The reports given below cover excavation work in Iraq during 1975, together with a few which could not be included in the last collection of reports for 1973–4 in Iraq 37 (1975), 57–67. The information on each site has been kindly provided by the director of the excavations, unless otherwise specified, and the final version checked by him wherever possible. The sites are arranged in alphabetical order, according to their best known name.

The material for this report has been assembled by Mr. J. N. Postgate, Director of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, and the Editors are glad to acknowledge his efforts. They join with him in expressing their gratitude to all those colleagues who have so willingly contributed information on their work, and especially to Dr. Isa Salman, the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, for his generous co-operation which alone has made this compilation possible.

Excavations were restarted at this Early Dynastic site to the north-west of Nippur by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq under the direction of J. N. Postgate, and lasted from September to December, 1975. Work was confined to the main north-eastern mound, in Areas A and E investigated by the Oriental Institute expedition in 1963 and 1965.

During his excavations of the successive cities of Troy, Schliemann uncovered a few clay pots adorned in relief with a crudely moulded human face, presumably female, which might have been thought to be in the tradition of the vase decorated in relief and painting with a female face from Hassuna and the pots with moulded faces from Kish. Professor Frankfort, however, in his most interesting article Ishtar in Troy, proposes quite a different derivation for these pots, termed by him “face-urns”, which implies that they were used for funerary purposes, although they did not contain human remains and were not found in graves, but in dwellings, which suggests that they may have been domestic utensils. A piece bearing rudimentary indications of a human face was also discovered and, although not found in the same level as the pots, has been thought to be the cover which fitted over the mouth and neck of one of the vessels. From this fact Frankfort concludes that the derivation of this type of pot can be traced back to certain objects of stone and clay which consist of a bell-shaped base surmounted by double volutes with perforated centres which were not uncommon at various sites in strata of the Protoliterate d (= Uruk III, Jamdat Naṣr) period.

The princesses in the royal family of the Ur III state had a role in developing and revitalizing the economy. In ancient Iraqi society women operated in all fields of work. Cuneiform texts recorded their activities in the processes of receiving, delivery, distribution and mediating between people. Living in the community, Iraqi women played an important and positive role in ancient Iraq's society. Šāt-Eštar first became known as a princess in the texts treated in the author's MA Thesis in 2010. The study of the texts which mention princess Šat-Eštar shows that this character played an important role in processes of receiving, delivering, distributing and mediating between people. She was specialized in trading several materials, primarily barley and flour and then dates, as well as textiles and clothing types. The people she dealt with were Agatia, Šulgi-mudah, Abituni, Šāt-Su'en, Šāt-Nūnu, Šeškala, and Lugal-nisaĝ-e.

Writing in 1931, Eckhard Unger observed that published Neo-Babylonian texts written at or referring to Dilbat and dated by the Neo-Babylonian kings were scarce; those dated by the early Achaemenid kings, up to the end of the reign of Darius I, were more numerous; the latest unequivocally dated text from Dilbat was VAS 6, 331, dated by Bēl-šimânni, one of the Babylonian rebels against Xerxes; Seleucid and Parthian texts from Dilbat were unknown. In 1976 these observations still held, and Joachim Oelsner contemplated the possibility that the dearth of later texts from Dilbat was connected with Xerxes' suppression of the Babylonian revolts in the early years of his reign.

Oppert-Menant, Doc. jur. 276 ff. No. VI was problematic. Its publication in 1877 did not include a facsimile of the cuneiform text, but relied on a transliteration that is now antiquated and partly incomprehensible, accompanied by a largely unsuccessful effort at translation. It was plainly written at Dilbat on 7/IX/14 Darius, called “Kings of Lands”. Oppert ascribed it to Darius I, but the omission of “King of Babylon” from the royal title (or at least from the transliteration of the title) suggests to a modern reader that Darius II was intended. Oelsner judged properly that as long as the cuneiform text was not available there was no way to assign the text confidently to the reign of one Darius or the other.

In the Library of the Institute of Archaeology, London, there is a collection of aerial photographs of Iraq taken by the R.A.F. during the 1930s. One of a pair, taken near Zairwan (36° 26′ N; 41° 59′ E) demands publication for the information it gives on the extent and structure of the Roman limes (Plate XX).

The photograph shows a stretch of wall with faces of large orthostats and filled with material whose nature cannot be determined from the picture. The wall runs along a low ridge. There are remnants of other structures against the wall and others, less well preserved, spreading down the slope of the ridge. These structures seem to be of poor masonry and almost certainly post-date the wall itself. There is no reason to suggest that they have any rôle in connection with the functioning of the wall. On the other side of the ridge are clear traces of what is probably a road with small mounds running along either side of it.

Zairwan is north of Jebel Sinjar and to the north-east of the important town of Singara. It stands at the foot of the mountains and gives its name to a pass of no great quality running through them.

The composition of the battle of Til-Tuba from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh is usually described as a relief depicting a recorded historical event. It is considered a good and solid example of the Assyrian concern with history and the Assyrian propensity for propagandistic depictions of current events. The scene, which is surely saturated in the ideology of empire, has already been discussed from that point of view. Is it true to the historical event? Is it an exaggeration? Did the Assyrians really do these things? How close or how distant is this depiction of the battle from the real historical event of war?

The Assyrian method of representation is generally one that is attentive to minute details and concerned with ethnographic accuracy, even when the composition is hierarchical and representations of the body are stylised into abstract patterns. Realism is certainly a distinctive aspect of Assyrian narrative art and accurate details of dress and landscape were used to create what Roland Barthes would have called the effect of the real.

The choice of this subject originates from the fact that the area of research to which I have been devoting myself recently includes the figurative cultures of Mesopotamia and Syria in the Early Dynastic and the Early Syrian periods, specifically in the field of war. Some of the data resulting from this research focus on the representation of the “head of the enemy”, which appears repeatedly in the documentation of the second millennium BC in Syria but so far seems to be absent in contemporary Mesopotamia. Despite the evident difference between the forms of representation from these two areas, I perceived in the figurative cycles of the Neo-Assyrian reliefs not only the recurrence of this theme but also the intentional display of severed heads, which reaches its climax in the numerous examples from the South-West Palace in Nineveh. My first aim is, therefore, to suggest a plausible approach towards identifying the origin of the display of “severed heads”, previously absent from Mesopotamian scenes of warfare, in the visual communication of the Neo-Assyrian period. My second aim is to offer an interpretation which may help shed light on ideological, cultural and anthropological aspects essential to the Neo-Assyrian political programme and its visual representation.

Hundreds if not thousands of statuettes of the Hellenistic and Roman times of alabaster, clay, and bone have been found all over Babylonia in Graeco-Roman ruins and tombs and in many places in Middle-Mesopotamia, e.g. at Dura. They present a great interest not only from the artistic but also from the religious and mythological points of view. Those of clay have been collected and illustrated by Mrs. E. Douglas van Buren and all those found at Seleucia will soon be published and illustrated in a comprehensive study by Miss W. van Ingen of the University of Michigan. I have dealt with some of them repeatedly, especially from the point of view of the history of art.

In this short note I wanted to correct a mistake of mine regarding some of these statuettes and at the same time to draw the attention of fellow-students to one very curious variety occurring among them. I mean the statuettes which represent a human figure—without doubt a deity—in the squatting position so typical for the Orient in general.

The Samarran ceramic assemblage of the Mesopotamian region has long remained an enigma. With the exception of the work of Braidwood et al. and Oates, the nature of the relationship between Samarran and other contemporary Mesopotamian and Iranian styles has not been systematically explored. This paper begins by challenging contemporary perceptions of the Samarran “culture” and continues by investigating the relationship of Samarran wares to those of the Hassuna and Ubaid traditions. Comparisons among these assemblages are made by means of recent miner-alogical data from the site of Tell 'Oueili (Tell 'Awayli) in southern Mesopotamia. The Ubaid 0 ceramic assemblage at Tell 'Oueili is seen to have a substantial Samarran component, and, in light of this information, new questions arise concerning the place of this style within the region. The data provided by Courtois and Velde are used to test the following hypotheses about Samarran ceramics: [1] that they were imported to the southern Mesopotamian plain, [2] that they were locally made in southern Mesopotamia, and [3] that they are an integral and undifferentiated part of the Ubaid 0 assemblage.

Dr Matthews was kind enough to show us a draft of the preceding article before publication so that we could reply, for which we thank him. Our original article was intended as a review of the problem of the Early Dynastic to Akkadian transition and as a quick general overview of the WF excavation at Nippur, rather than the final statement on either. The point of the article was not to define the Akkadian Period but to make steps towards the identification of an assemblage of material culture (pottery, tablets, objects, and seals) found in levels which are dated to the historical Akkadian Period. That assemblage included pottery types, but we did not suggest that a single pottery type or a few types alone should be the basis for dating; nor would we prefer, as is implied by Matthews, to define a period by pottery as opposed to other objects. What the Nippur WF excavation gave us was a well-stratified sequence of artifacts; and we were careful when suggesting the level at which we might have entered the Akkadian (historical) period not to be adamant about the date of the pertinent level and to precede it with a “transitional” level (Level XVII) which might have been either Early Dynastic or Akkadian. Perhaps we should have been more cautious and extended that transitional label to cover Level XVI as well.

Paolo Emilio Botta, who was sent to Mosul as the French Consul in 1842, explored at Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus and then began investigating ancient stone foundations at Nebi Yunus. Muhammed/Mehmed Pasha and local religious leaders, who were worried that the tomb of prophet Yunus (Jonah) and a local mosque would be destroyed by the excavations, opposed these investigations and the work stopped as a result. After Nebi Yunus, Botta started to work at Kuyunjik in December 1842. While his workers were busy at Kuyunjik, someone from the village of Khorsabad talked about stones with inscriptions and reliefs on them on top of a hill. After three months of exhaustive work at Kuyunjik, on March 20th, 1843 Botta sent a group of workers to Khorsabad for excavation. However, problems arose about Botta's work in Mosul. The Pasha of the province in particular created obstructions. We have done research in the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry of Turkey on Botta's excavation permits and documents, the obstructions created by the Pasha of Mosul, the details of the story of Botta's experiences at Khorsabad and the relevant correspondence. In these archives we have found documents about the problems Botta experienced at Khorsabad, the conditions for excavation permits and the construction of an excavation house, the plan of the excavation house mentioned by Botta, which was drafted like a fortress next to the village houses and sent to Istanbul, as well as petitions of the villagers opposing Botta's work and his excavation house. Here, we attempt to re-read Botta's excavation seasons, permits and the problems he encountered through the documents in the Ottoman Archives in order to understand how this period is to be understood. Through these documents and correspondence, we were able to study the problems that arose between the Ottoman State and France as a result of Botta's excavations at Khorsabad.

This article reports three new radiocarbon dates from the Iraqi sites of Tell Fara (Shuruppak) and Tell Muqayyar (Ur), produced as a part of a larger dating project on the absolute chronology of Southern Mesopotamia from the Uruk period until the Akkadian era. The radiocarbon results presented here offer good absolute time estimates for the ED I/II period at Fara and the most reliable absolute age so far for the important archaeological find that is the earliest graves in the Royal Cemetery of Ur.

Excavations carried out in the last five years by “La Sapienza” University of Rome and Iraqi teams at the site of Abu Tbeirah (Nasiriyah, Iraq) exposed a large multi-phased mud-brick building (Building A), internally articulated into various rooms with different purposes, which probably hosted a wide range of activities. This building presents an opportunity to investigate the use of these spaces in order to glimpse the daily life and the socio-economic structure of its past inhabitants. In this paper we present the preliminary outcomes of this study, based on the results of a micro-debris analysis that looked at the distribution of the material residues embedded within the floor of Room 5 of the building.

Hittite political history consists of a continuous series of wars. The Hittite empire, situated amidst bellicose neighbours and lacking natural frontiers, called for rulers whose power relied on strong armed forces. Every king, when he ascended the throne, at first had to fight against aggressive enemies, in order to keep the inherited territory intact, whereas later on during his reign, he usually endeavoured to expand its borders.

The sources on the warfare of Hittite kings are rather numerous; they can be traced from the very beginning of the Old kingdom until its disappearance (ca. 1600–1200 B.C.).