Although numerous publications on the archaeology of the Sultanate of Oman have appeared, what is still lacking is a readily accessible English summary of recent highlights that deals with the late pre-Islamic culture in Mazun/western Maka (cf. Kervran and Hiebert 1991: 337–48, Yule and Kazenwadel 1993: 251–77, Yule 1994: 519–577). Until the publication of the final report on the excavations of the German Archaeological Mission to the Sultanate of Oman appears, the present contribution is intended to summarize the state of research. The cursory terms “Parthian” and “Sasānian Oman” (Potts 1992 II: 292–300) reveal the political hegemony and the date, but fail to come to grips with the culture as it is known from illustrated preliminary reports. The same holds for “classical Oman”. Oman lies outside the Mediterranean and outside classical influence. It is not in itself classical in any sense. The publications which have appeared on late pre-Islamic Central Oman have been understood differently by members of archaeological special interest groups of different nations, isolated experts, and particularly archaeologists oriented towards the archaeology of the neighbouring United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Three main topics shed light on this final pre-Islamic Arabian culture: the location of Maka and of early historic Oman, early Arabic sources on Oman, and the Samad culture (post 300 BC–AD 900, Fig. 1). The newly recovered archaeological information combines with what is known about the historical geography. The following notes are a tribute to the cooperation between Omani and foreign scholars interested in this area of ancient Near Eastern history.

From Assyria and Babylonia in the first half of the first millennium B.C. comes a series of small figurines in the round and relief plaques, which are usually found beneath the floors of buildings within receptacles of baked or unbaked brick or (at Nineveh) stone slabs or (so far restricted to Aššur) pottery jars; the figurines themselves are almost invariably of sun-dried clay, very occasionally, perhaps, of terracotta or metal. Their purpose, as texts prescribing the rituals involved attest, was to avert evil from the buildings and sickness from the inhabitants. The British School's Nimrud complement comprises at least 136 relevant pieces from 66 separate deposits discovered in three buildings: the Burnt Palace, the Acropolis Palace (AB) and Fort Shalmaneser, and dating possibly from the reign of Shalmaneser III (?) or, at least, Adad-nirari III down to the fall of the Assyrian Empire in 613 B.C.

In this paper I shall deal with just one, but perhaps the most important, area on which the series sheds light, namely the question of the identification of the creatures represented by the various iconographic types. It can hardly be denied that the study of apotropaic figurines is of somewhat limited importance in itself. Where it succeeds is rather in the light which it throws upon other matters of more general and basic interest. It is vital here to recognize the official nature of the ritual and practice, and the consequent position of the iconography of the figurines in the official religion of the Assyrian state. And while there are no apparent documentary sources directly concerning, for example, the subjects of the apotropaic palace reliefs, there are texts ordaining procedures for apotropaic rituals involving figurines, which often enable identifications of analogous types.

Over three hundred glazed bricks were last year discovered in Courtyard T of Fort Shalmaneser. They were lying between the buttresses that flanked the entrance to T 3 and must originally have formed a panel set into the wall above. Though most of them had been broken into several separate fragments, few had fallen clear and the most important of these was in fact discovered from the fill of a nineteenth-century trench on top of the mound. The bricks were taken to Baghdad where it eventually proved possible to reconstruct their entire design.

An inscription dates the bricks to the reign of Shalmaneser III; they were found resting on a confused mass of mud-brick and charcoal, and had clearly collapsed during one of the sacks of Calah, when the wooden fittings of the door below were set on fire and its east jamb demolished. The bricks, whose total weight must have exceeded three tons, fell immediately, but since only mud mortar can have bound them to the wall behind, brought down at the same time very little mud-brick. When the main body of the wall did fall shortly afterwards, it sealed them in what was still an extremely loose heap. This process of destruction, while serving its purpose at the time, saved the bricks from the dangers of exposure, and even the fire only damaged those which came to rest face down on the smouldering wood. Two of them, however, which carried a representation of the god Aššur, were split into an unusually large number of fragments and must have been cracked before the panel fell.

In the spring of 1969 the Soviet archaeological expedition began extensive studies of early agricultural sites in north-western Iraq. Up to that time the investigation of archaeological cultures representing the early stages of development of food-producing economies in Mesopotamia had been confined to north-eastern Iraq and western Iran, the mountains of Kurdistan and the Zagros with their foothills and valleys. But in north-western Iraq, from Mosul to the Syrian frontier, there are areas whose natural resources offer an equally fruitful prospect for investigation of this process. One such area particularly favourable to agriculture from its earliest stages is the broad and fertile Sinjar plain. Eastward the plain borders on the Mosul region, beyond which lie the Kurdish foothills around Erbil and Kirkuk, and on the north it is bounded by Jebel Sinjar, rising to a height of c. 1250 m. This range reproduces on a small scale the natural conditions of the Zagros, and abounds in caves, but is as yet inadequately investigated. Winter rainfall is relatively high, and a number of small perennial streams flow from the hills into the soft alluvial soils of the plain, which are extremely fertile and favour the construction of simple irrigation systems; in places these now extend up to 15 km. south of the range.

The throne-base of Shalmaneser III found at Nimrud in 1962 comprises two blocks of yellowish-brown limestone; one block sat close against the east wall of the room (T1) in which it was found, the other fitted tightly to the west side of the first. The dimensions of the throne-base are 2·28 m. (7½ feet) north-south and 3·82 m. (12½ feet) east-west (at centre) respectively.

The east block has a narrow panel of three lines of inscription (the signs being smaller than those of the rest of the inscription) running north-south along the extreme east part of its upper, horizontal, surface, and panels each of twenty lines of inscription running east-west and west-east respectively along the north and south parts of that surface; these panels leave between them an uninscribed portion comprising two-sevenths of the north-south dimension of the block.

For many centuries Tell Nebi Yūnus, the smaller mound of Nineveh, has been revered as the burial place of the prophet Jonah. This shrine, at one time part of a Christian monastery but now contained within a mosque, and the surrounding village, now a suburb of Mosul, have hitherto restricted archaeological activities on this site. A brief summary is given below of the few discoveries so far made, but the main subject of this article is a comparative study of the inscriptions of Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.) and of his son Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.), which describe the ekal māšarti or arsenal they built here. These, when considered together, provide a more detailed picture of the general layout and aspect of this building than is usually to be found in such texts, and it is hoped that this study may prove to be of some guidance in the event of this site ever being more fully investigated in the future.

In the spring of 1966 a survey of archaeological sites was begun in the qadha of Mandali, Diyala Liwa, east of Baghdad, and between Mandali and Badra, Kut Liwa, along the foothills bordering the Iranian frontier (Fig. 1). The survey was undertaken initially with financial support from the American Philosophical Society and continued in 1967 with the assistance of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. It is hoped that ultimately all archaeological sites in the area will be surveyed systematically, but the primary reason for the selection of this particular region was the possibility that it might provide clues towards the solution of a number of prehistoric problems. Three essentially geographic considerations led to this choice. The first was the fact that Mandali lies roughly equidistant from Tell es-Sawwan, the southernmost Hassuna-Samarra site, and Ras al ‘Amiya, the northern known limit of the southern pottery type known as Hajji Muhammad or Al ‘Ubaid 2. Thus it was hoped that information concerning the relationships, chronological and typological, between these two distinctive prehistoric groups might be found. The second factor was the actual physical situation of the area which, although consisting for the most part of alluvial plain, lies at a significantly higher elevation than the more central portion of the river basins. The plain slopes gradually downwards from the foothills so that Mandali itself has an elevation of 137 m. in contrast with 34 m. at Baghdad. There was, therefore, the possibility that here early prehistoric mounds might be visible above the level of the plain as in Assyria, not as in Sumer buried beneath the silt that has seriously hampered archaeological investigation.

In a previous number of Iraq, R. D. Barnett published an article, based on a communication given by him to the Rencontre Assyriologie in 1954, on the important discovery made at Ziwiye, a find that has posed so many definite questions and produced so few definite answers. Some drawings of hitherto unpublished material from this site in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum may perhaps be of interest, especially to those concerned with the problems posed by the bronze container in which the treasure was reputedly found. This receptacle was in the form of a coffin or bath of which one end was curved (Fig. 1). The other end was straight, one of its right-angled corners being now in the Metropolitan Museum (Fig. 2). This shape, common among the earthenware coffins at Aššur and at Ur, was recognised as being similar to two other metal ones unearthed by Sir Leonard Woolley at the latter site.

Beginning with the publication of Garelli's book “Les assyriens en Cappadoce” in 1963, a new wave of research into the Old Assyrian political, economic, and social structures has brought about a quite detailed understanding of many central aspects of the Old Assyrian society. It is my impression that something approaching a consensus has been reached in a number of important fields, and it is readily obvious where most of the pressing new problems are to be found. Many basic commercial procedures have been adequately analysed, the technical vocabulary of the merchants is beginning to be understood, the political system of the Assyrian state and the basis for the existence of the colonies on foreign soil has been described. However, all these studies have also made it very clear that the Old Assyrian colonial system constituted a highly sophisticated commercial milieu, and many features in the socio-economic structures bear witness to the complexity with which we have to deal in our work on the texts. Obviously, there cannot be a general agreement in all areas, and such differences of opinion must be reflected in our translations and interpretations of technical terms which can be seen to refer to central concepts. A case in point is the word tamkārum, “merchant”, which is dealt with in Garelli's contribution in this volume. Garelli tends to see this term as a title which refers to an official, and my own view is that it denotes a contractually regulated capacity and thus that it is not a title. One interpretation leads to the concept of a centralized bureaucracy in Assur, the other does not necessitate such a reconstruction. At the moment we can do little more than note the difference of opinion and attempt to present a coherent theory, but I believe that it is important at the same time to realize that these different views reflect two more or less clearly defined models of the Old Assyrian society. I have the feeling that some scholars think that such conceptual models should somehow be avoided, and that they constitute a danger to a real understanding of the ancients and their world, but such a view rests on a misunderstanding; it is not true that the “real” scholar is only interested in the texts and builds his theories exclusively on them, for any analysis entails some conceptual model. In fact, the success of our efforts often depends on how well we understand the models which we are using.

Many important texts from the last series of British Museum excavations at Nineveh were made available in R. Campbell Thompson's paper ‘A Selection from the Cuneiform Historical Texts from Nineveh (1927–32)’, published in Iraq 7 (1940). Mention is made therein of other fragments, said to be mosdy ‘well-known duplicates’. However, among these unedited pieces have been found a number that are worthy of publication as they usefully augment the repertory of Assyrian historical sources. They have been identified during the compilation of a supplementary catalogue of texts from Nineveh on behalf of the Trustees of the British Museum. Thanks are due to the Trustees and to the Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities for permission to publish these manuscripts.

The majority of the pieces in the collection are from the reign of Ashurbanipal, so they are presented here as a homogeneous group. It is hoped to make the other texts known in due course. Although the Annals of Ashurbanipal are familiar, several Editions are so poorly preserved that any new material is welcome, and these texts, together with those from Nimrud studied by E. E. Knudsen, and the promised edition of the Chicago collection by H. Tadmor, will prepare the way for a complete reconstruction of some of them. In this situation, the present study attempts to introduce the new evidence in the context of the previously available texts.

Following several seasons of survey and sampling of prehistoric sites in the middle and western Khabur drainage, we have secured more than fifty radiocarbon dates that provide an internally consistent, accurate and detailed chronology for this region. In this paper we provide a short synopsis of each sampled site by archaeological period (Table 1), accompanied by drawings of diagnostic ceramics. A complete presentation of the archaeological, artifactual, botanical and zoological records will be published as a monograph.

The Yale University teams have conducted a series of excavations, surveys and sampling projects in the middle Khabur region over the past thirteen years (Fig. 1). The principal goals of these efforts have been to document the prehistoric periods and to relate the distribution and density of sites to the natural environment and its changes, as well as to changes in the social, economic and political contexts prevailing locally and in northern Mesopotamia. In order to carry out intra-regional and inter-regional comparisons and interpretations, it is essential to have a solid chronological foundation. Unfortunately, accurate, calibrated radiocarbon dates based on modern techniques have been few and scattered, thus giving rise to unwarranted dependence on cross-comparisons with ceramics, or on isolated dates. Moreover, with calibration it is apparent that the commonly accepted definition of a “millennium” to encompass only a thousand years is not always accurate. This means that to use “conventional” radiocarbon dates often results in a very biased view of rates of change and of relations between regions.

With the generous consent of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavations at the site of Abu Salabikh were re-opened in September-December 1975 by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, under the writer's direction. It is a pleasure to record here our profound gratitude to Dr. Isa Salman, Director-General of Antiquities, and to all those members of his directorate who made our work possible and assisted us in every way. Special mention must be made of our representatives, Ghassan Azzawi, Ali Hashim, and Abdul-Mejid Muhammad, who never failed to give us all possible help, and of Dr. Abdul-Hadi al-Fouadi, whose assistance as director of excavations in Baghdad was indispensable. The members of the team were Niels Christian Andersen, M.A.A., architect, Dr. P. R. S. Moorey, cataloguer, R. M. C. Shirley, archaeologist, Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan and Kathryn Tubb, photographer and conservator respectively, and Mr. and Mrs. Philip and Adrienne Watson, archaeologists. Mrs. Carolyn Postgate was in charge of the pottery, and Miss Martha Patrick nobly doubled up as child-minder and draughtswoman. All members earned our sincere gratitude for their conscientiousness, and invariably did more than the mere recital of their assigned functions would imply. Grants towards the costs of the excavations were made by the British Academy, the British Museum, Trinity College Cambridge, and the C. H. W. Johns Fund, Cambridge, and to all these institutions we are greatly indebted for their support.

The tell at Arpachiyah in Northern Iraq has proved to be a key site in providing detailed information concerning the Halaf culture. At the suggestion of Dr. Joan Oates and Professor David Oates an eight week season of excavations was begun on the site on 5th September, 1976. Mr. Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Minister of Information, arranged a grant to help finance this season. The staff consisted of two conservators (Mr. Jalal Ibrahim and Mr. Kalil Qabtan), a photographer (Mr. Mudhir al Khalide) two experienced Shergati excavators with three assistants, and the author as director. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Mosul Museum, Mr. Manhal Jebur, Mr. M. Said al-Iraqi, and Mr. Hazim Abdulhamid. In addition special thanks go to Dr. Isa Salman, the Director General of Antiquities at the time, and to Dr. B. Abu es-Soof. During our two months on the tell we were visited by the late Professor Fuad Safar, Dr. Oates, Mr. M. A. Mustafa and Mr. T. Matsutani, all of whom provided us with sound advice which certainly assisted in the solution of some of the more difficult problems we encountered.

The basic intention of these excavations was to expand on Sir Max Mallowan's 1933 season at Arpachiyah, to check and, if possible, to improve on the archaeological sequence that he established and which was published in this journal in 1935. The information produced in this report is taken in part from the writer's Ph.D. dissertation, The Halaf Culture in Mesopotamia, Institute of Archaeology, London University, to be submitted in 1980.

The reign of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) has long been associated with three major monuments: the Bronze Gates from Balawat/Imgur-Enlil; the Throne Base from Fort Shalmaneser at Nimrud; and the Black Obelisk also from Nimrud. Each of these works is carved with scenes of historical narrative, arranged in narrow bands, with the subject matter identified in short epigraphs usually at the top of each band. Each monument also preserves a longer inscription, recording the military activities of the king. Although reproductions and descriptions of the relief carvings, and translations of the accompanying inscriptions have been available for some time, art and text have not, as yet, been studied together. Yet these three monuments comprise the primary visual sources available for the reign of Shalmaneser, as we lack any of the large-scale architectural reliefs of historical narrative that characterize the palace decoration of his father, Assurnasirpal II, and later Assyrian kings. For this reason, it seems particularly worthwhile to reexamine the monuments here. In fact, when all three works are studied as a unit—the images together with their accompanying texts and the many other royal inscriptions available—they become highly valuable sources of information for this period.

The fourth season of excavations at H3 at the north end of Kuwait bay took place in the spring of 2002. It is a great pleasure to express again our thanks to all those people who made it possible to continue our work at this important sixth/fifth millennium site with its mix of Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamian traits. Major financial support again came from the National Council for Culture Arts and Letters, together with Kuwait Shell without whose continuing support we would be unable to work. We are equally indebted to our colleagues at the National Museum of Kuwait and especially to Mr Shehab Abdul Hamid Shehab, Director of the Department of Antiquities and Museums, and to Mr Sultan al Darwish and his field team. Our own staff worked magnificently under conditions which were sometimes far from ideal. Without the hard work and skill of members of both the teams we would have achieved little and we thank them all. The major objectives for the 2002 season were as follows:

– to complete the plan of the major complex of rooms in Area A

– to establish the stratigraphic relationship between Areas A and C

– to establish the relationship between the buildings in Area A and the fire pit horizon in Area F (the Foxhole)

– to explore a new area, Area G, to the north of the main complex.

The stratigraphic relationships were successfully established and the plan of an additional building in Area G can now be added to the map of the site. Once again, however, it was found that the limits of the Area A complex in the east lie outside the excavated area, although the development of the structure (s) through time is now much clearer.

The subject of this article is a type of palace known in North Syria from the ninth to the seventh century B.C. There is no proof that the ancients called it bît hilani, but it is probable that the Assyrians, when using the term, had such a palace in mind. However, whether or not the designation is justified, we shall be dealing with concrete architectural forms. For the purpose of this article the bît hilani is a palace with two long narrow rooms, both with their main axis parallel to the façade. The first is a portico with from one to three columns, often placed at the top of a low flight of steps. Stairs to the upper storey are set to one side of the portico.

A Number of the historical texts excavated by R. Campbell Thompson at Nineveh belong to the period of the Middle Assyrian kingdom, or to the first two centuries of the first millennium B.C. They attest the activity of successive Assyrian rulers in structural works on the mound of Kouyunjik, although the buildings themselves have been demolished, or remain undiscovered. Moreover, they add information on the history of that age, known mainly from texts unearthed at Ashur. All the pieces studied here are catalogued in the Second Supplement to the Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum (1968) where details of provenance and physical appearance are given. They are published by permission of the Trustees.

The series of clay knobs (‘bosses’) recording the history of the Temple of Ishtar was edited by R. Campbell Thompson and he had a presentation of some other texts in hand at the time of his death, in 1941. His notes and copies were made available by courtesy of the Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, but the tablets have been baked and cleaned recently, so new copies have been drawn. One of the texts, an important tablet of Tiglath-pileser I, has been edited by E. F. Weidner (see below, n.2), the remaining fragments of historical content are given now, and some related pieces added for the information they add in this respect. Although these are but scraps, and many are unidentified, they merit publication as records of a poorly documented era.

Excavations at Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq by the Ur Region Archaeological Project have revealed a substantial building (hereafter the Public Building) dating to the mid-second millennium b.c. The results are significant for the light they shed on Babylonian provincial administration, particularly of food production, for revealing a previously unknown type of fortified monumental building, and for producing a dated archive, in context, of the little-understood Sealand Dynasty. The project also represents a return of British field archaeology to long-neglected Babylonia, in collaboration with Iraq's State Board for Antiquities and Heritage. Comments on the historical background and physical location of Tell Khaiber are followed by discussion of the form and function of the Public Building. Preliminary analysis of the associated archive provides insights into the social milieu of the time. Aspects of the material culture, including pottery, are also discussed.

The Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) investigates settlement and land use from the Neolithic to the present in the Erbil Governorate of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which includes a large portion of the core of the Assyrian Empire. In seven field seasons, it has documented a broad settlement landscape in a region of great social and political importance, especially in the Bronze and Iron Ages, including 728 archaeological sites. Its field methodology combines traditional surface collection with the use of historical aerial and satellite photographs, mobile GIS, and UAV (drone) photogrammetry. Preliminary results show some unexpected patterns: a high density of culturally Uruk settlements in the fourth millennium B.C., variable urban morphologies in the Early Bronze Age; and large but low-density settlements at the end of the Sasanian period or the early Islamic period. The project is explicitly testing several hypotheses about centralized Neo-Assyrian landscape planning in the imperial core. These hypotheses appear to be confirmed, although the situation was more complex than in surrounding provinces, probably due to the longer history of continuous settlement.

This, the second report on the activities of a team from the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq in the north Jazira, will present an overview of the results of the first four seasons of fieldwork. A review of settlement change since the first millennium BC will be reserved for a future publication. The first two seasons of survey (autumn 1986 and 1987), which concentrated on the region around Tell al-Hawa, were followed, in autumn 1988, by a season of excavation of three sites within the hinterland: Tulul al-Biyadir, Tell al-Hilwa and Khanijdal. The most recent season, conducted over some four months between September 1989 and February 1990, resulted in a total survey coverage of some 475 sq km. In addition, a single Late Assyrian/Hellenistic/Parthian site (Khirbet ‘Aloki) was excavated to investigate the sequence of settlement within the area of putative Neo-Assyrian colonisation. The first interim report (Ball, Tucker and Wilkinson 1989, henceforth, Ball et al. 1989) presented an introduction to the area and the rescue project; this report will focus upon the development of settlement and the influence that early route systems had upon settlement patterns.