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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
THE British Museum having been fortunate enough to acquire a new historical document from Assyria of considerable importance, it has been thought that (not withstanding that an excellent translation and commentary upon it, from the pen of the copyist of the text, Mr. L. W. King, of the British Museum, has been published) a few notes concerning it would not be without interest to the readers of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and more particularly those whose studies deal with the pre-Christian Semitic East, especially the tract lying north-west of the Persian Gulf.
page 388 note 1 The Bellino-cylinder, Taylor-cylinder, and other texts.
page 390 note 1 The characters which I have translated “catapults, fortifications”—a provisional rendering—are 
, numgalli dûri, translated by King “‘great flies' of the wall’”, though he further suggests that they were siege-engines, “probably with an armoured roof expanding rearward like a fly's wings.” As all Assyriologists know, the character num (“fly”) is used, in the Flood-legend, to indicate something corresponding with the rainbow in the Biblical account, and a great cross-bow or ballista may have suggested, to the imagination of the Assyrians, a giant fly with outspread wings. It is also noteworthy that the word for “lightning” in Sumero-Akkadian is 
, num-gir, “fly-sword.” Cf. also 
=zumbi-abni, “the fly of stone,” perhaps a catapult or ballista for throwing great pebbles. In Boissier's, Divination, p. 6Google Scholar, this group should be followed by ZA-GIN, Semitic zumbi âbnu uknī, “lapis-fly,” a name probably due to its colour.
page 392 note 1 So according to the Armenian text—cf. Schoene's Eusebius, col. 27, and Eusebii Pamphili Chronicon Bipartitum, by Aucher, P. Jo. Baptist, Venice, 1818, p. 21Google Scholar.
page 394 note 1 I have adopted the restorations given by Mr. King in the British Museum publication referred to.
page 397 note 1 Probably the Babylonians in general, in which case “the older Enlil” may not be intended, but Bel-Merodach.
page 398 note 1 King: breccia.
page 400 note 1 Assyrian Discoveries, by Smith, George (2nd ed., 1875), pp. 430–1Google Scholar.
page 403 note 1 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archœoloyy, December, 1909, pp. 339 ff.