Moortgat here gives an account of the fourth campaign at Tell Chuēra, an important site situated on the frontier of North Central Syria, between the Ḫabur and the Balikh, about equidistant from Ras el ‘Ain and Tell Abiadh, in steppe country studded with ancient settlements. The work was conducted under the auspices of the Max-Freiherr-von-Oppenheim Institute and the Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, and is a pendant to the campaign instituted at Tell Halaf on the Upper Ḫabur by Oppenheim in 1911–1912. The results obtained at Chuēra also have a significant relation to the discoveries made by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in 1934–1938, at Chazar Bazar, Brak and elsewhere in the eastern Habur-Jaghjagha District, and are therefore peculiarly appropriate to discussion in this Journal which published accounts of these excavations about thirty years ago. Thus investigations spread over a period of more than 50 years are gradually placing this part of Northern Syria in a perspective which has become more clearly intelligible through the foreground of Babylonia.

The main mound of Chuēra is of large dimensions and spans a distance of over 1,000 metres from north to south. Winter rains are apt to be heavy, and water is available from a wadi of the same name. Buildings have appeared in several sectors of the mound, both of undressed stone, Steinbau I & III, and of mud-brick.

The text of úru àm-ma-ir-ra-bi, the longest extant Sumerian balaĝ-lament, is in the process of recovery and reconstruction from Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform tablets. This article presents a previously unpublished Babylonian tablet fragment that holds part of the composition's hitherto unknown eleventh tablet. The fragment also contains part of the catchline to the twelfth tablet, also unidentified until now, and is thus an important source for the reconstruction of úru àm-ma-ir-ra-bi.

During the summer of 1931, in the interval between the departure of the first and the arrival of the second of the two distinguished scholars who have occupied the post of Director of Antiquities in Iraq since the death of Gertrude Bell, I was privileged to hold for a few months inexpert administrative charge of the Department. It was at this time that my friend Aḥmad Beg-i Taufiq Beg, Mutaṣarrif of Sulaimani, reported that he had discovered in the naḥiya of Surdash a rock carving which he believed to be ancient Persian. The news was surprising. From 1919 to 1922, when the liwa was under direct British administration, many political and military officers had scoured the district on duty or in search of sport; in the last seven years, since the re-establishment of regular administration, visitors, though not particularly numerous, had not been rare; I myself, with many Kurdish friends who know of my interest in these things, had been in the neighbourhood two or three times. Yet I had never heard any whisper of the existence of such a monument. There was, indeed, one cave near Awdalan that was frequently talked about, an immense hollow running deep into the mountain and holding, no doubt, much of interest to the student of primitive man; but it was not that. I made up my mind to visit the place myself as soon as possible. But for the next three years a perverse fate seemed to turn my footsteps consistently in the direction of the Syrian desert, away from the Kurdish hills; and it was not until April 1934 that the fortunate conjunction of the ‘Id-al-’Adhḥa holidays and Easter gave me my opportunity. Aḥmad Beg was kind enough to make all the preliminary arrangements with Shaikh ‘Abdul Karim of the Qadiri-darwish takya of Awdalan, and to accompany me himself.

In 1912 Macalister published the 100-foot long line of enormous, rough uninscribed standing stones at Gezer in Palestine. The next year, Andrae published the strange, double row of stelae, some rough, some uninscribed, mostly very large, which he had found at Assur. The similarity between the two installations was immediately noted and for over sixty years the Stelenreihen at Assur have been cited in the many discussions of the maṣṣēbôt of Palestine. The singular importance of the Assur stelae lies in the fact that some of them were inscribed, whereas the Palestinian stones were not. The Assur inscriptions tell us that the stones represented people, and Eduard Meyer and others believed that the Gezer stones probably had the same meaning. Obviously, in order to project the meaning of the Assur stelae on the Gezer stones, one assumption had to be made: that the people in the two areas were practising identical customs. Curiously enough, this basic assumption has yet to be proved. In fact, many later scholars have taken the Assur stones to be merely one example of a wide-spread custom of setting up plain stones. The Assur stelae have been lumped together with the ever increasing number of plain stones, those found singly as well as those discovered in clusters, with Biblical evidence for maṣṣēbôt, with Punic stelae, and even with Greek hero cults. Far from considering the Assur inscriptions as the determining factor in interpreting uninscribed stones elsewhere, meanings drawn from this wide body of comparative material have been imposed on the Stelenreihen.

Babylon has been associated with incantation bowls since the first discoveries in the mid-nineteenth century. The “Rawlinson” collection of eight incantation bowls (seven were written in Aramaic and one in Mandaic) was accessioned on 9 October 1851 by the British Museum and, according to Trustees Minutes, had been “found in a tomb at Babylon”. Austin Henry Layard does not seem to have been privy to this provenance information when three of these incantation bowls were transcribed and translated in his book, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. Instead he claimed that the bowls from the “Rawlinson” collection were “obtained at Baghdad, where they are sometimes offered for sale by the Arabs; but it is not known from what sites they were brought.” This misinformation has been perpetuated and no further information has come to light on the unusual findspot.

Amongst the vast collections of the Iraq Museum are numerous incantation bowls from Babylon, to which IM 9726 can now be added (Fig. 1). The entry in the Register of the Iraq Museum, dated 1927/1928, is scant, not even mentioning the script of the bowl: “Bowl with Incantation Text. Baked clay 12.5 × 6.5 [cm]. Presented by Mey Marian”. Thirteen years later, Cyrus Gordon included IM 9726 in his resumé of international collections of incantation bowls that appeared in the 1941 issue of Orientalia. It was one of the eleven incantation bowls Gordon recorded from the Iraq Museum collection, which he noted “has increased considerably since my last visit to Baghdad in 1935” and which he correctly predicted “should eventually become the largest and the best”. However, Gordon, who noted that IM 9726 had nine lines of Aramaic, only presented excerpts of its text. He did not supply any photograph or drawing of this incantation bowl nor any other information.

The major cities of Babylonia possessed, at least by the end of the fourteenth century B.C., hemerologies which indicated, for each month of the year, which days in that month were regarded as propitious. In the time of Nazimaruttash, king of Babylon, whose reign covered the turn of that century, the versions of Sippar, Nippur, Babylon, Ur, Larsa, Uruk, and Eridu were collated and excerpted to produce a single version, which was presumably regarded thenceforward as the standard version for Babylonia.

This standard version (preceded by a longer text of a rather different kind, which indicated which months of the year were regarded as favourable for the performance of various specified actions, such as founding a palace, changing one's occupation, or falling from a roof) was later—perhaps some two centuries later—set out on a large tablet since found in the remains of the city of Ashur, and was followed on the tablet by a further version, by no means in complete agreement with the standard version, and identified on the tablet as the Ashur version.

To these two versions of the short summary hemerology for the whole year, however, the tablet adds two sets of special very detailed instructions for the first eight days of the seventh month of the year, Tashritu; the first set (to which are prefixed short instructions for certain days of the first month, Nisanu) is described on the tablet as the Ashur version, while the second (a shorter set, differing extensively in detail from the Ashur version, and without prefixed instructions for Nisanu, but including, additionally, special instructions for the ninth day of Tashritu) is marked as the Akkad version.

Le beau cylindre gravé en hématite A 357, trouvé en 1936 pendant la seconde campagne de fouilles à Chagar Bazar (Haute-Syrie), a été publié par Sir Max Mallowan dans son rapport définitif paru dès 1937 dans Iraq 4, 97, 111 et 136 à 137, ainsi que dans un article préliminaire dans Illustrated London News (1937), 521.

Il ressort du rapport dans Iraq, dont on admirera la précision, et l'étendue des comparaisons stylistiques, que le cylindre de Chagar Bazar faisait partie des offrandes funéraires déposées dans un caveau voûté en briques crues, anciennement écroulé, situé sous le sol d'une habitation comprenant au moins quatre pièces, et dont les fondations remontent au XIX e s.av.n.è. (“Grave 153, room 42, level I, early intermediate, section, fig. 6, p. 122”). A la suite de reconstructions, réparations et transformations successives de la maison, le niveau des sols superposés et des pavages dans les courettes a été rehaussé de 3 mètres. L'occupation semble s'être poursuivie jusque vers la fin du XVIIIe s.av.n.è., et aucune trace d'incendie n'a été signalée. Sous le sol de la pièce 42 où fut mis au jour le caveau 153 ont été dégagées trois inhumations: les offrandes qui y furent déposées constituent le contexte archéologique du cylindre A 357. Il se compose de poteries, dont certaines peintes (types fig. 21 (6), 22 (14), 23 (7), 24 (1)), attribuées au “early intermediate level I”, autrement dit à l'Ugarit Moyen 2 de la stratigraphie de Ras Shamra; cf. Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale, 91, 1900–1750 av.n.è.).

Nelle rovine delle antiche città della Valle dei Due Fiumi gli strati più recenti sogliono risalire al periodo persiano ossia all'epoca dei Parti e dei Sassanidi, quando la Mesopotamia faceva parte dell'impero partico o del regno sassanidico. In quasi tutti i luoghi dove gli scavatori hanno iniziato delle ricerche archeologiche essi si sono imbattuti anzitutto in rovine più o meno vaste e più o meno importanti di questi due periodi. Già il Loftus a Warkah, poi i Tedeschi a Babele, e più recentemente a Ctesifonte, gli Americani a Nippur e ora a Seleucia, gli Inglesi a Kish, i Tedeschi ad Ashshur, ed ancora in altri luoghi si sono trovate tracce più o meno cospicue della civiltà partica, vale a dire della civiltà mesopotamica del periodo partico.

A second season of a new programme of excavations at Tell Brak in northeastern Syria took place from mid-March to late May 1995. Our sincere gratitude for continuing support goes especially to the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, in particular in Damascus to the Director-General, Professor Dr Sultan Muhesen, the Director of Excavations, Dr Adnan Bounni, and to all their colleagues who assisted us in many ways. We also thank Sd Jean Lazare of the Antiquities Office in Hasake and Sd Ass'ad Mahmud of Der ez-Zor Museum. Our representative was again Sd Hussein Yusuf who provided invaluable assistance in all aspects of our work, for which we are very grateful. Funding was 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.

The excavation team in 1995 comprised Dr Roger Matthews (excavations director), Ms Helen McDonald (registrar and pottery specialist), Professor Farouk al-Rawi (epigraphist and archaeologist), Dr Susan Colledge (palaeobotanist and environmentalist), Dr Keith Dobney (zooarchaeologist), Dr Wendy Matthews (micromorphologist), Ms Fiona Macalister (conservator), Ms Kim Duistermaat, Mr Geoffrey Emberling, Mr Nicholas Jackson, Mr Tom Pollard (archaeologists), Ms Amy Emberling and Mr Jake Emberling (camp support).

Dr. P. R. S. Moorey has recently established the identity of a ridden animal on terracotta relief plaques of early 2nd-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia as a true, if very small, Equus caballus. The presence of this species in this region at so early a date has, until now, often been seriously doubted. Also quite recently, a distinct strain of small-pony-sized horse (of 1.20m or under at the withers) has been identified in Iran. The slenderness index of its metapodials (one of the most commonly used criteria for determining equid species) has been found to fall within that of the hemiones. Hence it seems possible that some remains of harness animals of the late 3rd or early 2nd millennium B.C. hitherto dismissed as those of onager may actually have belonged to a true, if very small, Equus caballus. In the light of these facts a review of the pertinent figured evidence has seemed desirable. This has revealed the later continued use of a categorically small pony alongside that of the large pony or small horse.

Plate VI a shows a boy astride an animal that has long been called “an immense wolfhound”. It has a small head and ears, slender limbs, a full mane, and a long, full tail. This equid and others on similar plaques from this period seem definitely smaller and lighter than the Przewalski horse, whose height of 1.30m or more places him just under or already within the “large pony” class of the modern horse-show ring.

Among the discoveries made by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur during the 1930–1 season were four public chapels of the Larsa period. Since city temples and domestic shrines were familiar from his earlier excavations, these wayside shrines marked a new discovery of which, however, little note seems to have been made in subsequent discussions of Babylonian religion. The most discussed, perhaps because of its better preservation, is the building (A H House 3 = No. 1 Church Lane) at the corner of Church Lane and Straight Street, fronting on Carfax, with the main door into Church Lane (Fig. 1), called by its discoverer the ‘Chapel of Pa-sag’. The sanctuary proper bore signs of destruction which had preserved the contents in situ, thus enabling a reconstruction to be given of the arrangement of the main furnishings in the Larsa period.

In the centre of the sanctuary, blocking the visual access into a smaller inner room in a direct line with the street doorway, stood a low brick construction (Plate XXIa). This was coated with bitumen in the same way as were two plinths standing behind it on either side of the doorway leading into the inner room, so that this may also have been the pedestal for a statue rather than an altar. It is possible that the limestone figure of a goddess (Plate XXIIc) had been broken in its fall from this commanding position.

The very interesting Ur III text UET V, 796, that was treated by W. F. Leemans in 1960, was recently given fresh attention by M. Roaf, in an article which appeared in this same journal. The main problem raised by this text, which records a very large shipment of copper received at Dilmun, is the relationship between the weight standard of Dilmun and that of Ur: the former makes only use of minas, while the latter uses minas and talents. Already in Leeman's treatment of UET V, 796 it was established that the Dilmun mina weighed 2⅔ Ur minas. Collation of the text, provided by J. N. Postgate, allowed Roaf to suggest the restoration, in line 1, of the figure 13, ˹7˺ [50] which perfectly fits the equivalence between 611 Ur talents 6⅔ Ur minas and the corresponding numbers of Dilmun minas (i.e. 13,750 minas).

Given this, it seems appropriate to attempt an evaluation of the absolute weights of the Dilmun and Ur units and to make some comment about (a) the articulation of the Dilmun system, (b) the possible relationship between this system and the others that were in use in various areas and periods of the ancient Near East.

The texts presented in this study are two which were discovered by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq during the 1955 season at Nimrud. The field records of the Expedition show that both tablets came from a rubbish pit H 2 within the precincts of the Nabu Temple. They formed part of a large collection which was disturbed and partly destroyed by persons searching for loot and burnt-bricks after the destruction of Calah in 612 B.C. Some time in the sixth century there was an attempt to repair and renovate the city by the impoverished inhabitants of the district, who found in the old Assyrian pavements invaluable building material. Much excavation of the Temple area was then undertaken, and the site was studded with pits which were subsequently refilled with unwanted debris including the remains of the Temple library.

The cuneiform tablet here edited belongs to the Museum of Natural History at Torquay, and I am greatly indebted to the Curator who has kindly submitted it to me for study and publication. Whence it comes is unfortunately unknown, but it seems to be of the same class as the large number of commercial documents from Nippur in middle Babylonia which now belong to the University of Pennsylvania and have been published in four volumes by the late Professor A. T. Clay. This suggestion is made especially probable by the Aramaic endorsement or summary of the Babylonian text which closely resembles those found on some of the tablets in that collection. It appears to be the only one of its class in England, so far as published collections go, since the tablets in the British Museum which bear Aramaic notes are Assyrian texts of the seventh century B.C.

The ancient Semitic poem here presented is inscribed in alphabetical cuneiform on clay tablets unearthed at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) on the north coast of Syria. The tablets themselves date approximately in the fifteenth century B.C., but their contents were, no doubt, traditional and therefore older still.

2. The poem belongs to a cycle, several portions of which have already been published, which deals principally with the contest of two gods, Ba'al and Mōt, for dominion over the earth. Each in turn defeats his rival and assumes the sovereignty.

In reality, this is a nature-myth pure and simple, for Ba'al is none other than the Lord of the Rain (cp. Arabic ba'l) and Mōt that of the Drought (cf. Arabic mawuth). The alternate victory and defeat of each thus symbolizes the regular alternation of the seasons in the Syrian year. The reign of Mōt, or Drought, covers the weary and rainless months of summer, while that of Ba'al, or Rain, begins in late September and ends some time in March or April.

Leonard Woolley directed the dig at Ur for twelve seasons which began in 1922 and ended in 1934. During that time he had many assistants on his staff which only once amounted to more than five in all, an astonishingly small number for the control of a labour force which often consisted of between 200 and 250 men who were unearthing not only substantial architectural remains, but also large numbers of small objects—about 20,000 of them were entered in the Expedition's catalogue. Woolley himself served on every one of those twelve expeditions and only his quickness and prodigious industry, supported by a well-trained family of Syrian foremen from Jerablus, enabled him to carry through tasks for which the more elaborately organised expeditions of today would require at least three times the number of supervisors. It is my privilege to have served Woolley for six years—1925–1930—longer than any other of his assistants, and it has therefore fallen to me on this occasion to recall memories of the man and the kind of life we led at Ur. I must also mention, very briefly, some aspects of the work at Ur, which are now the subject of active investigation and controversy, as well as others which are in danger of being forgotten, but still offer tempting rewards for research.

This article presents detailed illustrations of two rock-reliefs from the neighbouring sites Rabana and Merquly, located on the flanks of Mt. Piramagrun in Iraqi Kurdistan. Both matching sculptures are aligned with perimeter fortifications that enclose substantial architectural remains. Based on numismatic parallels, supported by archaeological evidence, it is proposed that these depictions of near life-size figures represent an anonymous Arsacid King of Kings from the early first millennium (c. a.d. 50-150), who was credited with construction of the mountain fortresses. Rabana and Merquly together form an important landscape of settlement on the north-western frontier of the Parthian Empire.

In the middle of the third millennium, the ruling Akkadian elite introduced new traditions into Sumer which resulted, among other things, in a wide-ranging harmonization of their own gods with those of the Sumerian pantheon. A complete Sumerian-Akkadian syncretism, however, did not apply for all deities. During the reign of the Akkadian kings, a shift in influence between two important deities of the Sumerian pantheon occurred as the moon-god Nanna/Suen rose to prominence, displacing the sun-god Utu/Šamaš. Discovering when this shift took place is difficult to pinpoint because Sargonic Sumerian religion is poorly documented. Also, convincing archival data are only available from the time of Naram-Suen.

In the following I will argue, with examples taken from official art, that this shift most likely happened during the reign of Naram-Suen, when a new imperial ideology is discernible from visual imagery, showing the king assuming the role of the sun-god. Utilizing Ur III textual sources I will also demonstrate that the three gods shown on the seal drawn as Fig. I are depicted with their cult places: Enki/Ea in the Abzu, Utu/Šamaš in the fields, probably in an open-air shrine, and Nanna/Suen on the ziggurat, signifying — contrary to mainstream scholarly opinion — that ziggurats already existed in Sumer prior to the Ur III period.

The hitherto unpublished Late Babylonian fragment BM 47806 + adds another example to the group of rituals which counteract witchcraft by banning sorcerers to the netherworld. Šamaš is asked to hand them over, on his journey to the netherworld, to Ḫumuṭ-tabal, the ferryman of the dead. The edition of BM 47806 + is preceded by a brief overview of rituals of this type, including a discussion of the relationship between ritual burial of figurines – symbolising the dismissal of sorcerers to the netherworld – and their ritual burning, the other single most important technique of figurine magic deployed to kill warlock and witch.

We present editions of five cuneiform tablets in the collection of Norwich Castle Museum and two held by Cambridge University Library. The Norwich tablets comprise three tablets from the well-known “Mesag archive” or “Umma C” from the Sargonic period; one small tablet from Ur III Umma; and a fragment of an unprovenanced Old Babylonian account. Those in Cambridge are both from Ur III Girsu: a wool receipt and part of a balanced labour account.