On the morning of April 27th last I was delighted and astonished to discover in the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff a tile inscribed in Neo-Punic letters. I published a summary account of the graffito in The Illustrated London News on August 12th, 1939. Here I should like to say a little more about the inscription, not so much to amplify the short account in The Illustrated London News as to leave a permanent record in an archaeological journal of a discovery which is unique in the annals of British archaeology.

Arabia has given Britain one inscription: as long ago as 1878, a fine Roman altar, inscribed in Latin and Palmyrene characters, was discovered in the Roman camp near South Shields, and is now to be seen in the Free Library at that place. But this is the first time that an inscription from the hand of a descendant of the old Phoenician branch of the Semitic race has been found in Britain (or rather, recognized as such, for the tile was found during the excavation of Holt in the years 1907–15).

In the course of the excavation of a building which has become known as Fort Shalmaneser, a well preserved slab of greenish alabaster with an inscription from Shalmaneser III was discovered in a doorway leading into the room F.S., S. 4, where it served as a threshold. The slab measures 146 cms. in width (length) and 62 cms. in height (width); brickwork and bitumen covering which extended c. 10 cms. at either edge of the slab concealed the beginning and end of each line of the inscription. A rectangular socket hole near the upper edge of the slab was designed to receive a vertically sliding bar. There is a crack in the stone running from the upper to the lower edge; a natural flaw in the surface is responsible for the circumstance that the sign KUR, in line 5, was incised to a smaller scale than the other signs of the inscription. Part of the surface at the upper edge of the slab is worn; for this reason part of the first line of the inscription is lost.

The inscription is framed, and the individual lines of inscription are separated by ruled lines. The inscription continues beyond its frame at the end of the second line. The width of the inscribed panel is 141 cms., its height 53 cms. The distance between each ruled line is 5 cms. A copy of the inscription is shown in Plate XII. The following is a transliteration and translation of the text.

Excavations carried out in the last five years by “La Sapienza” University of Rome and Iraqi teams at the site of Abu Tbeirah (Nasiriyah, Iraq) exposed a large multi-phased mud-brick building (Building A), internally articulated into various rooms with different purposes, which probably hosted a wide range of activities. This building presents an opportunity to investigate the use of these spaces in order to glimpse the daily life and the socio-economic structure of its past inhabitants. In this paper we present the preliminary outcomes of this study, based on the results of a micro-debris analysis that looked at the distribution of the material residues embedded within the floor of Room 5 of the building.

Le beau cylindre gravé en hématite A 357, trouvé en 1936 pendant la seconde campagne de fouilles à Chagar Bazar (Haute-Syrie), a été publié par Sir Max Mallowan dans son rapport définitif paru dès 1937 dans Iraq 4, 97, 111 et 136 à 137, ainsi que dans un article préliminaire dans Illustrated London News (1937), 521.

Il ressort du rapport dans Iraq, dont on admirera la précision, et l'étendue des comparaisons stylistiques, que le cylindre de Chagar Bazar faisait partie des offrandes funéraires déposées dans un caveau voûté en briques crues, anciennement écroulé, situé sous le sol d'une habitation comprenant au moins quatre pièces, et dont les fondations remontent au XIX e s.av.n.è. (“Grave 153, room 42, level I, early intermediate, section, fig. 6, p. 122”). A la suite de reconstructions, réparations et transformations successives de la maison, le niveau des sols superposés et des pavages dans les courettes a été rehaussé de 3 mètres. L'occupation semble s'être poursuivie jusque vers la fin du XVIIIe s.av.n.è., et aucune trace d'incendie n'a été signalée. Sous le sol de la pièce 42 où fut mis au jour le caveau 153 ont été dégagées trois inhumations: les offrandes qui y furent déposées constituent le contexte archéologique du cylindre A 357. Il se compose de poteries, dont certaines peintes (types fig. 21 (6), 22 (14), 23 (7), 24 (1)), attribuées au “early intermediate level I”, autrement dit à l'Ugarit Moyen 2 de la stratigraphie de Ras Shamra; cf. Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale, 91, 1900–1750 av.n.è.).

In this article the name of the Sumerian god Isimu is analysed as “who brings the shoots forth” and explained by the chthonic character of his master Enki. Investigated is as well the ratio behind the complex writing of his name and the names of other servants of Enki. Beside this it is shown that Isimu must have been known at least since the time of the archaic texts from Ur. There was also another Janus like mythical being, the male and female Ara, at one point identified with Isimu.

It is appropriate to dedicate this article to Sidney Smith, on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday, for like many scholars primarily concerned with the ancient history and archaeology of Western Asia, his interests were frequently drawn to the distant field of South Arabia where so much enigmatic material reminiscent of the northern, urban monuments of Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia has been found.

The boldly carved, large alabaster head here illustrated on Plates XXIV–XXV is as good a specimen of its kind as I have ever seen, and can be confidently authenticated, not only because of its assured style and antique condition, but also on account of the circumstances of discovery.

This head, which is at present privately owned, was found by a young officer, in 1962, when his regiment was stationed in Aden. On a long distance patrol he visited the ancient city of Timna‘ which he noted as situated on the Yemen-Aden Protectorate border, about two days drive by armoured car, west of ‘Ataq. He described the site as ‘ now reduced by nature to cover a square mile of rubble, often covered with high sand-dunes. There is no water now and only a few Beduin live there’. He also observed that this appeared to be the site of an ancient capital city, that broken pillars and other architectural remains were lying around and that walls and gates could still be traced.

Babylon has been associated with incantation bowls since the first discoveries in the mid-nineteenth century. The “Rawlinson” collection of eight incantation bowls (seven were written in Aramaic and one in Mandaic) was accessioned on 9 October 1851 by the British Museum and, according to Trustees Minutes, had been “found in a tomb at Babylon”. Austin Henry Layard does not seem to have been privy to this provenance information when three of these incantation bowls were transcribed and translated in his book, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. Instead he claimed that the bowls from the “Rawlinson” collection were “obtained at Baghdad, where they are sometimes offered for sale by the Arabs; but it is not known from what sites they were brought.” This misinformation has been perpetuated and no further information has come to light on the unusual findspot.

Amongst the vast collections of the Iraq Museum are numerous incantation bowls from Babylon, to which IM 9726 can now be added (Fig. 1). The entry in the Register of the Iraq Museum, dated 1927/1928, is scant, not even mentioning the script of the bowl: “Bowl with Incantation Text. Baked clay 12.5 × 6.5 [cm]. Presented by Mey Marian”. Thirteen years later, Cyrus Gordon included IM 9726 in his resumé of international collections of incantation bowls that appeared in the 1941 issue of Orientalia. It was one of the eleven incantation bowls Gordon recorded from the Iraq Museum collection, which he noted “has increased considerably since my last visit to Baghdad in 1935” and which he correctly predicted “should eventually become the largest and the best”. However, Gordon, who noted that IM 9726 had nine lines of Aramaic, only presented excerpts of its text. He did not supply any photograph or drawing of this incantation bowl nor any other information.

The text of úru àm-ma-ir-ra-bi, the longest extant Sumerian balaĝ-lament, is in the process of recovery and reconstruction from Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform tablets. This article presents a previously unpublished Babylonian tablet fragment that holds part of the composition's hitherto unknown eleventh tablet. The fragment also contains part of the catchline to the twelfth tablet, also unidentified until now, and is thus an important source for the reconstruction of úru àm-ma-ir-ra-bi.

A second season of a new programme of excavations at Tell Brak in northeastern Syria took place from mid-March to late May 1995. Our sincere gratitude for continuing support goes especially to the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, in particular in Damascus to the Director-General, Professor Dr Sultan Muhesen, the Director of Excavations, Dr Adnan Bounni, and to all their colleagues who assisted us in many ways. We also thank Sd Jean Lazare of the Antiquities Office in Hasake and Sd Ass'ad Mahmud of Der ez-Zor Museum. Our representative was again Sd Hussein Yusuf who provided invaluable assistance in all aspects of our work, for which we are very grateful. Funding was generously provided by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, and the British Academy, to all of whom sincere thanks are expressed.

The excavation team in 1995 comprised Dr Roger Matthews (excavations director), Ms Helen McDonald (registrar and pottery specialist), Professor Farouk al-Rawi (epigraphist and archaeologist), Dr Susan Colledge (palaeobotanist and environmentalist), Dr Keith Dobney (zooarchaeologist), Dr Wendy Matthews (micromorphologist), Ms Fiona Macalister (conservator), Ms Kim Duistermaat, Mr Geoffrey Emberling, Mr Nicholas Jackson, Mr Tom Pollard (archaeologists), Ms Amy Emberling and Mr Jake Emberling (camp support).

Among the discoveries made by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur during the 1930–1 season were four public chapels of the Larsa period. Since city temples and domestic shrines were familiar from his earlier excavations, these wayside shrines marked a new discovery of which, however, little note seems to have been made in subsequent discussions of Babylonian religion. The most discussed, perhaps because of its better preservation, is the building (A H House 3 = No. 1 Church Lane) at the corner of Church Lane and Straight Street, fronting on Carfax, with the main door into Church Lane (Fig. 1), called by its discoverer the ‘Chapel of Pa-sag’. The sanctuary proper bore signs of destruction which had preserved the contents in situ, thus enabling a reconstruction to be given of the arrangement of the main furnishings in the Larsa period.

In the centre of the sanctuary, blocking the visual access into a smaller inner room in a direct line with the street doorway, stood a low brick construction (Plate XXIa). This was coated with bitumen in the same way as were two plinths standing behind it on either side of the doorway leading into the inner room, so that this may also have been the pedestal for a statue rather than an altar. It is possible that the limestone figure of a goddess (Plate XXIIc) had been broken in its fall from this commanding position.

The texts presented in this study are two which were discovered by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq during the 1955 season at Nimrud. The field records of the Expedition show that both tablets came from a rubbish pit H 2 within the precincts of the Nabu Temple. They formed part of a large collection which was disturbed and partly destroyed by persons searching for loot and burnt-bricks after the destruction of Calah in 612 B.C. Some time in the sixth century there was an attempt to repair and renovate the city by the impoverished inhabitants of the district, who found in the old Assyrian pavements invaluable building material. Much excavation of the Temple area was then undertaken, and the site was studded with pits which were subsequently refilled with unwanted debris including the remains of the Temple library.

Moortgat here gives an account of the fourth campaign at Tell Chuēra, an important site situated on the frontier of North Central Syria, between the Ḫabur and the Balikh, about equidistant from Ras el ‘Ain and Tell Abiadh, in steppe country studded with ancient settlements. The work was conducted under the auspices of the Max-Freiherr-von-Oppenheim Institute and the Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, and is a pendant to the campaign instituted at Tell Halaf on the Upper Ḫabur by Oppenheim in 1911–1912. The results obtained at Chuēra also have a significant relation to the discoveries made by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in 1934–1938, at Chazar Bazar, Brak and elsewhere in the eastern Habur-Jaghjagha District, and are therefore peculiarly appropriate to discussion in this Journal which published accounts of these excavations about thirty years ago. Thus investigations spread over a period of more than 50 years are gradually placing this part of Northern Syria in a perspective which has become more clearly intelligible through the foreground of Babylonia.

The main mound of Chuēra is of large dimensions and spans a distance of over 1,000 metres from north to south. Winter rains are apt to be heavy, and water is available from a wadi of the same name. Buildings have appeared in several sectors of the mound, both of undressed stone, Steinbau I & III, and of mud-brick.

During the summer of 1931, in the interval between the departure of the first and the arrival of the second of the two distinguished scholars who have occupied the post of Director of Antiquities in Iraq since the death of Gertrude Bell, I was privileged to hold for a few months inexpert administrative charge of the Department. It was at this time that my friend Aḥmad Beg-i Taufiq Beg, Mutaṣarrif of Sulaimani, reported that he had discovered in the naḥiya of Surdash a rock carving which he believed to be ancient Persian. The news was surprising. From 1919 to 1922, when the liwa was under direct British administration, many political and military officers had scoured the district on duty or in search of sport; in the last seven years, since the re-establishment of regular administration, visitors, though not particularly numerous, had not been rare; I myself, with many Kurdish friends who know of my interest in these things, had been in the neighbourhood two or three times. Yet I had never heard any whisper of the existence of such a monument. There was, indeed, one cave near Awdalan that was frequently talked about, an immense hollow running deep into the mountain and holding, no doubt, much of interest to the student of primitive man; but it was not that. I made up my mind to visit the place myself as soon as possible. But for the next three years a perverse fate seemed to turn my footsteps consistently in the direction of the Syrian desert, away from the Kurdish hills; and it was not until April 1934 that the fortunate conjunction of the ‘Id-al-’Adhḥa holidays and Easter gave me my opportunity. Aḥmad Beg was kind enough to make all the preliminary arrangements with Shaikh ‘Abdul Karim of the Qadiri-darwish takya of Awdalan, and to accompany me himself.

Leonard Woolley directed the dig at Ur for twelve seasons which began in 1922 and ended in 1934. During that time he had many assistants on his staff which only once amounted to more than five in all, an astonishingly small number for the control of a labour force which often consisted of between 200 and 250 men who were unearthing not only substantial architectural remains, but also large numbers of small objects—about 20,000 of them were entered in the Expedition's catalogue. Woolley himself served on every one of those twelve expeditions and only his quickness and prodigious industry, supported by a well-trained family of Syrian foremen from Jerablus, enabled him to carry through tasks for which the more elaborately organised expeditions of today would require at least three times the number of supervisors. It is my privilege to have served Woolley for six years—1925–1930—longer than any other of his assistants, and it has therefore fallen to me on this occasion to recall memories of the man and the kind of life we led at Ur. I must also mention, very briefly, some aspects of the work at Ur, which are now the subject of active investigation and controversy, as well as others which are in danger of being forgotten, but still offer tempting rewards for research.

The ancient Semitic poem here presented is inscribed in alphabetical cuneiform on clay tablets unearthed at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) on the north coast of Syria. The tablets themselves date approximately in the fifteenth century B.C., but their contents were, no doubt, traditional and therefore older still.

2. The poem belongs to a cycle, several portions of which have already been published, which deals principally with the contest of two gods, Ba'al and Mōt, for dominion over the earth. Each in turn defeats his rival and assumes the sovereignty.

In reality, this is a nature-myth pure and simple, for Ba'al is none other than the Lord of the Rain (cp. Arabic ba'l) and Mōt that of the Drought (cf. Arabic mawuth). The alternate victory and defeat of each thus symbolizes the regular alternation of the seasons in the Syrian year. The reign of Mōt, or Drought, covers the weary and rainless months of summer, while that of Ba'al, or Rain, begins in late September and ends some time in March or April.

The major cities of Babylonia possessed, at least by the end of the fourteenth century B.C., hemerologies which indicated, for each month of the year, which days in that month were regarded as propitious. In the time of Nazimaruttash, king of Babylon, whose reign covered the turn of that century, the versions of Sippar, Nippur, Babylon, Ur, Larsa, Uruk, and Eridu were collated and excerpted to produce a single version, which was presumably regarded thenceforward as the standard version for Babylonia.

This standard version (preceded by a longer text of a rather different kind, which indicated which months of the year were regarded as favourable for the performance of various specified actions, such as founding a palace, changing one's occupation, or falling from a roof) was later—perhaps some two centuries later—set out on a large tablet since found in the remains of the city of Ashur, and was followed on the tablet by a further version, by no means in complete agreement with the standard version, and identified on the tablet as the Ashur version.

To these two versions of the short summary hemerology for the whole year, however, the tablet adds two sets of special very detailed instructions for the first eight days of the seventh month of the year, Tashritu; the first set (to which are prefixed short instructions for certain days of the first month, Nisanu) is described on the tablet as the Ashur version, while the second (a shorter set, differing extensively in detail from the Ashur version, and without prefixed instructions for Nisanu, but including, additionally, special instructions for the ninth day of Tashritu) is marked as the Akkad version.

The cuneiform tablet here edited belongs to the Museum of Natural History at Torquay, and I am greatly indebted to the Curator who has kindly submitted it to me for study and publication. Whence it comes is unfortunately unknown, but it seems to be of the same class as the large number of commercial documents from Nippur in middle Babylonia which now belong to the University of Pennsylvania and have been published in four volumes by the late Professor A. T. Clay. This suggestion is made especially probable by the Aramaic endorsement or summary of the Babylonian text which closely resembles those found on some of the tablets in that collection. It appears to be the only one of its class in England, so far as published collections go, since the tablets in the British Museum which bear Aramaic notes are Assyrian texts of the seventh century B.C.

Nelle rovine delle antiche città della Valle dei Due Fiumi gli strati più recenti sogliono risalire al periodo persiano ossia all'epoca dei Parti e dei Sassanidi, quando la Mesopotamia faceva parte dell'impero partico o del regno sassanidico. In quasi tutti i luoghi dove gli scavatori hanno iniziato delle ricerche archeologiche essi si sono imbattuti anzitutto in rovine più o meno vaste e più o meno importanti di questi due periodi. Già il Loftus a Warkah, poi i Tedeschi a Babele, e più recentemente a Ctesifonte, gli Americani a Nippur e ora a Seleucia, gli Inglesi a Kish, i Tedeschi ad Ashshur, ed ancora in altri luoghi si sono trovate tracce più o meno cospicue della civiltà partica, vale a dire della civiltà mesopotamica del periodo partico.

In 1912 Macalister published the 100-foot long line of enormous, rough uninscribed standing stones at Gezer in Palestine. The next year, Andrae published the strange, double row of stelae, some rough, some uninscribed, mostly very large, which he had found at Assur. The similarity between the two installations was immediately noted and for over sixty years the Stelenreihen at Assur have been cited in the many discussions of the maṣṣēbôt of Palestine. The singular importance of the Assur stelae lies in the fact that some of them were inscribed, whereas the Palestinian stones were not. The Assur inscriptions tell us that the stones represented people, and Eduard Meyer and others believed that the Gezer stones probably had the same meaning. Obviously, in order to project the meaning of the Assur stelae on the Gezer stones, one assumption had to be made: that the people in the two areas were practising identical customs. Curiously enough, this basic assumption has yet to be proved. In fact, many later scholars have taken the Assur stones to be merely one example of a wide-spread custom of setting up plain stones. The Assur stelae have been lumped together with the ever increasing number of plain stones, those found singly as well as those discovered in clusters, with Biblical evidence for maṣṣēbôt, with Punic stelae, and even with Greek hero cults. Far from considering the Assur inscriptions as the determining factor in interpreting uninscribed stones elsewhere, meanings drawn from this wide body of comparative material have been imposed on the Stelenreihen.

In his article “Babylonian Music Again”, O. R. Gumey provides a welcome update on research on the tablets concerning music of the ancient Near East. Gurney's article also has a corrective effect on a rambunctious article by Martin West that appeared shortly before. Gurney seems to me to have the musical system almost right. West, while he seems to understand the system, presents it in ways that I find illogical, and that I fear will be confusing or misleading. Furthermore, while some of West's conclusions exceed the span of even my own irresponsible imagination, some of his other conclusions seem unnecessarily restrictive, conservative, or simply old-fashioned. Here I want to assert limits of the kind and extent of musical conclusions that we can expect to draw from the available data, but also to explore the kinds of ideas that we can entertain without fear of restriction by those same data.

Gurney as well as West report with approval a new reading proposed by Th. J. H. Krispijn. There is more to be said about this reading and about its effect on our understanding of ancient Near Eastern music. Krispijn's new reading is for the text UET VII 74, for which Gurney now gives an updated transliteration (p. 102). I reproduce here Gurney's paradigms for the instructions in Chapters I (ll. 1–12) and II (ll. 13–20) of UET VII 74.

(1–12) If the sammu is (tuned as) X and the (interval) Y is not clear, you tighten the string N and then Y will be clear. Tightening.

(13–20) If the sammu is (tuned as) X and you have played an (unclear) interval Y, you loosen the string N and the sammu will be (in the tuning) Z. [Loosening].

When first interpreting this text twenty-five years ago, it was assumed that Chapter I involved loosening the strings one by one, thus shifting the whole tuning gradually downwards; and in Chapter II, tightening the strings one by one, with the reverse effect. As we then read the text, it did not specify tightening or loosening, and so the choice was arbitrary. Gurney (p. 102) blames the choice on the assumption that the text referred to the harp, whose longest and lowest string was identified as “front”, therefore (according to Nabnītu XXXII) the “first”.