U.E.T. VI, Part II will consist of about 150 plates of copies prepared by C. J. Gadd from some 200 pieces varying in size from fairly well-preserved four column tablets to small fragments and “buns” inscribed with but a few lines of text. Tentatively, the arrangement of the volume is planned to be as follows:

Lamentations. All in all there are nineteen tablets and fragments inscribed with several different lamentations. Thus, there is a fragment which is probably part of the long known Nippur lament, which begins with a bitter wailing over the destruction of Nippur and Sumer as a whole, and ends on a note of joy celebrating their delivery and restoration by king Išme Dagan of Isin. There is a well preserved tablet inscribed with lines 110–171 of “The Curse of Agade”, the historiographic lament which concerns the rise and fall of Sargon's capital, Agade. There is a fragment inscribed with part of a composition which may be designated “The Lamentation over the Destruction of Erech and Sumer”, for which there are available at present four published and five unpublished pieces; as yet only a small part of this composition can be restored, a passage of about 120 lines containing the partially preserved text of kirugu 4, 5, and 6. Six of the Ur pieces are inscribed, not unexpectedly, with “The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur”, which I published some 25 years ago as no. 12 of the Oriental Institute's Assyriological Studies. Five of these are excellently preserved tablets, but since the text has been almost completely available in published form for many years, the new Ur material will add but little that is new except, of course, a considerable supply of new variants which should prove to be of some significance.

Among the tablets from Sippar in the British Museum catalogued by E. Leichty, four unidentified prism fragments were found. Fragments of two of these had earlier been rejoined and copied by Pinches. All four prism fragments come from relatively small five-sided prisms and are written in neo-Babylonian script. The prisms share features that suggest they may be fragments or duplicates of the same or very similar inscriptions: appearance and orthography (texts 1 and 2); identical lines and columns showing third-person verbal forms (texts 2 and 4); and similar closing sections (texts 1 and 3). Transliterated and translated below, the texts of the prism fragments are not identifiable as duplicating in style or content any other known inscription of an Assyrian king. They are for this reason interesting.

1. BM 56617 (87–7–14, 996b + 1815), joined and copied by Pinches, is the largest of the fragments published here. The records of the British Museum state that the prism fragment comes from Aboo-Habba (Sippar). The fragment preserves four of its five faces; the top and bottom of the prism are broken away. The preserved portion of column i begins with the usual opening titles of the king and thus the missing portion above–at least 5 lines–probably contained an invocation to a deity. The prism should probably be assigned to Esarhaddon, although his name does not appear in the inscription, because of the appearance of Sennacherib's name as the first name in the genealogy that follows the king's titles.

This article discusses the two main royal palaces constructed in Kalḫu during the ninth century: Ashurnasirpal II's Northwest Palace and Shalmaneser III's Military Palace. Through a re-examination of the architecture of both palaces, it will be argued that the two were more alike than has been commonly assumed. The military nature of the Military Palace did not preclude the presence of most types of spaces that were already present in the Northwest Palace. By discussing the differences and similarities between the kinds of spaces, decoration and spatial organisation found in each palace this article tries to offer a new analysis of both, and of the nature of Late Assyrian royal palaces more broadly.

The Royal Cemetery at Ur, with its almost two thousand graves, is one of the most impressive archaeological settings in southern Mesopotamia. Although most of the graves have been assigned to the Early Dynastic Period, more than three hundred graves have been dated to a timeframe from the Late Akkadian Period to the end of the third millennium B.C. However, the precise dating of many of these graves is under debate because stratigraphic data are often lacking, and the material culture used for dating has mainly been cylinder seals and other small finds. Due to the poor quality of the data published by Woolley, pottery has rarely been used to establish chronological determinants that could be useful in dating the graves. Thanks to the Ur Digitization Project, the field records from the Ur excavations are now available online. Among them are the Field Notes, which often contain pottery drawings, reproduced to scale. This paper re-analyses some of the graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur that have been dated to the final part of the third millennium B.C. This analysis is based on a typological approach to the pottery assemblages that allows revised chronological determinants for dating selected grave contexts.

Of the excavations that have taken place in Iraq since the 1930s, many have revealed remains dating to the Early Dynastic period. None of these has been published as fully as the Diyala sites excavated by the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute of Chicago from 1930 to 1938. (Frankfort, 1939, 1943, 1955; Delougaz, 1940, 1952, Delougaz and Lloyd, 1942; Delougaz, Hill and Lloyd, 1967.) It is these sites that still provide the largest collection of well-stratified pottery for this period, and thus material from newly-excavated sites has always been compared to that from the Diyala region.

There are two major disadvantages to this state of affairs. Firstly, it is undesirable that any kind of archaeological material comparison should be limited to just one region or site; and secondly, notwithstanding the importance of the city of Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), the Diyala region was a fringe area, and the style of its pottery should not have to be accepted as the norm for Southern Mesopotamia or anywhere else.

A recent survey in the western foothills of the Zagros Mountains has located five new Neolithic sites. We present here the occupational features and finds of this period in the Sar Pol-e Zahāb region, along with an interpretation of their distribution and associated settlement patterns. Our research indicates that the visible distribution of Neolithic sites is highly influenced by geomorphological factors. All sites are located on natural outcrops or on the edge of alluvial plains. Many others have certainly been buried beneath layers of later sedimentation. All of the sites identified by our survey are small and of modest elevation, with cultural remains, particularly ceramics, similar to Neolithic sites such as Guran and Sarāb in the central Zagros region and Jarmo and Tamarkhan in Mesopotamia. Based on the ceramic evidence and the location of the region, between the central Zagros mountains on the east and Mesopotamia on the west, we suggest that this vast area maintained an integrated ceramic tradition, which suggests an overall cultural homogeneity of these areas during the seventh and early sixth millennia B.C. In other words, these recent discoveries indicate that similarities in Neolithic material culture in the Māhidasht, Kermanshāh and Hulailan plains with material culture of regions in Mesopotamia are not accidental or random but indicative of a large coherent zone with unique ceramic and cultural traditions (the patterned ceramic tradition of Sarāb-Jarmo), extending from Iraqi Kurdistan east into the central Zagros range. Regarding the lack of eighth and seventh millennium B.C. sites in the northern reaches of the Iranian part of the Zagros range, we may consider the pathway of Sar Pol-e Zahāb a primary route for transporting obsidian to upland areas of the central Zagros. This also suggests a lasting network of cross-regional communications, since archaeological discoveries prove this pathway was the main node connecting these two cultural regions for a long period of time.

This article introduces a small group of ivories held in the Sanandaj Museum, which were discovered in 1997 during the seventh season of Nasratolah Motamedi's excavations at Ziwiye, northwest Iran. An investigation of the decorative, figurative, and stylistic characteristics of these pieces reveals a strong Neo-Assyrian influence, with close similarities to the palace reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, as well as the influence of Assyrianizing Urartian art. These extensive cultural influences on Mannaean art can be seen in terms of political and economic relations with the two regions.

In the early 1990s the two fragments of black stone making up the Tower of Babylon stele with pictures of the ziggurat in Babylon and the king Nebuchadnezzar II were found in the large open trench from the German excavations of Amran in 1900. The findspot was about 20 m north of the Esagil temple in Babylon, but the level where it was discovered is not Neo-Babylonian but later, possibly Parthian. The archaeological and historical background of the stele is discussed, and the image of the Ziggurat on the stele is considered. After 28 years in the Schøyen Collection Oslo, the stele is now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

The use of waxed wooden writing boards in Mesopotamia can be traced back at least to the Ur III period and the indications are that at certain periods they were a major vehicle of cuneiform writing. This article deals with the use of writing boards at Sippar in the Neo-Babylonian/early Achaemenid period, based on the numerous references to their use in the archives of the Ebabbara. The word used for a set of writing boards was lē'u, normally written with the logogram gišDA but occasionally written out phonetically. This article presents a catalogue of the evidence from Sippar followed by an analysis of the purposes for which writing boards were used, an examination of the procedures and officials involved, comments on their manufacture and a review of the evidence concerning the end of the archives. An appendix gives editions of twelve new texts.

Figs, 1 and 2 show a conspectus of the restorable pot-shapes of both plain and glazed ware found in the Sassanian buildings excavated at Kish in 1932-3. Almost all of them come from the SS 7 complex, at an average depth of 2 metres: a few are from SS 6 or SS 8, at a similar depth. They form a group that should prove most valuable for purposes of dating on less well documented sites in Iraq, for it seems most probable that this pottery belongs to the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. The latest coin found with the pots is one of Justinian I (A.D. 527-65).

A. Plain ware. The commonest shapes are the hemispherical and truncated conical bowls which often bear Aramaic incantations; jugs which have ovoid bodies and rounded or pointed bases; jugs with pinched lips and flat bases or base-rings; and large three-handled jars for storing liquids.

Looking back as one can now do over a long period of time spent at the British Museum, it is clear that a major contribution to the development of the Research Laboratory was made by Leonard Woolley not only on account of the quantity and diversity of the material that he produced for study and treatment year after year, but by the stimulating influence of his presence as a co-worker. Indeed, without this, the annual task which confronted a small and devoted laboratory staff would have been well-nigh impossible.

The first rumour of his return was quickly followed by the arrival of dozens of boxes, petrol tins, containers of any and every sort and a selection of these reached the Laboratory and duly gave forth many hundreds of match boxes, tins and cigarette packets all carefully labelled, all very dusty, but all containing treasures that meant something, at least to the excavator. And so the hospital cleanliness of the Laboratory inevitably suffered a change and rooms took on the aspect of that partially-organised chaos wherein someone can always claim to know where objects have been put. In the midst worked Woolley in the deepest concentration—and he was a whale for work—but always with a ready smile for the right kind of interruption.

In his book Zur Datierung des Königsfriedhofes von Ur (Rudolf Haibert Verlag Bonn, 1966) Nissen has re-examined the sequence dating of the Royal Cemetery of Ur and attempted to relate it to history. The archaeological analysis is necessarily based on the two great volumes written by the late Sir Leonard Woolley in 1934. This is not the first attempt of the kind, for another, unsuccessful one was made by Pallis many years ago. The fact is that the stratigraphic evidence of many critical points is defective and the major problems cannot be solved by using the internal evidence alone.

Nissen's new assessment of the situation depends largely on one important observation, namely: that Woolley made an error in the orientation of the Neo-Babylonian Temenos Wall which measures 103° on all plans except on pl. 274 where it is 98°. The discovery of this error has led Nissen to re-draw the cemetery plan with the wall aligned at the correct angle and to re-orientate many graves which during certain seasons Woolley specifically states were plotted with reference to that base line.

The Sealand Dynasty ruled in southern Mesopotamia ca. 1740–1460(?) b.c.e., but Sealand archaeological deposits are extraordinarily rare, and the dynasty itself is known almost entirely from a limited number of texts. Sealand Dynasty social and ecological practices remain mysterious, and ceremonial activities are at best poorly understood. Faunal remains from the small site of Tell Sakhariya in southern Iraq provide our first glimpse into the Sealand animal socio-economy. Sakhariya's occupants herded and hunted in multiple environmental zones. In pre-Sealand times Tell Sakhariya was an important ceremonial site, and the large-scale food sharing and possible ritual dog burial in its faunal assemblage might indicate that Sakhariya retained ideological significance into the Sealand era.

If we conduct today a survey of early scientific studies on the archaeology of the Near East, most of them seem to be only of historic interest. Only a few of the results published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century remain valid. Nevertheless the first three decades of the twentieth century were a very important period for setting the agenda in methods and aims of Near Eastern archaeology. Moreover, many of these early theories and propositions still have an effect on current research, even when in the present state of knowledge they are out of date or no longer of relevance.

In the course of a wordy article which offers no new solution to any problem, R. L. Crocker makes a series of criticisms of articles by us on the subject of Babylonian music. It is gratifying that he, the musicologist who has been most concerned, acknowledges that Gurney's corrections to the system, published in Volume 56 of this journal, are “almost right”. However, he accuses us of suffering from and perpetuating methodological and terminological confusions, and of being insufficiently emancipated from modern European musical concepts. It seems to us that there is more confusion in Dr Crocker's paper than in ours, and that in places he is more guilty than either of us of preconception based on modern musical theory.

A real step forward in the understanding of the Babylonian tonal systems was made a few years ago when T. J. H. Krispijn produced an improved reading in 1. 12 of the crucial “re-tuning text”, UET VII 74. Line 12 rounds off the preceding list of tuning adjustments. In what had previously been read as NU.SU.U[D] “no more” (i.e. “end of sequence”), Krispijn recognized nu-sú-ḫ[u-um], “tightening”; the damaged sign on the edge is compatible with ḫu, and the reading seems secure. This has consequences for readings in all that precedes and follows. Previously, te-[x x] in 1. 15 and te-n[i]-m[a] in 1. 19 had been taken to be from enûm, thus “you alter”, and the same verb had been restored in both sections of the document. It was then open to the modern interpreter to decide whether “alter” meant “tighten” in § 1 and “slacken”in §2, or vice versa. With the new reading it became clear that § 1 was about tightenings, and that the verb in § 2 was to be read as te-n[é]-e!-[ma], “you slacken”, from nê um, while a different verb was to be restored in § 1, namely [tu-na-sà-ah]. These are the technical terms for re-tuning a string, known from the lexical texts cited by Gurney in his n. 5, and they are both present on UET VII 74. A further consequence of the new reading was that it confirmed the view for which R. Vitale had argued on other grounds,3 that the “front”strings of the instrument played the highest notes, not the lowest as others had supposed.

Assyrian sculptures have been treated in various ways. Neglected original records about pieces found at Nineveh can still be informative. Pieces that did not go at once to major public museums were sometimes liable to rejuvenation, detached from their original contexts but endowed with new significance as commercial assets, as independent works of art, or as integral parts of contemporary architecture. Two Nimrud sculptures, built into the walls of Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh, represent a unique fusion of Assyrian and Scots artistry, now vulnerable to financial pressures.