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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.