The Chalcolithic period in Mesopotamia and Iran (c.6000–4000 b.c.e.) is characterised by larger cities replacing small farming settlements, technological developments including wheel thrown pottery and copper metal working, and people establishing long distance trade networks. The Halaf horizon (5900–5100 b.c.e.) developed out of the local late pottery Neolithic tradition and is found throughout western Syria, southern Turkey, and northern and central Iraq. This archaeological culture is defined by a finely painted pottery, dryland farming, round and rectangular houses, and the use of stamp seals. A comparable ceramic horizon, the J-ware horizon (5200–4700 b.c.e.) arose in the Mahidasht and Kermanshah valleys of Iran. The J-ware ceramics are finely painted, possibly deriving from the Halaf tradition, but also slipped and burnished. The Rowanduz Archaeological Program's (RAP) excavations elucidate links between northern Iraq and northern Iran from the Chalcolithic to the modern period. This paper explores the relationship between the Halaf and J-ware traditions at Banahilk, recently re-excavated by RAP, and the larger contacts during the Chalcolithic.

The bēt ḫilāni is one of the most famous features of Assyria's royal palaces as well as one of its most elusive. The term is mostly known from Assyrian royal inscriptions, which describe it as an architectural feature inspired by the architecture of Syro-Anatolia. Such explicit references to the architecture of other cultures is exceptional and provides a rare glimpse into the valuations of Assyria's architects.

Modern attempts to identify the bēt ḫilāni archaeologically are almost as old as the field of ancient Near Eastern Studies. Unfortunately, the discourse has become more convoluted over time through the integration of disparate architectural features into a single bēt ḫilāni discourse and a narrow view of how architectural exchanges occur. Past research has generally assumed a morphological correspondence between the Assyrian bēt ḫilāni and the external porticoes that typify Syro-Anatolian architecture. This article will argue that Assyrian architects had a different set of ideals and interests which led them to change the external Syro-Anatolian portico into an interior feature used to add monumentality and ornamentation to the rooms of Assyria's palaces. This changes the bēt ḫilāni from a morphological category into a decorative one and contextualises it within the architectural traditions of Assyria.

This paper examines discoveries made during the survey of Kall Karim and presents a chronological framework for this site based on ceramic decorative styles and forms. This site was first identified during archaeological survey of the northwestern part of the Posht-i Kuh area in Ilam province (west Iran) in the winter of 2016. Kall Karim is located in a rugged area on the northern slopes of Seh Kurvand Mountain in the Bawlly region, which is used for winter pastures of nomadic tribes. According to surface remains, the ancient use of Kall Karim is entirely related to pottery production activities. All the surface sherds belong to the Ubaid period; according to typological studies and comparison of motifs and forms, we propose that Kall Karim belongs to Ubaid 2-3. It seems that both abundance of necessary materials and the accessibility of fuel for kilns caused the formation of Kall Karim in this location, far from residential centers.

The small collection of ancient Near Eastern seals in the school museum at Charterhouse was called to our attention by the kindness of Mr. Ian Blake. It was assembled in the nineteenth century through two gifts, that of D. G. Prinsep in 1876 (eight cylinders) and that of Leonard Marshall in 1896 (sixteen cylinders and five Sassanian stamp seals). No information has survived about the exact source of these seals, though, as will be seen, they might well all come from sites in southern Iraq. We are most grateful to the Governors and Headmaster of Charterhouse for allowing these seals to be taken to Oxford for study and photography. The School authorities also subsidized the cost of photography, which was done by Mr. R. L. Wilkins of the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. In the following concise catalogue Professor O. R. Gurney is responsible for the seal inscriptions (save for a single Sassanian one kindly read by Dr. A. D. H. Bivar), and Dr. P. R. S. Moorey for the classification, description and discussion of the designs. We gratefully acknowledge advice on various points from Mr. Briggs Buchanan and Professor W. Lambert, who bear no responsibility for any persisting errors. For the abbreviations used in the catalogue see pp. 80–1. Measurements given are in millimetres (height × width); figures such as 1–1956–2 are the Charterhouse registry numbers.

The following pages are translated from an unpublished Bodleian MS. They form the first part of the introduction to an Arabic commentary on the Eisagoge of Porphyry, which the title page and the Bodleian catalogue ascribe to the well-known Arab philosopher al-Fārābī (first half of the tenth century A.D.). We know from independent sources that al-Fārābī wrote a commentary to the Eisagoge. This is evidently what we have before us, but the text dealing with the Eisagoge, which was later itself commented on by Avempace, is a different work.

The world empire of the Arabs was already an established fact considerably earlier than A.D. 700, It is generally admitted that the Arabs in the countries which they came to rule were the heirs of classical antiquity to a considerable extent. This is nowhere more evident than in philosophy and the sciences. If at first sight it seems surprising that they made more use of ancient philosophy and science than the general literature and common institutions of the Graeco-Roman world such as the theatre and the gymnasium, the reason is doubtless to be found in the abstract character of these branches, in consequence of which they did not impinge directly on the prejudices of the new rulers.

Two large Akkadian rock crystal cylinder seals retain red and white decorations painted within their central perforations; one seal is striped while the other bears a chevron design. In the case of the striped seal, the walls of the perforation were longitudinally grooved, presumably to aid retention of the decoration. Hematite or red ochre was used as red pigment in both seals. It would have been possible to paint the red stripes/chevrons around the central perforations with a small brush operated from within a narrow tube. The perforations were subsequently over-painted with white pigment (probably calcined bone) providing a contrasting background. Lead liners were inserted into the perforations of both seals, apparently to protect the decorations.

The perforation of another rock crystal seal is longitudinally grooved and bears the corroded remains of a copper liner which may have also served a decorative purpose. Traces of red pigment and/or distinct longitudinal grooves were observed in three other seals and may be present in a further two seals. Thus, the perforations of at least six and possibly eight of the twelve Akkadian rock crystal cylinder seals in the British Museum's collections appear to have been decorated. These observations suggest that the practice of painting or decorating the perforations was more common than has previously been appreciated.

In the course of research undertaken with M. Louise Scott in Mosul and Baghdad in early 1987 I had the great privilege of making the acquaintance of Sd. Mohammed Ali Mustafa, who went out of his way to help us in all that he could, and whose wonderful knowledge and generosity we shall always remember. Among the material which he unearthed for us were photographs of inscribed stone troughs from Nineveh and his own copies of their inscriptions.

These troughs came to light in 1954, when a section of the ancient city walls of Nineveh just North of the mound of Nebi Yunus was destroyed. At that time Mohammed Ali Mustafa was already involved in work at Nineveh and was able to carry out an emergency investigation. Unfortunately, there is no map surviving which shows the exact location of the troughs, but an examination of photographs taken at the time (Plate XXI, in which latter note especially the “pagoda” roof in the background to the left: this still stands) and of the area as it now appears, along with consideration of details provided by Mohammed Ali Mustafa, allows us to fix the position of the troughs just within the walls at the place marked on Fig. 1. The error is not likely to be more than 15 metres up or down the length of the walls.

After the discovery of Royal Palace G at Ebla in 1974, several contributions, particularly by the writer and by P. Matthiae, addressed specific aspects of the artistic and architectural cultures of Early and Old Syrian Ebla. Many of these aspects revealed contacts and comparisons with Ur. It was not, however, possible to build up a coherent picture from these random and unrelated aspects. Such a picture may still elude us, but in the presence of a varied documentation relating to different periods, we think it is now opportune to review the evidence.

The Tablet 6 A 343, which is now in the possession of the Danish National Museum at Copenhagen, was excavated in the year 1936 by the Danish Expedition to Hama in Syria. For permission to publish the text, I am indebted to the Carlsberg Foundation, which sponsored the excavations; to Professor Harald Ingholt, Yale University, who directed the Expedition; and to Mr. Niels Breitenstein, Keeper of the Department of Classical Antiquities at the Danish National Museum. I take the opportunity to thank Mr. Breitenstein for his interest in my work with the Hama tablets in general. For very generous and valuable assistance with the reading and interpretation of difficult signs and passages especially in the latter part of the text, I am much indebted to Professor Benno Landsberger of the University of Chicago.

The tablet 6 A 343 was found in the remains of the ancient city of Hama, in Building III of Level E, which provides us with the year 720 B.C. as a lower date: the year in which Hama was conquered by the armies of Sargon II of Assyria. It is, however, possible that at least some of the tablets found in Building III should be dated to the ninth century B.C., inasmuch as a letter (6 A 334) found in the same archaeological context may with some probability be dated to the reign of one Marduk-apil-uṣur, a local ruler of Suḫi and a contemporary of Shalmaneser III of Assyria.

Almost all modern writers agree on the list of the stations on the caravan road linking Mosul to Nisibin, as it was known to the Arab geographers of the classical age (ninth–eleventh centuries) and their successors of the Middle Ages. Starting from Mosul it includes: Balad, Bâ’aynâtha, Barqa’îd, Adhrama, Tell Farrâsha and Nisibin.

The first station, Balad, does not raise any problem; its identification with Eski-Mosul fixes it firmly on the map, on the Tigris, at a distance of 40 kilometres to the north-west of Mosul (see Fig. 1).

After Balad, questions begin to arise, and it may not be impossible that some of the proposed localisations could be revised.

These localisations are well known:

For Bâ’aynâtha, de Goeje proposed Abû Wadjnah, in Iraq, near the ’Ain Zâlah airfield of the Mosul Petroleum Company, and Dussaud suggested Tell al ’Uwaynât, also in Iraq, to-day on the railway line Mosul-Syria.

Barqa’îd was pushed back by de Goeje and Von Oppenheim beyond the Syrian border, to Tell Rumailân (or Rumaileh) near Tell Hâdi, with, as a corollary, the localisation of its replacement, Bashazza, at Tshilagha, 25 kilometres to the West of Qubûr al bîdh, also in Syria.

In the course of the excavation of a building which has become known as Fort Shalmaneser, a well preserved slab of greenish alabaster with an inscription from Shalmaneser III was discovered in a doorway leading into the room F.S., S. 4, where it served as a threshold. The slab measures 146 cms. in width (length) and 62 cms. in height (width); brickwork and bitumen covering which extended c. 10 cms. at either edge of the slab concealed the beginning and end of each line of the inscription. A rectangular socket hole near the upper edge of the slab was designed to receive a vertically sliding bar. There is a crack in the stone running from the upper to the lower edge; a natural flaw in the surface is responsible for the circumstance that the sign KUR, in line 5, was incised to a smaller scale than the other signs of the inscription. Part of the surface at the upper edge of the slab is worn; for this reason part of the first line of the inscription is lost.

The inscription is framed, and the individual lines of inscription are separated by ruled lines. The inscription continues beyond its frame at the end of the second line. The width of the inscribed panel is 141 cms., its height 53 cms. The distance between each ruled line is 5 cms. A copy of the inscription is shown in Plate XII. The following is a transliteration and translation of the text.

The excavations carried out during the 1926–7 and 1930–1 seasons at Ur by C. L. Woolley brought to light two large sectors (AH and EM) of the Old Babylonian city characterized by private dwellings dating from the Larsa domination but partly re-used until the Kassite period after the destruction of the city by King Samsu-iluna of Babylon, in the eleventh year of his reign (1729 BC) (Woolley 1955: 163–94; Woolley and Mallowan 1976; see also Pinnock 1995: 101–11). These sectors offer important documentation about daily life in lower Mesopotamia at the beginning of the second millennium BC and meaningful data concerning architecture and urbanism in the Middle Bronze Age, as well as hundreds of cuneiform tablets discovered in the archives of private citizens. The presence of several graves below the floors and in particular the existence of corbel-vaulted family tombs in baked brick, built with sophisticated technique beneath what seem to be domestic chapels (Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 29–30, 33–9, Pls. 43–8), usually placed at the back of the houses, led Woolley to identify cultic activities linked to ancestors, suggesting close kinship between the persons living in a house and the dead buried beneath it. In spite of the criticism raised by M.-Th. Barrelet a few years after the publication of the final report, it seems very probable that Woolley's hypothesis is correct, as confirmed at other Mesopotamian sites (e.g. the tombs related to private residences found at Larsa; see Calvet 1996).

Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age is marked by a well-documented Old Assyrian presence during the kārum period (20th–17th century b.c.), a dynamic time of long-distance trade and cultural contact. One of the idiosyncrasies of the social history of this period is a special bigamous arrangement which allowed Assyrian men to enter second marriages on the condition that one wife remained at home in Aššur, and the other in Anatolia. In testing the extent to which a middle ground for cross-cultural compromise is recognisable in such Assyro-Anatolian marriage practices, this article considers whether the terminology used in reference to the first and second wives (amtum and aššatum respectively) can be interpreted as the crucial element of misunderstanding in middle ground formation.

Besides their significance in administrative procedures, cylinder seals also played an important role as amulets in ancient Mesopotamia. There are many references to them being used in medical and magical procedures, which sometimes determine their features of magical potential. Thus not only the imagery and inscription of cylinder seals but also the raw material of which they were made contributed to their medico-magical usage (cf. Collon 1987: 119; 1997: 19–20). This paper deals with the last-mentioned feature of cylinder seals, that is their raw material, which is treated in a short series known from BAM 194 viii’ 9’–14’, as well as from another three tablets published here for the first time.

A statuette of a woman dating from the Second Dynasty of Lagash features exceptional gold, silver and copper bracelets that have been recently restored and analysed. The statue is remarkable for its refined dress, to date known only from a small number of female figures, almost all linked to the court of Lagash's Second Dynasty. Examination of the statuette and comparable pieces has revealed possible traces of polychromy, although these vestiges are particularly difficult to identify with any certainty. This paper presents these results within the larger corpus of female depictions from the Second Dynasty of Lagash, together with other very similar examples, to better understand the meaning of the specific costume they wear and the possible identity of the women wearing it.

This catalogue of ancient Near Eastern seals is published and the photographs are reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The term “ancient Near East” is here used to cover the period from the prehistoric age until the end of the Achaemenid Empire. The majority of the seals in the Collection are Mesopotamian in origin but Achaemenid art is well represented and there are a few examples of Syrian, Anatolian and Phoenician glyptic; Egyptian seals have not been included. None of the seals was obtained through excavation and in only a few cases is it known where they were acquired. In consequence their classification has had to be based entirely on stylistic grounds. No attempt has been made in this article to give a general history of the development of Near Eastern glyptic art since this has been treated in a number of publications, notably H. Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, A. Moortgat, Vorderasiatische Rollsiegel, E. Porada, Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections, vol. I, H. H. von der Osten, Altorientalische Siegelsteine der Sammlung Mans Silbius von Auloch (Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensis, vol. XIII).

The seals have been classified according to form into three groups: I, cylinder seals; II, seal-amulets; III, stamp seals. Groups I and III have been subdivided according to region, but so far as possible a chronological arrangement has been followed in order to give a continuous presentation of the development of glyptic art.

Work on my publication of the University of Pennsylvania's 1931 soundings at Fara prompted me to look again at the material from the Early Dynastic cemetery at al-‘Ubaid. This study resulted. It attempts to re-define the relative dates of the graves within the al-‘Ubaid cemetery. It also reviews the evidence for the dating of the cemetery as a whole in an effort to establish its position within the Early Dynastic period.

There is an extended discussion of the pottery types found in Sumer in ED II and IIIa. The neglect of this material has recently been highlighted by Professor Adams' survey of the Sumerian “heartland”. One of the most striking problems to emerge from his study is the difficulty of identifying pottery and sites of this period.

It is appropriate to dedicate this article to Sidney Smith, on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday, for like many scholars primarily concerned with the ancient history and archaeology of Western Asia, his interests were frequently drawn to the distant field of South Arabia where so much enigmatic material reminiscent of the northern, urban monuments of Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia has been found.

The boldly carved, large alabaster head here illustrated on Plates XXIV–XXV is as good a specimen of its kind as I have ever seen, and can be confidently authenticated, not only because of its assured style and antique condition, but also on account of the circumstances of discovery.

This head, which is at present privately owned, was found by a young officer, in 1962, when his regiment was stationed in Aden. On a long distance patrol he visited the ancient city of Timna‘ which he noted as situated on the Yemen-Aden Protectorate border, about two days drive by armoured car, west of ‘Ataq. He described the site as ‘ now reduced by nature to cover a square mile of rubble, often covered with high sand-dunes. There is no water now and only a few Beduin live there’. He also observed that this appeared to be the site of an ancient capital city, that broken pillars and other architectural remains were lying around and that walls and gates could still be traced.

In this article the name of the Sumerian god Isimu is analysed as “who brings the shoots forth” and explained by the chthonic character of his master Enki. Investigated is as well the ratio behind the complex writing of his name and the names of other servants of Enki. Beside this it is shown that Isimu must have been known at least since the time of the archaic texts from Ur. There was also another Janus like mythical being, the male and female Ara, at one point identified with Isimu.

In his article “Babylonian Music Again”, O. R. Gumey provides a welcome update on research on the tablets concerning music of the ancient Near East. Gurney's article also has a corrective effect on a rambunctious article by Martin West that appeared shortly before. Gurney seems to me to have the musical system almost right. West, while he seems to understand the system, presents it in ways that I find illogical, and that I fear will be confusing or misleading. Furthermore, while some of West's conclusions exceed the span of even my own irresponsible imagination, some of his other conclusions seem unnecessarily restrictive, conservative, or simply old-fashioned. Here I want to assert limits of the kind and extent of musical conclusions that we can expect to draw from the available data, but also to explore the kinds of ideas that we can entertain without fear of restriction by those same data.

Gurney as well as West report with approval a new reading proposed by Th. J. H. Krispijn. There is more to be said about this reading and about its effect on our understanding of ancient Near Eastern music. Krispijn's new reading is for the text UET VII 74, for which Gurney now gives an updated transliteration (p. 102). I reproduce here Gurney's paradigms for the instructions in Chapters I (ll. 1–12) and II (ll. 13–20) of UET VII 74.

(1–12) If the sammu is (tuned as) X and the (interval) Y is not clear, you tighten the string N and then Y will be clear. Tightening.

(13–20) If the sammu is (tuned as) X and you have played an (unclear) interval Y, you loosen the string N and the sammu will be (in the tuning) Z. [Loosening].

When first interpreting this text twenty-five years ago, it was assumed that Chapter I involved loosening the strings one by one, thus shifting the whole tuning gradually downwards; and in Chapter II, tightening the strings one by one, with the reverse effect. As we then read the text, it did not specify tightening or loosening, and so the choice was arbitrary. Gurney (p. 102) blames the choice on the assumption that the text referred to the harp, whose longest and lowest string was identified as “front”, therefore (according to Nabnītu XXXII) the “first”.