Certainly one of the most striking features of the archaeological scene in Iraq today is the vigorous restoration work which the Directorate General of Antiquities is carrying out at various sites up and down the country. It is, of course, true that the repair and restoration of Iraq's ancient monuments has long been a perennial concern of the Directorate, but due in the main to the high costs of such work and the competing financial demands of the Directorate's many other responsibilities, it has proved impossible in the past to proceed on more than a modest scale. Since 1960 the situation has changed completely. In that year by making a special allocation to the Directorate of one hundred and twenty thousand dinars the Iraq Government recognised formally and materially that if the country's architectural heritage was to be preserved for later generations, and if the world-famous sites of Mesopotamia were to present attractions to foreign visitors comparable with those offered by equally famous sites in neighbouring Near Eastern states, something effective should be done to step up preservation, restoration and improvement. This admirable decision has since been upheld by further substantial annual disbursements, and in consequence the Directorate has been able to plan and to put into effect an ambitious and extensive programme including work both in Baghdad, and at Hatra, Babylon, Aqar Quf, Ur and Tell Harmal. As those of our readers who are familiar with these sites will readily realise, the problems to be faced and overcome by the would-be preserver and restorer are of a truly intimidating order in their number and complexity. It is, therefore, in tribute to the courage, ingenuity and skill of the responsible officers of the Directorate that we offer these all-too-brief notes on their progress to date.

Qasr Serīj lies five kilometres south-west of Tell Hugna, and some sixty kilometres north-west of Mosul, on gently undulating ground at the southern foot of Jebel Qusair. It is watered by a small perennial stream, now used to irrigate the fields of the modern village of Qusair just to the north of the ancient site. The ruins were visited by the writer in 1956 in the course of a survey sponsored by the Stein-Arnold Fund of the British Academy, and will be more fully published in the forthcoming account of that work. I am greatly indebted to Father John Fiey, of the Dominican community in Mosul, who subsequently called my attention to documentary evidence for the foundation of a monastery, and a church dedicated to St. Sergius, in this region by Mar Ahudemmeh, Metropolitan of the monophysite church in Mesopotamia A.D. 559–575, and suggested that this church was Qasr Serīj, an identification which is amply confirmed by the evidence. The purpose of this brief article is to entertain readers of Iraq with an unusually well-documented episode in a little known period of Mesopotamian history, the last century of Sassanian rule before the coming of Islam.

The church stands in the middle of a ruin field extending half a kilometre to the east of the watercourse. The other buildings, although some at least may be contemporary, were apparently built of mortared rubble in the common medieval tradition of the region, and are so far buried in their own debris that no coherent plan can be recovered. The church, on the other hand, was constructed of carefully dressed limestone blocks, and parts of the structure stand to nearly their original height. The plan (Plate XXVII), which is unique among the existing monuments of Iraq, is that of a small basilica of North Syrian type, of which many well-preserved examples exist farther to the west. It is an approximate rectangle c. 23 by 14 m., with a central nave flanked by aisles and terminating in an inscribed semi-circular apse.

The discovery of an inscribed statue of Shalmaneser III at Nimrud during the 1961 season of excavations by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq was reported in the last issue of this journal. It is the purpose of the study which follows to present the text of the inscription, together with a translation, some discussion of setting and content and notes on deserving passages.

As was stated in the first report, the statue, a fraction over one metre in height and diagonally broken at its left lower corner, was found leaning against the North wall of the storeroom NE 50, situated in the North-East courtyard of Fort Shalmaneser. The exact position is shown on the accompanying detail from the 1961 plan, given in Fig. 1. The statue ‘had apparently been brought in to Fort Shalmaneser for repair, since we found dowel holes bored in the opposed faces of the fracture. It seems unlikely that an object of such importance would have been broken in normal circumstances, and the damage may have been the work of the invaders in 614 B.C.’ One may perhaps admit the possibility of another explanation (see below), but it is worth recalling that the fragmentary condition of the Shalmaneser statue found at Nimrud in 1956 has also been plausibly attributed to an act of Median violence.

Among the discoveries made in the course of the excavations of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq at Nimrud in the spring of 1962 was a well-preserved hollow clay barrel-cylinder of Esarhaddon, ND. 11308 (Plate XXXV, opposite p. 117), found just outside the south wall of the ancient town near its south-east corner; it had presumably fallen from a building above in Fort Shalmaneser. It is now in the Iraq Museum.

The cylinder, virtually undamaged except by the pick-mark of unexpected discovery, is 17·7 cm. long; it has a maximum diameter of 10·4 cm., and a diameter at each end of 9 cm.; at the left end is a circular hole 1·8 cm. in diameter, at the right end a circular hole 1·5 cm. in diameter: it bears an inscription of 64 lines, each c. 15 cm. long, lines 1–62 of which are duplicated (except in minor points listed below) by lines 1–62 of the inscription on the cylinder ND. 1126 (BM 131129), whose measurements in the same dimensions are 19 cm., 10·2 cm., 9·7 cm., 1·7 cm., 1·8 cm., and c. 16 cm. respectively.

The Era Epic is the expression of frustrated patriotism. Babylonia had been reduced to ruins and impotence by a people called the Sutû, and the author is trying to explain the reason and to give promises of a glorious future. The reason given is that the god Era, a god of pestilence, had been angry. No grounds, ultimately, for this anger are suggested: it was the god's nature. His commander-in-chief, the god Išum, finally persuaded him to relent. The last of the five tablets, in which the text is written, begins at the point in the narrative where Era has been appeased.

One distinctive feature is a long epilogue. The Epic of Creation is the only other Babylonian epic with a similar ending, but this is less detailed. The Era Epic names its author, and specifies the particular blessings that would come upon gods, kings, nobles, rhapsodists, scribes, and houses that heed this ‘song’. These promised blessings account for many of the copies which have come down to us. The whole epic inscribed in minute writing on a single tablet, single tablets of the five, or short extracts, were used as amulets. Miss E. Reiner has written on this use of the Epic in J.N.E.S. 19 (1960), pp. 148–155. Often the tablets have two corners cut away and a horizontal hole through the remaining tab, as though to fit the tablet into a frame. Such a tablet forms the basis of the present publication. It is a Neo-Late-Babylonian tablet from Ur, U.18122, which contained the whole of Tablet Five written in a minute hand. Unfortunately only illegible traces of the obverse remain, but most of the reverse is preserved, if legible with difficulty. In addition to the copy (Plate XXXVI), we give a full edition of the Fifth Tablet based on collations of all the London fragments. A copy is also given of Bu. 91–5–9, 69+177+225, which has previously been read from inadequate photographs. In view of the useful list of MSS. of the Epic given, with full bibliography, by B. Kienast in Z.A. 54, pp. 244–249, we leave readers to refer to that for details.

The bronzes illustrated on Plates XXXVII, XXXVIII, 1, 2, and XXXIX, 4 are all unstratified and the provenance of only one of the daggers is known. This is illustrated on Plate XXXVII, 1 and comes from a site above Lahijan in the Elburz mountains east of Resht. It was presented to the Institute of Archaeology by Mrs. Iris Ainley. The dagger is 35 cms. long and the lunate pommel measures 5·9 cms. in width. Plate XXXVIII, 4 is in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (No. 422.991), and is published here by courtesy of the Associate Curator, Mr. G. W. Van Beek. It measures 38·4 cms. in length and the pommel is 4·1 cms. in width. Both the daggers (Plates XXXVII, 1 and XXXVIII, 4) show the distinctive features which relate them to daggers from the region of the Talish, where tombs excavated in both the Russian and Persian areas by De Morgan in 1890 and 1901 have yielded many comparable examples. Plate XXXVIII, 4 can be compared to my type 43 (Iraq VIII, 1946, Pt. 1, Pl. V, 43). This type cannot be included among the common types of Talish bronze dagger, but a dagger from Hiveri, published by De Morgan, has a solid hilt with three circular ribs and the type example from Veri, with one rib round the solid hilt are both comparable. A dagger from Luristan with hilt similar to the Veri example is also published by Godard, and again the skeuomorphic moulding representing the thong which bound hilt and blade together on earlier blades is visible. But, as Schaeffer has pointed out, the cemetery at Veri must have lasted for a considerable period. Most of the tombs can be assigned to his “Talish récent II” c. 1450–1350 B.C. (dated by analogy with comparable material in tombs at Hassan Zamini and Agha Evlar which contained seals of Kirkuk style) but there is an earlier group contemporary with Khodja Daoud Köpru (Talish récent I c. 1550–1450 B.C.) in which the swords are all narrow rapiers with tangs.

The excavations at Yanik Tepe, a prehistoric mound twenty miles south-west of Tabriz, were begun in 1960, when building levels of one period only were all that could be investigated. The site clearly required further excavations, if possible on a larger scale, and these were carried out during a period of eight weeks, beginning in mid-August 1961. All archaeological excavations must have an over-riding purpose, and that of the work at Yanik Tepe, itself a seemingly obscure settlement in a little known region, is to try to make this region to some extent comprehensible to students of the archaeology of Iran and of the Near East as a whole. The site was chosen originally by me with this objective in mind, with the particular hope that it might provide some much needed evidence for the prehistory of eastern Anatolia, and perhaps also of Trans-Caucasia, more especially during the third millennium B.C., commonly called the Early Bronze Age. But the purpose and extent of the excavations at Yanik Tepe were never intended to be confined to one cultural period, however interesting. It was hoped to reveal the story of this agricultural community in north-west Persia over a considerable period of time. This hope has already been realized, since the excavations of 1961, though requiring continuation in 1962, have uncovered remains of Late Chalcolithic levels of the mid-fourth millennium B.C. and of later periods down to c. 600 B.C. and beyond, in areas of the mound untouched in 1960 (see Fig. 1). The sequence of cultural periods is a very long one, even though there are gaps, especially in the second millennium B.C., for which other sites may have to provide the material evidence. Yanik Tepe was never a major town, but it should add very significantly to knowledge of the ancient Near East.