of the outline of the back, deprives this assumption of any anatomical foundation.

The statements of time-spans (Distanzangaben) were thoroughly investigated by scholars discussing the problem of Mesopotamian chronology in the second millennium B.C., and were recently the subject of a detailed article. Some of these statements are no more than approximate estimates (e.g. all the statements of time-spans in Nabonidus' inscriptions) and are of no help for the establishment of an exact chronological scheme. Other statements reflect the efforts of the scribes to base their calculations on available data, thus becoming an important source for the study of chronology.

The publication of the Assyrian King-Lists (henceforth AKL) accelerated the investigation and understanding of the statements of Distanzangaben of the Assyrian kings. Poebel, who believed that the AKL supplies all the necessary data for the establishment of an exact Assyrian chronology, tried to fit the statements of time-spans into his kinglists-based chronological scheme. Soon afterwards, Weidner took the same line of enquiry. Later on, Landsberger demonstrated that there is a major chronological gap in the tradition of the AKL following the reign of Išme-Dagan (son of Šamši-Addu I) and that it is impossible to establish an exact chronological scheme just by combining all the available numbers of regnal years. Landsberger proposed that in the time of the Middle Assyrian kingdom there had still existed an “ungekurzte Rezension der Königliste”, and that this recension had served as basis for the calculations of time-spans by Shalmaneser I and Tiglath-pileser I. By calculating these time-spans backwards he tried to overcome the gaps existing in the tradition of the AKL in its present form, and this approach was accepted by subsequent scholars.

As today, bread in antiquity came in a multitude of varieties, some of which were specific to particular regions or populations. Examining the terminology and iconography of breads in Assyrian texts, it is clear that there was a continuity of certain types of bread peculiar to Assyria from the Middle Assyrian period to the final century of the Assyrian empire. This exemplifies the strength of Assyria's identity over half a millennium, and the persistence of its cultural independence in some respects from its Babylonian neighbour. The majority of the written sources refer to cultic activities, and the conservatism expected in cultic contexts no doubt contributes to the long-term persistence of certain types of bread. There may even be reason to see one variety (ḫuḫḫurtu) as the forerunner of a bread used in Jewish cultic contexts to this day (challah).

The severed head is a topic that has always attracted popular attention. In Christian art, for example, it was an image of martyrdom and fearless resistance against suppression. In contrast, popular accounts of headhunting have been used to convey an image of the primitive for Western audiences since the nineteenth century (e.g. Panel 1992). In anthropology headhunting has long been discussed in terms of materialist and evolutionary models. Only recently attempts have been made to place the phenomenon of headhunting in a wider historical and regional context (Hoskins 1987; idem 1996b; George 1991). The headhunter has become a professional recruiter in the search for executives to fill high-level positions. However, most scholars would not look to urban societies when researching the topic of the practice of headhunting, namely the taking of a head. We still habitually perceive it as an expression of violence and primitive warfare that occurs in stateless societies. In opposition to that view, this article will focus on an urban society in which a headhunt was, in at least one case, carried out in a strict anthropological sense: that is the headhunt of Ashurbanipal, described in the annals as the overthrow of the Elamite king Te-Umman and portrayed on the reliefs at Nineveh.

Anatolian prehistory has had great pioneers: Myres, Ormerod, Frankfort, Götze and others. Yet, in its present form, it is one of the youngest branches of archaeology. We might say that it was born when the Alişar excavations were in progress, round about 1930, on which reckoning it is less than twenty years old. Unfortunately for us in England, it grew with the rapidity of adolescence between 1939 and 1945 when our attention was otherwise engaged.

During the war Turkish scholars were extremely active, and made some very important discoveries. German scholars were active too, at first in the field, later in research. The fresh material, like the comments thereon, has been published mainly in Turkish or in German works, the former being accessible but not always translated, the latter for the most part not available in England. Therefore a person whose opportunities and obligations have led to the study of both Turkish and German periodicals should try to make the results available: hence this paper. It is not, of course, confined strictly to the chronological and linguistic limits just mentioned, nor is it purely objective. For not only is a summary of facts needed, but also indications of the manner in which they might modify preconceived notions. Those indications may prove to be wrong. And whether much modification is needed depends on the notions. On almost every question one should keep an open mind, since excavation and exploration are still being carried on intensively, and new factors are continually introduced.

That Sumerian literary compositions, despite the rarefied, etherial, unworldly nature of much of their content, could prove to be significant source material for such practical, mundane, workaday matters as trade and commerce, has been known a long time, ever since the text of the hymns inscribed on the Gudea Cylinders was edited and published some seventy years ago. When therefore the theme of this Rencontre was announced, it occurred to me that it might be useful to search through all, or at least most, of the available Sumerian literary documents with an eye for those passages that have some relevance for trade and commerce, for barter and exchange. This paper will present the rather meagre results of this search.

Beginning with the myths, I found that there were four which contained passages relating to commerce and trade: (1) the Ur version of the Dilmun myth “Enki and Ninhursag”; (2) the myth commonly known as “Enki and the World Order”; (3) the poem celebrating the journey of Nanna-Suen to Nippur; (4) the myth revolving about the transfer of the me from Eridu to Erech, in which the deities Inanna and Enki are the main protagonists.

In May 1874 Birch wrote to Fox Talbot that “The Arabs have tapped one of the Babylonian libraries and documents of the later dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar are finding their way to England, but they are all sale tablets, and therefore, of inferior interest.” One of George Smith's intentions during his ill-fated last expedition in 1876 was to inspect and acquire similar contract tablets offered by Michael Marini of Baghdad in June 1875. Such was his interest that his dragoman Mathewson reported that, although hungry and tired on arrival at Baghdad, he was so impatient that he went in search of Marini to see and arrange the purchase of antiquities which he had in store for him. He would never for a moment be put off looking at anything with cuneiform on it. Smith reported and commented on an initial purchase of “about 800 objects and have got them very cheap”.

A cholera epidemic and unrest made conditions for his expedition such that he started down river to reach Kurnah on 30th April 1876 to take the advice of the Consul General. He returned through flood and sandstorm to arrive on 8th May when he noted “Difficulties, Plague, incomplete returns”; “Quarantine, disinfecting, dissatisfaction”; “riots at Baghdad two sects of Mahom(medans) dispute as to Shrines”. This was part of the wider political unrest of the time and he noted “rebelling on Hindiyeh, riot at Mosul, Salonica, Difficulty at Damascus fear of spread of plague”, and finally “give up expedition and return”.

Myres and Richter, A Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum (Oxford, 1899), record three Phoenician inscriptions among the contents of the Cyprus Museum. Since C.C.M. others have been acquired. The catalogue, complete to date, of Phoenician inscriptions in the Cyprus Museum is as follows:

• 1. Larnaka, 1894, C.C.M. 6231 = R.É.S. 1207.

• 2. Larnaka, 1894, C.C.M. 6232 = R.É.S. 1208.

• 3. Dali, found 1887. C.C.M. 6300 = R.É.S. 453. The squeeze from which Euting published did not adequately represent the state of preservation of the stone, and it is to be regretted that the text given in R.É.S. was not based on an independent examination of the stone. From a squeeze supplied to me by Mr. Mitford (Fig. 1) I read and restore as follows:

The stone has been built into the inner wall of a room in the Museum, and it is not now possible to tell how much—whether … or merely —preceded the name of the month.

Letters sent from the German scholar Ernst Herzfeld to Gertrude Bell between 1909 and 1912 provide valuable information about the scholarship of these remarkable characters as they explored issues pertaining to the development of early Islamic art and architecture in Mesopotamia. Through a spirited and often fractious exchange of ideas about a range of artistic and architectural topics that included vaulting techniques, the design of early mosques and palace forms, one can track the impact each had upon the other's scholarship, and the degree to which their respective views shaped one another's conclusions about important Islamic period sites such as Samarra and Ukhaidir.

Inspired and also shamed by John Russell's discovery of the fair copy of Layard's excavation notes for Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (Russell, 1995), I have recently gone through the extensive Layard Papers in the British Library in the hope of further interesting finds. From his first excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh, November 1845–June 1847, there is very little, only some notes and sketch plans of Nimrud; but these would have been only a fraction of the records Layard originally made. He presumably discarded all others, such as field notes, journals and diaries, sketches and site plans, after completing Nineveh and its Remains (1849). Of the excavations on Sennacherib's palace at Kuyunjik, in May and June 1847, there is only Layard's later fair copy of his field notes LN 1 (Russell, 1995, pp. 72–7 and SWPS, pp. 10–12). By comparison, for his second campaign, October 1849–April 1851, there is a wealth of material, both for Nimrud and especially for Kuyunjik, and although much of this does not necessarily add greatly to our knowledge of Layard's discoveries, his notebooks and diaries certainly do contain new and interesting details. These documentary sources will be used in a separate article, charting the course of Layard's excavation of Sennacherib's palace.

Under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq a new series of excavations at Tell Brak, northeastern Syria, commenced with a first season from mid March to late May 1994. Our gratitude for support goes especially to the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, in particular in Damascus to the Director-General, Dr Sultan Muhesen, and the Director of Excavations, Dr Adnan Bounni, in Hasake to Sd Jean Lazare and in Der ez-Zor to Sd Ass'ad Mahmud, and to our representative Sd Hussein Yusuf for his good-humoured assistance throughout the season. Funding was most generously provided by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, and the British Academy, to all of whom sincere thanks are expressed. For first-class mechanical support we thank Mr T. Falzani of Cambridge.

The team in 1994 comprised Dr Roger Matthews (excavations director), Dr Wendy Matthews (micromorphologist and pottery specialist), Ms Helen McDonald (registrar and pottery specialist), Professor Farouk al-Rawi (epigraphist and site supervisor), Ms Fiona Macalister (conservator), Mr James Conolly (lithics specialist), Ms Lisa Cooper, Mr Geoffery Emberling, Ms Candida Felli and Mr Nicholas Jackson (site supervisors). Ms Amy Emberling and Mr Jake Emberling joined us for part of the season, and we were visited in May by Professor D. Oates and Dr J. Oates.

Middle Assyrian texts have a phrase ṭuppa ṣab¯atu, which is usually understood to mean “to take (possession of) a tablet”. There is a corresponding type of tablet called a ṭuppu ṣabittu (plural (ṭuppatu ṣabbutātu). This article contends that ṭuppa ṣabātu is a technical term for drawing up a formal document, and that ṭuppu ṣabittu is a “formally drawn-up tablet”, normally if not invariably involving at least one seal impression, used both in private commercial contexts and in public administration. It is further maintained that this usage survives into Neo-Assyrian times, when its most frequent (but not exclusive) usage is at the end of a legal document where a witness (often identified as a scribe) is described as ṣābit ṭuppi: this has been understood to mean that this scribe retained possession of the document, or that a third party “kept” the document. In the light of the fresh Middle Assyrian evidence, it is preferable to see it as referring to the scribe “who drew up the document”.

To speak about Nineveh from the perspective of the archives of Mari may seem rash: the Middle Euphrates is a long way from the banks of the Tigris. Yet the importance of Nineveh and its shrine was such that several texts found at Mari mention it as what must then have been a religious metropolis.

During the period when Mari was under the dominion of Samsî-Addu, his son, Yasmah-Addu, sat on its throne. He was primarily responsible for affairs in the west, but personally participated in the military campaign marked by the fall of Nineveh and received numerous letters informing him of military events related to this event. Even after the conquest of Mari, when Yasmah-Addu had left the area, news of Nineveh and its surroundings went on arriving at the capital of the Middle Euphrates and continued to do so more sporadically in the era of Zimrî-Lîm.

I would like first to present the data relevant to the geography and toponymy of the kingdom of Nurrugûm, to which Nineveh belonged at that time, and then to reconstruct the campaign that led to the fall of Nineveh and the complete annexation of the kingdom. I will end with some remarks on the famous commemorative inscription placed by Samsî-Addu in the temple Emenue at Nineveh.

This article is a pilot study investigating sealing and seals on the published tablets in the British Museum that come from Sippar and are dated to the reign of Hammurabi. The limitations of such a sample are self-evident: the present published corpus consists of carefully selected or randomly copied or transliterated texts, which are only a minute portion of the whole of Hammurabi period texts, and are without archival context (see n. 4). While this approach cannot hope to give a complete picture of the role of seals in the Sippar of Hammurabi, it has raised points of interest in scribal and sealing practice and may generate less conventional methods in the study of Old Babylonian sealing.

The c. 177 texts referred to in this article (see n. 2) range through most of Hammurabi's reign (1792–1750 BC) and span the majority of text types: lawsuits, inheritances, bequests, nursing and adoption contracts, marriages, sales, property exchanges, rentals, leases, loans, receipts and miscellania (e.g. memoranda, hire of person, gift of millstone). By far the most common of these texts are field leases. For the sake of convenience the tablets discussed below will be referred to as long-term (e.g. sales, adoptions, estate settlements) or short-term (e.g. leases, receipts). The relevance of this to sealing will become apparent.

In a sense the present article continues the work of the Rev. C. H. W. Johns in publishing the neo-Assyrian legal and administrative texts from Nineveh. The majority of the new texts come from the excavations of R. Campbell Thompson at Nineveh, but in addition to these I have copied some small fragments from the older K texts, and a few pieces from the excavations of 1904 and 1905. Further, by the kindness of the authorities of the Ashmolean Museum, I have been able to include a single text, which is probably not from Nineveh (No. 1).

No one would maintain that these texts, many of which are ‘useless’ fragments, are of great importance. None the less, I have copied every piece, since there is always the chance of a join to a larger published text, and since publication of even the smallest fragment saves later scholars the trouble of establishing its unimportance on the original. I have given transliterations of almost every one, and translations of most, in the hope that this will make them more accessible to the non-specialist, and prompt the specialist to study the texts more deeply in taking issue with my own interpretations. This journal has seen the publication of many similar texts from Nimrud over the past 20 years, and it is equally fitting that texts excavated by Campbell Thompson should find a place in Iraq, with which he was so closely associated.

The palace of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud was the best preserved of all those discovered in the nineteenth century. The slabs along its walls had never been burnt, and most stood or survived to their full original height. But because the sculptures upon them were generally repetitive and so not necessarily required by the British Museum which paid for their excavation, while the subjects had a special appeal to missionaries and lovers of the picturesque, they became more widely dispersed and consequently misunderstood than those of any other building. The narrative reliefs have been frequently illustrated, but these were found only in the throneroom B and the eroded west wing; the remaining rooms were decorated with pictures either of genies and sacred trees or of the king flanked by genies and courtiers. These formal reliefs outnumber all those surviving complete from elsewhere; a study of them is essential for any understanding of the techniques and procedures used by Assyrian sculptors. A preliminary need, however, is to work out the positions in which the extant slabs stood before their removal. The following article is an attempt to point out, by reference to unpublished examples, some of the main characteristics which distinguish the reliefs from different rooms and on which the full list of provenances in the appendix is based.

Ashurnasirpal moved the capital of Assyria to Nimrud-Calah in his fifth year (879 B.C.), but vital public buildings were still being constructed long after his death. Presumably the palace was given priority, as the king was resident in Calah just before starting on his sixth campaign, but the standard inscriptions which are carved on every wall-relief in the palace as well as on the inaugural stela include a mention of his expedition to the Mediterranean; since this was not undertaken until some time between his eighth and nineteenth years, a reasonable date for the completion of the decoration may be a little before 870.