When Austen Henry Layard excavated the palace of Aššurnaṣirpal II at Nimrud, ancient Kalḫu, he did not describe Room Z in detail. Therefore, information to aid in a reconstruction of this room must be collected and carefully analysed with the use both of primary sources and the careful considerations of earlier and contemporary scholars who have contributed to the restoration of this palace since its discovery almost 150 years ago.

Layard described the room and the one entrance which he designated as such in the following manner:

“Entrance a. Colossal winged figures with garlands round their temples, carrying on one arm a wild goat or a gazelle, and in the elevated right hand, an ear of corn: facing Chamber Z.”

“Room Z. A narrow passage, connecting hall Y with a chamber which has been completely destroyed. Nos. 1, 2, 6, 7 are narrow slabs, divided by the usual inscription in two compartments, each occupied by a small winged figure. On the remaining slabs are colossal winged figures, with the horned cap.”

The site of Tell Aqab lies six kilometres south of the town of Amuda, in the Jezirah province of north-east Syria. It is one of a large number of early mounds which cluster along the northern edge of the Khabur triangle, an extensive and fertile plain drained by the Khabur River and its eastern tributaries. The rich well-watered soil of the Khabur triangle has attracted human settlement during many periods in the past. Earlier in this century excavations by von Oppenheim (Oppenheim 1931) at Tell Halaf and by Mallowan (Mallowan 1947) at Chagar Bazar and at Tell Brak demonstrated the great archaeological potential of the Khabur headwaters sites. The excavation of Tell Aqab was undertaken by the Department of Archaeology of the University of Edinburgh in order to gain a better understanding of the prehistory of this important area. In particular, the site of Tell Aqab promised to yield a long and well stratified Halaf and Ubaid culture sequence for the Khabur headwaters region.

The major assemblages of ivory carving preserved from the first millennium B.C. have generally been divided into two groups, Phoenician and North Syrian, and the classic characteristics of these groups are by now quite well established. However, if one defines Phoenicia as corresponding more or less to the coastal strip west of the Lebanon mountains, from the Carmel to Byblos, with the chief cities in antiquity as Tyre, Sidon, Arka, Arwad, Sarafand and Gebeil, and possibly including the Beka'a Valley and the Anti-Lebanon but certainly not further east; and if one defines North Syria as comprising the city states north of the Orontes Valley and south of the Taurus, from the Habur to the Amanus, including Gozan, Bit-Adini, Carchemish, Kummuh, Maraş, Sam'al, Arpad, Patina/Unqi and possibly Hamath; then it will be noted that the territory occupied by these two regions in no way encompasses the entire Syro-Palestinian Levant. Notably absent is the area of the powerful kingdom of Aram, whose capital was at Damascus, as well as the kingdom of Israel, with its seat at Samaria—both of which geographical and political units figured prominently in the southern coalition of states met by Shalmaneser III of Assyria in 853 B.C. and in subsequent Assyrian campaigns to the West.

The student of ancient Mesopotamian society is blessed not only in having access to written evidence, but in having that evidence frequently preserved in significant archaeological context. Although all artifacts both derive meaning from their context and aid in the interpretation of this context, none can equal the cuneiform tablet in informative power. Only partial understanding is possible from a study of the texts and the other archaeological data when the two are divorced; as the texts reveal the actions of the ancient structures' inhabitants, so the archaeological remains represent the physical manifestation of these recorded actions. In the following pages we will take advantage of this unique blessing and attempt an examination of Old Babylonian residence patterns as they are reflected in house property transactions and their accompanying architectural modifications.

Although Mesopotamian archaeologists spend much of their time clearing buildings, determining construction techniques and identifying architectural modifications, relatively little attention has been paid to the social and cultural implications of these structures. Domestic architecture reflects the social needs of its inhabitants and as such is a sensitive indicator not only of variations in wealth but of variations in social organization. Since real cultural change is manifested by changes in social, economic and political organization, and not necessarily by stylistic changes in artifacts, we must use all of the tools at our disposal, in this instance textual and ethnographic, to penetrate the implications of architectural remains. It is hoped that this study may move us one step closer to this goal.

In order to live one must eat and if one is to live a full and active life the food that is eaten must supply all the nutrients required to maintain the body in a healthy state. An appreciation of the importance of diet has led to many modern studies in this field. The methods used include an examination of the environment of the country concerned; of its economic basis—for example whether it is mainly an agricultural or an industrial country, what food is available and whether such food is locally grown or imported; dietary surveys, usually at family level, of the food intake of the population and clinical studies to assess the health of the individual. The information gained in these surveys is used to assess the adequacy of the nutritional intake of the population. It has proved difficult to set up an accepted standard by which to judge adequacy of diet, but the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has produced tables of recommended daily intakes of nutrients which can be taken as a practical guide.

Some of these methods can be applied to ancient Mesopotamia in order to see whether the diet there can be considered adequate. Examination of the palaeoethnobotanical and palaeozoological evidence from excavated sites, together with references in cuneiform texts and representations of plants and animals on cylinder seals and reliefs, give information about the environment and the economic base. This was agriculture with cereals such as barley and wheat as the main crops and sheep, goats, cattle and pigs the main domesticated animals. Clinical studies of individual people are not possible: obviously no one is available for measuring and weighing or to supply blood and urine samples for tests! It may be, however, that the study of skeletal material will in future enable the likely height and weight of a population to be calculated and provide some information about calcium and Vitamin D deficiencies. It is impossible also to carry out the kind of dietary survey in which families are studied and their food weighed before eating so that exact food intake can be calculated. But by studying the botanical and faunal remains, cylinder seals and reliefs, and the cuneiform texts, it is possible to get some idea of the range of food which was available, which foodstuffs were utilized and how, and to a certain extent who ate what.

The use of cuneiform as a recording medium survived in Babylonia some 500 years after the loss of political independence. Records from the Arsacid period, however, are not numerous nor have those published been subject to systematic study. The texts presented here are among the latest administrative records in cuneiform and are concerned primarily with recording the income and expenditures of the temples of Babylon. The texts were originally housed in the Bodleian library but now are kept in the Ashmolean museum. They were first described by R. Campbell Thompson in his Catalogue of the Late Babylonian Tablets in the Bodleian Library, where he described the tablets without giving copies or transliterations.

The temple accounts published here consist of an introductory statement giving the amount of the income of a certain temple for a specific period of time, which is usually either approximately one month or multiples of a month. This is followed by a list of specific expenditures and the remainder, which was then deposited or re-deposited, as the case may be, with a private banker. We know from other sources that the right to act as banker was leased by the temples for specific periods to private individuals, who put in tenders to the temple assembly for this right.

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.

Several Assyrian cities contained free-standing obelisks or other monuments of stone with registers of carved decoration. This article presents fragments of such monuments now in the British Museum Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, with references to others known to me.

Layard (1849: II, 53, 58) records that, during his brief soundings at Assur in 1847, one of his workmen “also picked up, amongst the rubbish, … several bits of black stone with small figures in relief, which appeared to have belonged to an obelisk, like that dug up at Nimroud”, and that his trenches, somewhere on the mound, produced “bits of basalt, with small figures in relief”. The British Museum has the following two fragments, from this period of Layard's work in Assyria, which are indeed entered in the original acquisitions register of the then Department of Antiquities as coming from Kalah Shergat, i.e. from Assur.

This paper reports on an attempt to apply the technology of ultrasonic cleaning to the conservation of clay tablets and to measure the effectiveness of ultrasound against the desalting technique now in use. It is hoped that the results of these preliminary experiments will inspire a thorough investigation into the possible advantages of employing an ultrasonic cleaning system. The author would not recommend switching from the standard soaking method to ultrasound before a good deal more study.

The conservation of cuneiform tablets involves the removal of water-soluble and less soluble salts present in the clay. This is usually accomplished by baking the tablets to approximately 1500° F and later washing them in cool, circulating water. Salt deposits that are not removed through conservation tend to crystallize, damaging the surface of the tablet with its inscription and causing internal disintegration as well.

During the second season of excavations at Tell Brak, in 1978, work was continued in Area CH, Trench B. The small sounding below the two-staged dais in Room 1 of the “temple” was further deepened and its lowest levels were found to contain evidence of Late Uruk occupation. The small sample of pottery from these levels is of some importance. It is the first stratified group of north Mesopotamian locally-made Uruk pottery to be found immediately below an early third millennium B.C. pottery sequence of reliable stratification; it shows certain typological affinities with the third millennium material and with pottery from other Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age sites. Of particular interest is the first recorded occurrence of Ninevite 5 ware in a Late Uruk context.

It is our intention to describe briefly the principal Late Uruk wares found at Brak and to illustrate some of the characteristic sherd and vessel types.

Over 50% of each sherd batch was of coarse, Chaff-Tempered Ware. The light, brittle, medium to poorly fired fabric is pale to dark red, orange or brown in colour and is usually carbonized at the core. Sherds from larger vessels are more substantial and better fired. Particularly characteristic of the ware is its high chaff content, though other fillers were used: lime, basalt and sand grits (some of them fairly large) and shell being the most obvious.

The fragment of Mesopotamian music lexicography published here was identified in the tablet collection of the Babylonian Section of the University Museum, Philadelphia, during a search for certain Sumerian literary fragments. It is offered to Oliver Gurney since it supplements the text of Nabnitu XXXII of whose major source he is the copyist and pioneer decipherer. Furthermore, the new musical term revealed by the text here may have a bearing on the treatise for the tuning of the Babylonian harp published by Professor Gurney in a previous number of this journal.

As shown in the following pages there has been considerable archaeological activity in Iraq over the last two years. The rescue operation mounted by the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage in the Hamrin Basin has continued during the whole of this period, although on fewer sites, and a considerable number of new sites have been discovered and excavated in the Haditha Dam area. Rescue work has also continued in areas threatened by city development or road building, and our list of sites for these two years is almost as long as for 1977 and 1978.

Our thanks go, as ever, to the President of the State Organization, Dr. Muayad Sa'id Damerji, for permission to include these summary reports in Iraq, and to all those excavators and others who have helped us in assembling them. As well as the individual directors, we would like to thank Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof and Dr. Muhammad Baqir al-Husseini, respectively Directors of the Hamrin and Haditha Projects, for their assistance. We would also like to take the opportunity of apologizing to those expeditions whose results we have been unable to include for lack of time or because of difficulty in communication: the chief casualty is the important work at Basra, now under the direction of Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-'Azzawi, Director-General for the South of Iraq, and the reports on a number of other sites are less detailed than we would have wished.