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little, only some notes and sketch plans of Nimrud; but these would have been only a fraction of the records Layard originally made.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.

The cuneiform tablets in the British Museum published here come from Old Babylonian Nineveh. A tablet from the Ashmolean Museum is also published here because its contents, reminiscent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, seem to link it with some of the British Museum fragments. Despite the fact that it was registered in the same year, the Ashmolean tablet almost certainly does not come from Nineveh, as the ductus is entirely different, and so is the clay. According to the sequence of numbers to which it belongs, the most likely findspot is Kish.

The tablet fragments and flakes numbered BM 134537 A–I and 134538 probably all belong to a single, very large tablet of the Old Babylonian period. They are written in Old Babylonian script quite similar to that of the letters from Tell al Rimah, and distinct from the script of Sippar. They were found by Campbell Thompson in the temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, together with other fragments which include a possibly bilingual text, and three letters.

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”.

An expedition under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq completed its eighth season at Nimrud, ancient Calah, during the first week of May 1957 after a two months' campaign which began early in March. For most of the season about two hundred workmen were employed including a number of skilled Sherqatis who have been with us from 1949 onwards. This year was memorable in the annals of the dig for two reasons: first we concluded our programme of work on the akropolis itself; secondly we began the excavation in the outer town of the great building known as Fort Shalmaneser which is likely to prove to be a military establishment more important than any other hitherto discovered in ancient Assyria and most prolific in its yield of antiquities.

Plaine immense, de 900 à 950 km de longueur et de 100 à 200 km de largeur, la Mésopotamie a toujours créé beaucoup de difficultés aux archéologues et aux historiens lorsqu’il leur fallait localiser des sites antiques. Bien qu’extrêmement aride en effet, – il tombe moins de 200 mm de pluie dans toute la région située entre Bagdad et la mer, – la Mésopotamie est parcourue par deux grands fleuves: l'Euphrate et le Tigre, aussi étrangers au pays que le Nil peut l'être à l'Egypte; à la différence de ce dernier cependant, ils ne coulent pas, encaissés dans des vallées capables de les contenir, aux très hautes eaux. A partir de Ramadi pour l'Euphrate, de Beled pour le Tigre, ces deux fleuves dominent les pays environnants comme le font le Rhin et la Meuse dans les Pays-Bas. Or, à Ramadi et à Beled, l'Euphrate n'est plus qu'à 47 m 20 d'altitude et le Tigre à 31 m 55 alors qu’ils ont encore à parcourir respectivement 890 et 970 km jusqu’au Golfe Persique. En temps de crue, les fleuves peuvent donc se répandre sur des milliers de km2 et submerger tout le pays.

It was not only in temples and upon tables of offerings that sacrifices were performed in early times in Mesopotamia, for certain detached areas were hallowed, and in them sacrifices were offered, constantly repeated on precisely the same spot. The ritual directions for the preparation for these ceremonies must have been both explicit and stringent, for the evidence reveals a scrupulous adherence to every detail, perpetually repeated every time the place was used. These particular places of sacrifice are known as “Opferstätten”, the designation given them by the excavators at Uruk-Warka, who were the first to interpret the evidence correctly; it is, indeed, to Dr. Lenzen's perspicuity and detailed observations that we owe most of the information we possess concerning them.

When al Mu‘awiyah in A.D. 661 became Caliph in Damascus, and founded there a line of rulers addicted by policy and temperament to architectural enterprise and reliant in many spheres on the talents and support of a Syrian population, the building trades of Syria, which had enjoyed but desultory employment since the busy years of Justinian, were quickened to a new and fecund term of life.

Several buildings created in the ensuing century have survived in part: at Damascus al Walid's mosque; in Jerusalem the Ṣakhrah and a part of the Aqṣa mosque; on the fringes of the Syrian desert and in the Jordan valley the ruins of at least a dozen desert palaces and baths. It is no surprise to find in these buildings, in their ashlar and timber construction, their arcaded columns, their mosaics and marble revetments, and in many features of their plans, a perpetuation of well-established Syrian traditions, the accumulated inheritance of Phoenician, Aramaean and Hellenized Christian societies over the two thousand years preceding the Arab conquest.

The traditional aspect of Umayyad architecture is self-explanatory. What is more curious historically is the intrusion into its Syrian environment of structural and decorative processes (like brick vaulting, stucco revetments, or various new ways of drawing things) which can be shown to be of foreign devising, now for the first time admitted into the main current of Syrian architecture.

It has long been suspected that the use of iron predated the so-called meteoric and smelted iron of the later stages of prehistory. Certainly small objects of iron such as awls and pins are found from the Chalcolithic period onwards and the rightly famous iron swords from Alaca Höyük demonstrate skills in making larger weapons in the Early Bronze Age. I document the use of iron ore for hammers and maces at Early Bronze Age sites in the Taurus Mountains and early Chalcolithic Tell Kurdu in the Amuq valley. This intensive understanding of materials and their properties led, millennia later, to the ability to smelt terrestrial iron.

The goal of this article is to investigate the enigma of the Old Akkadian presence at Nineveh. After reviewing the written and archaeological evidence for such a presence, the lack of evidence at Nineveh will be compared with the comparatively richer testimony of the Old Akkadian occupation at Assur. The thesis of this paper is that Šamši-Adad's claim that Maništušu was the original builder of the temple of Ištar of Nineveh should be regarded as suspect in the absence of any other data to back up his claim. I would like to make it clear that I am not insisting that Nineveh was a desolate site with no inhabitants during the Old Akkadian period. On the contrary, I do believe that it was inhabited at this time, although the evidence is meagre. However, who these inhabitants were is a question that needs to be answered. An official residence or presence of the Old Akkadians at the site seems unlikely, and I hope that I can prove this thesis to you.

The previously cited proof of an Old Akkadian presence in Nineveh rests on primary and secondary evidence. The primary evidence said to reflect such a presence implies Old Akkadian texts and objects. However, the Old Akkadian texts consist of a few fragments of two broken stone inscriptions bearing royal dedications of the Old Akkadian king Naram-Sin. The fragments were found in the area of the first-millennium Nabû temple. These dedications apparently recorded Naram-Sin's rebuilding of the Ekur in Nippur and were not concerned with any northern site. Consequently, the original inscriptions, of which these fragments are remnants, were probably brought to Nineveh in the seventh century from Nippur. They were carried there presumably at the same time as the Šulgi foundation document from Kutha and the Warad-Sin inscription from Ur, so they can hardly be used as evidence of an official Old Akkadian residence in Nineveh. Moreover, there is not one reference to the town of Nineveh in Old Akkadian sources.

Šamaš-šuma-ukīn is a unique case in the Neo-Assyrian Empire: he was a member of the Assyrian royal family who was installed as king of Babylonia but never of Assyria. Previous Assyrian rulers who had control over Babylonia were recognized as kings of both polities, but Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's father, Esarhaddon, had decided to split the empire between two of his sons, giving Ashurbanipal kingship over Assyria and Šamaš-šuma-ukīn the throne of Babylonia. As a result, Šamaš-šuma-ukīn is an intriguing case-study for how political, familial, and cultural identities were constructed in texts and interacted with each other as part of royal self-presentation. This paper shows that, despite Šamaš-šuma-ukīn's familial and cultural identity as an Assyrian, he presents himself as a quintessentially Babylonian king to a greater extent than any of his predecessors. To do so successfully, Šamaš-šuma-ukīn uses Babylonian motifs and titles while ignoring the Assyrian tropes his brother Ashurbanipal retains even in his Babylonian royal inscriptions.

In 1989 Muzahem Mahmud Hussein found the second of four rich tombs in the harem section of the NorthWest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud. The tomb contained the burials of Yaba, queen of Tiglathpileser III, and of Atalia, queen of Sargon II, and the tomb can therefore be dated to the last decades of the eighth century BC. This paper concerns three pairs of bracelets from Tomb II, and focuses in particular on the strange iconography of one of the pairs.

The purpose of this article is to make available to specialists and others interested the resources of Birmingham in the matter of ancient Near Eastern Seals. As would be expected, the lion's share comes from the City Museum, and I am indebted to Nicholas Thomas, Keeper of the Department of Archaeology, for permission to study and publish this material. His assistant, John Ruffle, has helped me by gathering the material together and in every other way. Miss Tess Martin, also of the City Museum, has kindly made impressions of all the seals published here.

Of the 56 seals in the City Museum, 42, numbered 541’65–582’65, were received quite recently as a bequest from Air Commodore E. St. Clair Harnett. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force in Iraq shortly after the First World War, and assisted the late Miss Gertrude Bell in her founding of the Baghdad Museum. He is mentioned in her letters as “Squadron Leader Harnett”, and it is appropriate that his collection should be published in Iraq, the Gertrude Bell Memorial. A notebook accompanying the seals records that they were collected in Baghdad between 1922 and 1927. Only in one case, now numbered 566’65, does it record the source of a seal, as Kish. Of the other 14 seals (all received from other donors), five, 552’62–556’62, were given by Woolley, and need not have come from Ur, since they are not included in the official publications.

The cuneiform scribal art in the first millennium was, by and large, one of conservatism. The creative activity of scribes of the first millennium was often relegated to the composition of commentaries and explanatory works on the great canonical series. Out of this artistic torpidity came a last gasp of genius. The horrifying destruction of Babylon and the hope of its reconstruction inspired a certain scribe, Kabti-ilani-Marduk (V 42), to compose Erra and Išum. Written on five tablets of about 750 lines altogether, our current text is reconstructed from thirty-seven exemplars from sites such as Assur, Nineveh, Babylon, Ur and, most recently, Me-Turnat (T. Haddad).

The story, entitled šar gimir dadmē, “King of the Entire Inhabited World”, presents little actual action. In almost Job-like fashion, the vast majority of the narrative consists of dialogue between the deities Erra, Išum, the Sebetti and Marduk, whose interactions in the divine realm ultimately lead to the destruction of Babylon and other major cities. Indeed, much of the scholarly activity concerning Erra and Išum has revolved around the significant difficulties presented by this dialogue.

Studies of the materials of cylinder seals (Sax, 1986, 1991b, and in preparation a, b, c) from Western Asia throughout the 3000 years or so of their production (c. 3500 B.C. to c. 400 B.c.) have shown that there was a chronological evolution in material usage. The seals are chiefly composed of simple mineral assemblages and the selection of particular raw materials appears to have been influenced by such properties as hardness and colour. A general trend, that higher proportions of harder stones were used with advancing time, has been observed (Gorelick and Gwinnet, 1979, 1990; Sax and Middleton, 1992). The trend in increasing hardness is likely to be related to the practical advantages of sealing with harder stones and to the correspondingly greater status that they commanded; it also would have required the development of suitable lapidary techniques. This paper is concerned with trends in material usage for cylinder seals in the latter half of the third millennium B.C. during the Akkadian, Post Akkadian and Ur III periods in Mesopotamia. The evolution in material usage during these periods is markedly different from those of both earlier and later periods, perhaps indicating the operation of special factors of availability, as will be discussed.

Details of the materials of the seals in the collections of the British Museum stylistically dating to the Akkadian, Post Akkadian and Ur III periods are included in the catalogue published by D. Collon (Bimson and Sax, 1982). Some minor amendments have been made to the results presented there but these do not affect the overall pattern of material usage.

The fragmentary obelisk of Ashurnasirpal II published here, in an entirely new reconstruction, was excavated at Nimrud by a British Museum expedition in late February 1853. The field director was Hormuzd Rassam, under the remote supervision of Henry Rawlinson in Baghdad. Since Rassam seldom receives proper credit for his Assyrian discoveries, which included the palace and much of the library of Ashurbanipal, the so-called White and Broken Obelisks, the Shamshi-Adad stela, the Balawat Gates, and much else, and since it is convenient to have succinct names for objects of this kind, I propose that this particular monument, which now bears the number 118800 in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum, should be known as the Rassam Obelisk. I am indebted to my colleagues in the British Museum for their comments on this paper, and to Miss Ann Searight for the drawings; the photographs were taken by the Museum's Photographic Service.

Toprakkale is the site that constitutes the starting point for the archaeology of Urartu, but the history of the largely destructive early excavations of the site is shrouded in darkness. The presence of items on the antiquities market said to come from the Van region attracted the interest of Austen Henry Layard, which led to brief excavations at the site of Toprakkale by the British Museum under Hormuzd Rassam in 1877, followed by further also brief investigations by K. Kamsarakan as well as continued illegal excavations. It is commonly held that Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt and Waldemar Belck excavated here between 1898–1899, but research performed in the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister's Office reveals their claim to have excavated there to be fraudulent and empty. This article uses primary source material from Ottoman archives to investigate the excavation history of one of the most iconic sites for the beginnings of Urartian Studies, and compels us to re-evaluate what we think we know about Toprakkale and the provenance of the objects associated with it.

Animal remains from two seasons of excavation at the Tell of Abu Salabikh (1975–1976) were examined during a month's visit to the site in October 1977. A proportion of this material was then selected for further study and was kindly sent on loan to the British Museum (Natural History) by the Department of Antiquities, Baghdad. Work is continuing on these specimens and on the equid skeleton described by Postgate and Moorey which had been loaned to the Museum a year earlier. The photographs, Plates XIV–XVI, were taken on site by Mr. David Nicolson and our thanks are due to him for his patience in the face of dust and sandflies.

The collection of animal remains was large, numbering perhaps more than 10,000 elements which were mixed with an equal or greater number of human bones. The animal bones were in a very fragmentary condition as is usual with the remains of food. They had suffered further breakage by the action of the compacted soil of the floors under which they were buried as well as by disturbance and re-burial following human interments. Furthermore the very high concentration of salts in the soil contributed to the fragmentation process. Shortage of time prevented analysis of this comminuted bone but the dimensions of every measurable element were recorded.

The general character of the Middle Assyrian glyptic is well understood from the seal-impressions on the archives from Assur, Fakhariyah and Rimah. As a result of the work of Saporetti (1979) there is now a better dating of the Assyrian tablets than was available to the pioneers. Mayer-Opificius (1986) made useful progress on the chronology of the thirteenth century designs, and this has been further elaborated by the present writer (1990).

There is at present no good evidence for geographical variations in the Assyrian seals, despite the wide spread of the material. This is in contrast to the chronological situation. The criteria for the thirteenth century are summarised here, but it is unnecessary to repeat the detailed arguments justifying them which are given in my former work. The thirteenth century is divided into three phases corresponding to the reigns of Adad-nirari I (1307–1275 B.C.), Shalmaneser I (1274–45 B.C.) and Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244–08 B.C.). This is partly for convenience and partly as a consequence of the form of Saporetti's book on the eponyms. When speaking of an “Adad-nirari” style I do not, therefore, mean to imply that such seals could not have been made in the adjacent reigns.