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.

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.

I try to show here that we do not at present have any substantial evidence for fixing the absolute value of any Assyrian capacity unit. This situation is likely to remain so until epigraphist-philologists and archaeologists recognize the need for common effort to solve this problem. Departure point of the present study was the discovery that, in a group of twenty-one documents from Nimrud dated in the period 699–652 B.C. which derive ultimately from the temple of Nabû, eighteen have common patterns from which one can deduce a few basic facts about metrological practice and terminology in the Neo-Assyrian period. To what extent they can be generalized must be decided by specialists in Neo-Assyrian on the basis of more evidence than I have at my disposal.

In his very useful treatment of Neo-Assyrian measures, J. N. Postgate called attention to ND 5457, which contains the phrase ina KAL-ti, i.e. ina sūte dannate, “in the heavy sūt”. He further observed that a calculation in the text indicates that this “heavy” sūt is twice the size of another (unspecified) sūt in the same text and went on to draw parallels between the well-attested light and heavy Assyrian weight norms, which stand to one another in the relationship of 1: 2, and with the Nimrud wine vessels, which were thought to show a similar pattern. He then identified this heavy capacity norm with an emār of 184 litres, deduced by the excavators of Nimrud on the basis of marked jars found there. There are, however, several points that still need clarifying.

A study of the excavated structures at Ur which Woolley identified as domestic and possibly Kassite (or later) in date. Through an examination of the objects excavated in the structures and associated graves (principally pottery, glass and faience vessels, scaraboids and tablets) the housing in area EM is dated to roughly the 13th century b.c. while the remains in areas XNCF, AH, YC and KPS are dated to the 8th/7th centuries b.c. The review also presents a summary history of Ur from the mid third millennium b.c. to the neo-Babylonian period highlighting the periods of royal patronage at the city.

The Babylonian Flood Story contains a conundrum which has stimulated various solutions, none of them convincing. Recent advances in lexicography seem to dismiss them, but an entirely unrelated observation suggests a way to interpret the texts in keeping with Babylonian beliefs and practices.

After Ea had told Ut-napishtim how to prepare for his escape from the Flood, he gave him an explanation of his strange conduct for his fellow citizens. The gods had taken a dislike to Ut-napishtim, so he would go to dwell with his patron Ea in his home, the Apsu. Thereupon Ea would act, apparently to benefit the people, in fact, to indicate that the catastrophe was about to break. The manner and significance of Ea's action as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, has long puzzled Assyriologists.

The media coverage of the severe weather patterns of 1982–3 and 1997–8 has reasserted for the study of history the possible influence of abrupt climate change at transitional periods. Modern theories on the fall of Ur have already looked beyond the Elamite invasion to the evidence of food shortage and failing water supply as preconditions of the event. The present study seeks to enlarge upon this theme, and will suggest that, following a period of storm and flood, a sustained drought brought an unprecedented loss of life to the city of Ur and across Sumer. The paper will finally suggest a modern and scientific explanation of the ud-šu-bala, or “weather change”, of the period.

In the Iraq Museum are displayed two large fragments of a floor mosaic found during a series of emergency surveys and excavations, carried out in 1957–58 by the Directorate General of Antiquities of Iraq. The works were conducted in the plain on the Lower Zab river, south of Rānya (Arbil Liwa), which was due to be flooded on the completion of the Dokan dam.

This work was necessary because in the plain—known locally as Dasht-i-Bitawīyn and some 80 square miles in area—there were at least forty tells which would be submerged on the completion of the artificial lake.

The mosaic was found about 10 miles south of Rānya, at Tell Khwāris which is situated at the confluence of the Lower Zab and its tributary Rubar-i-Basalam. Tell Khwāris is 100 m. long, 80 m. wide and 4 m. high.

Nearby dwellers in the course of their agricultural works had dug a deep trench on the summit of the mound and had brought to light several pieces of the floor mosaic which were subsequently destroyed. Members of the Directorate General of Antiquities when informed of the discovery, were able to trace all extant parts of the ancient floor and remove them to Baghdad.

The most important of the rich and varied pieces of carved ivory discovered at Nimrud during 1949 and 1950 have already been illustrated and discussed in previous numbers of this Journal. The photographs which accompany this article, Plates XII-XVIII, illustrate the remainder of what still needed to be published from those two seasons: anything omitted is probably too much mutilated or fragmentary to be worth describing.

This article presents three rock reliefs of the Parthian era in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, documented in Amadiya/Amedi by Columbia University's Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments survey project in 2013. The paper discusses the iconography, style and date of the reliefs and the methods that the Columbia team used to document them, including photogrammetry, perspectival corrected and perspective controlled stills, and 360° immersive, processed panoramas. At the same time as presenting a reading of the relief imagery, the article offers a preliminary self-reflective consideration of the documentation methods we have been utilizing for the study of rock reliefs in the past seven years. These technological advances, enormously useful for digital image capture, are nevertheless a form of imaging and must be understood as such methodologically. The final results of these kinds of technically advanced images of rock reliefs must rely on modes of visual interpretation that remain subjective and dependent on visual analytical skills based in historical knowledge, stylistic and iconographic analyses, as well as on-site, close up material-tactile studies of surfaces, of carving styles and methods. Finally, taking architectural context and landscape into account, the paper makes the case that the location of the reliefs dating to the Parthian era, at the citadel's entry, guided and inspired the Seljuk era monumental portals of Amadiya/Amedi that were subsequently erected and sculpted in dialogue with the ancient remains.

At some point early on during his reign, Sar-kali-sarrē, made a journey to Sumer. The occasion was so momentous that an entire year was named in commemoration of the excursion. This paper investigates the evidence for that royal visitation, with special attention given to the administrative documents that record the king's sojourn at Girsu. The investigation also considers the rationale for the king's decision to make an expedition to Sumer and asserts that Sar-kali-sarrē may have undertaken the journey in order to begin his building works at the Ekur in Nippur. In addition, the paper identifies some of the highest officials of the Akkadian court who traveled with the king. These individuals are significant because they are usually conspicuous in administrative documents, and as such their presence can establish prosopographic synchronisms between Sargonic archives.

The kiln furniture made for the Cuneiform Tablet Laboratory at the British Museum was nearing the end of its working life by 1992. A design project was thus undertaken to produce a kiln furniture solution that meets with the current conservation criteria, loosely based upon traditional potters' saggars. The primary innovation is a perforated refractory dish providing the same compartment throughout the firing and the desalination treatments. After three years' service the new kiln furniture's performance is assessed by comparison with the former “Inconel” firing basket and stainless-steel wire gauze equipment.

The first of the two daggers I propose to discuss I bought from Mr. John Whitaker of Cambridge, who acquired it from Messrs. Sotheby's sale on December 10th, 1932. The type, the patina, and the date when it came into the market suggest the possibility that it may have been associated with the two similar daggers recently acquired by the British Museum and said to have been discovered in a cave near Kirmanshah in the Luristan province of Persia, and with another now in the Louvre in Paris.

The dagger in my possession belongs to a series of Late Bronze Age daggers and swords best characterized by their inlaid hilt. The inlay of wood, ivory, or some other material has usually vanished and the remaining part of the hilt consists of a flanged tang, frequently with one or more rivet-holes and with a tang or a flange to hold the pommel.

The fragment A 7876 (Oriental Institute, Chicago) occupies a special position among the cuneiform sources of the ritual Maqlû. The six-column tablet, inscribed in the Neo-Assyrian script of the 8th and 7th centuries BC, originally contained the complete text of the series with its nine canonical tablets. Taking into account the relevant duplicate manuscripts the article offers an annotated edition of this fragment and compares its style and format to other “large tablets” (dubgallu) of Babylonian literary texts.

When the hoard of tools excavated by Loftus at Tell Sifr in Iraq, in 1854, was reassembled for publication some years ago (Moorey, 1971), a number of items mentioned by Loftus (1857, 268) could not be traced in the British Museum reserve collections nor was it then possible to arrange for the analysis of selected objects. In the intervening years the missing items have been located. The parts of two sheet-metal cauldrons (Figs. 1–3), with cast handle fittings, have now been identified whereas in 1970 only a single fragment was located (Moorey, 1971, no. 83). The “copper ingot” reported by Loftus has now also been traced (Fig. 4), as have a copper or bronze ferrule (Fig. 5) and the “dice-box” (Fig. 6). It has been possible to increase the significance of this still unique find by some investigation of the metals and alloys from which it was made (Table 1). The following notes are supplementary in every way to the original paper, whose substance is not repeated here. The numbering of objects in the previous paper is retained.