The cylinder seals and seal impressions from Brak have an importance out of proportion to the quality of their workmanship. All the circumstances of their discovery are scrupulously recorded, a great help in determining the approximate date of each piece, and a sure guaranty against any suspicion of forgery. They may not all be of outstanding artistic merit, but a few seem to be unique in the choice of subjects reptesented, and almost every one of them can show some detail or peculiarity which is well worthy of study. Professor Mallowan in his catalogue describes and discusses these works of glyptic art, and his extensive knowledge of the subject, and his diligent researches enable him to make illuminating comparisons and to give suggestive explanations of the more difficult problems. He has, indeed, given us all the essential information and much more besides in his valuable and penetrating discussion. The seals, however, were only a small part of the immense mass of material which he, as excavator, had to set in order, study and describe. It is because his harvest is so rich and abundant that it seemed worth while to gather up stray gleanings dropped from his full sheaves, Knowing well that the few observations which can be contributed, will only render more evident the value and importance of what he has given us.

The fragment published here is of black stone, from Mosul Museum, registered IM 55640, where the writer saw it on display in 1967. It comes from a stela that was probably similar in shape to most other neo-Assyrian stelae, and it records not only a military event and the king's name, but also a royal grant of land.

The purpose of the present paper is to review the question of the “bâtiment isolé” located at the north-west corner of the royal terrace at Khorsabad. The author seeks first to demonstrate how this building can be connected with the one depicted on relief 12 in Room VII of Sargon's palace, and secondly to propose a reconstruction both of the plan and the elevation of the building, incorporating all the special features belonging to it (column, capital, roof and so on). In order to do so, the author compares typically Assyrian plans, such as those of reception suites, with the remains of the “bâtiment isolé”. The reconstruction of the elevation of this building will partly be based on the relief from Room VII and partly on archaeological remains, such as column bases like those found at Khorsabad (Palace F and Residence K) and at Nineveh.

Of all figures seen in Mesopotamian art, the naked or kilted human male figure with curls of hair on either side of his face is one of the most familiar. A form of this figure was portrayed already in the Jemdet Nasr period; he became common in Early Dynastic III, and particularly in the Akkadian period, after which he was less popular, though he was revived from time to time, probably until Achaemenid times. Since the early identification with Gilgamesh has been abandoned, he has been referred to by many names: the “six-locked hero”, “wild man”, “naked hero”, or whatever. Long ago Erich Ebeling cited evidence that his Akkadian name was talīmu, the “twin”. F. A. M. Wiggermann, in his article “Exit talim!”, and later in his valuable book Mesopotamian Protective Spirits, has argued that this familiar figure was instead referred to in Akkadian, at least in the first millennium B.C., as laḫmu, the “hairy one”, the “Hairy”. This identification has been accepted by numerous other scholars.

Wiggermann presents the following evidence for his identification (listed from the most general to the most specific, rather than in Wiggermann's own order):

1. Lexical evidence to show that the root lḫm means “to be hairy”, and that the noun laḫmu means “the hairy one”.

2. Various citations of the noun laḫmu that in general are consistent with the identification.

3. A very specific association of the term and the image in the Neo-Assyrian texts which prescribe the preparing of figurines to be buried in houses and palaces for protection against evil spirits. This evidence is the same as was used by Ebeling for his identification of the “wild man” as talīmu, which Wiggermann wishes to discredit.

A recent survey in the western foothills of the Zagros Mountains has located five new Neolithic sites. We present here the occupational features and finds of this period in the Sar Pol-e Zahāb region, along with an interpretation of their distribution and associated settlement patterns. Our research indicates that the visible distribution of Neolithic sites is highly influenced by geomorphological factors. All sites are located on natural outcrops or on the edge of alluvial plains. Many others have certainly been buried beneath layers of later sedimentation. All of the sites identified by our survey are small and of modest elevation, with cultural remains, particularly ceramics, similar to Neolithic sites such as Guran and Sarāb in the central Zagros region and Jarmo and Tamarkhan in Mesopotamia. Based on the ceramic evidence and the location of the region, between the central Zagros mountains on the east and Mesopotamia on the west, we suggest that this vast area maintained an integrated ceramic tradition, which suggests an overall cultural homogeneity of these areas during the seventh and early sixth millennia B.C. In other words, these recent discoveries indicate that similarities in Neolithic material culture in the Māhidasht, Kermanshāh and Hulailan plains with material culture of regions in Mesopotamia are not accidental or random but indicative of a large coherent zone with unique ceramic and cultural traditions (the patterned ceramic tradition of Sarāb-Jarmo), extending from Iraqi Kurdistan east into the central Zagros range. Regarding the lack of eighth and seventh millennium B.C. sites in the northern reaches of the Iranian part of the Zagros range, we may consider the pathway of Sar Pol-e Zahāb a primary route for transporting obsidian to upland areas of the central Zagros. This also suggests a lasting network of cross-regional communications, since archaeological discoveries prove this pathway was the main node connecting these two cultural regions for a long period of time.

This article discusses the two main royal palaces constructed in Kalḫu during the ninth century: Ashurnasirpal II's Northwest Palace and Shalmaneser III's Military Palace. Through a re-examination of the architecture of both palaces, it will be argued that the two were more alike than has been commonly assumed. The military nature of the Military Palace did not preclude the presence of most types of spaces that were already present in the Northwest Palace. By discussing the differences and similarities between the kinds of spaces, decoration and spatial organisation found in each palace this article tries to offer a new analysis of both, and of the nature of Late Assyrian royal palaces more broadly.

The Royal Cemetery at Ur, with its almost two thousand graves, is one of the most impressive archaeological settings in southern Mesopotamia. Although most of the graves have been assigned to the Early Dynastic Period, more than three hundred graves have been dated to a timeframe from the Late Akkadian Period to the end of the third millennium B.C. However, the precise dating of many of these graves is under debate because stratigraphic data are often lacking, and the material culture used for dating has mainly been cylinder seals and other small finds. Due to the poor quality of the data published by Woolley, pottery has rarely been used to establish chronological determinants that could be useful in dating the graves. Thanks to the Ur Digitization Project, the field records from the Ur excavations are now available online. Among them are the Field Notes, which often contain pottery drawings, reproduced to scale. This paper re-analyses some of the graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur that have been dated to the final part of the third millennium B.C. This analysis is based on a typological approach to the pottery assemblages that allows revised chronological determinants for dating selected grave contexts.

The series of silver coins struck at Aradus in the last two centuries B.C. contains, in the letters added to the reverse type, rather more information upon the relations of the successive issues than is commonly to be derived from Greek coins: and a study of the specimens in the British Museum and Oxford collections, with the aid of casts from Berlin, Copenhagen, and Paris, has suggested that there may be a profitable field for investigation of the organization of this and the neighbouring mints. The statistics collected have therefore been recorded here as a starting-point.

Assyrian sculptures have been treated in various ways. Neglected original records about pieces found at Nineveh can still be informative. Pieces that did not go at once to major public museums were sometimes liable to rejuvenation, detached from their original contexts but endowed with new significance as commercial assets, as independent works of art, or as integral parts of contemporary architecture. Two Nimrud sculptures, built into the walls of Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh, represent a unique fusion of Assyrian and Scots artistry, now vulnerable to financial pressures.

The archaic tablet made available in the present note is now in a private collection in Belgium.

The well preserved proto-cuneiform tablet, measuring 73 × 69 × 18 mm (height × width × thickness), was copied from photographs in the early spring of 1989, and subsequently collated with the original in May of the same year in London. Although the exact provenience of the tablet, which came to Europe some decades ago via the antiquities market, is not secure, format, contents and personal designations point to its probable origin at Uruk/Warka.

Tablets of the Middle Assyrian period are rare in the collections of the British Museum, principally because the German excavations at Aššur, from which most come, were plainly more carefully controlled than many early excavations. Thus it is a pleasure to place this article, which presents three Middle Assyrian tablets, in a volume celebrating Lady Mallowan and Prof. D. J. Wiseman, to both of whom Assyriology is grateful for the edition of many documents from a younger Assyrian capital, Nimrud. The three pieces published here are a fragment of edicts, a document listing personnel, and a collection of omens.

For one who had the privilege of displaying to the first readers of Iraq some specimens of a game long favoured in many parts of the ancient East, it may not be inappropriate to celebrate this journal's recommencement with a less substantial allusion to a like subject. This is a reference in a Babylonian augural text to something which, as I shall try to make plausible, may perhaps be a game with some likeness to Chess. A reinforcement of this will then be sought from the observation of a single detail in the archaeology of Chess, which seems to point back to a Babylonian prototype of unique character.

In A. T. Clay's Babylonian Records in the Library of J. Pierpont Morgan, part IV, is published as No. 13 a tablet from Erech of the Seleucid period, inscribed with a chapter of ‘omens, derived from inspection of the entrails of a sacrificed victim. The tablet in question is the seventh of the augural work called as a whole barûtu, i.e. ‘seership?’ and at the same time is the third tablet of the section called šumma tiranu, i.e. ‘if the guts (&c.)’. Though this copy was written in the year 213 B.C. that is, of course, no reason for supposing that its contents were composed at that time. A fragment of the same compilation was in the Assyrian royal library at Nineveh, and this takes it back to the seventh century B.C. at least. No doubt most of its contents are older still.

In Iraq 30 (1968) I published a fragmentary text from Ur, then numbered 7/80, containing part of a treatise on the tuning of the sammû instrument, and with the collaboration of the musicologist David Wulstan, who himself contributed a companion article, I added an interpretation, with a table showing that the text described seven different tunings, with instructions in two chapters for the conversion of each one to the next, first by lowering, then by raising the pitch of one string by a semitone. The copy of the text was subsequently published again as UET VII 74 and the number 7/80 was abandoned when the tablet was sent to Baghdad and renumbered in the Iraq Museum. This text, usually known as “the tuning text” — a better name would be “retuning text” — provided the decisive clue to the understanding of the Babylonian musical system and its terminology, which have since been expounded by several musicologists and compared with the Greek system of “octave species”. So well established did the theory become that it was applied without question by several scholars when a few years later a tablet apparently containing a musical notation using the same terminology was recognized among the tablets from Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Little notice was taken in 1982 when Raoul Vitale wrote an article calling in question the basic assumption of the theory that the tuning system and the scales were upward rather than downward. Only recently has M. L. West proposed in this article “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Human Melodic Texts” (Music and Letters 75/4 [1993], 161–79) that Vitale's theory should be seriously considered.

If we conduct today a survey of early scientific studies on the archaeology of the Near East, most of them seem to be only of historic interest. Only a few of the results published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century remain valid. Nevertheless the first three decades of the twentieth century were a very important period for setting the agenda in methods and aims of Near Eastern archaeology. Moreover, many of these early theories and propositions still have an effect on current research, even when in the present state of knowledge they are out of date or no longer of relevance.

The Sealand Dynasty ruled in southern Mesopotamia ca. 1740–1460(?) b.c.e., but Sealand archaeological deposits are extraordinarily rare, and the dynasty itself is known almost entirely from a limited number of texts. Sealand Dynasty social and ecological practices remain mysterious, and ceremonial activities are at best poorly understood. Faunal remains from the small site of Tell Sakhariya in southern Iraq provide our first glimpse into the Sealand animal socio-economy. Sakhariya's occupants herded and hunted in multiple environmental zones. In pre-Sealand times Tell Sakhariya was an important ceremonial site, and the large-scale food sharing and possible ritual dog burial in its faunal assemblage might indicate that Sakhariya retained ideological significance into the Sealand era.

The splendid discoveries made by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur in the years between 1927 and 1931, of tombs with a wealth of grave-goods unparalleled before or since in Western Asia, were given a sombre aspect by the revelation that such sacrifice of material wealth had been accompanied by no less lavish expenditure of lives. The principal occupants of those tombs had been attended by a whole cohort of human and animal victims, put to death at the time in their places and attitudes and with all the equipment which had been proper to them in their lives and services. So plainly was all this revealed by the excavations that the whole scene of the funeral could be reconstructed by a modern artist in a picture which scarcely needed to draw upon the imagination.

Some controversy took place in the succeeding years upon the character of these human sacrifices, but it would now be generally agreed, I think, that they were no other than at first supposed, a dramatic example of the ancient (though late-lingering) rite of sending a deceased lord into the other world fully furnished with all the ministers as well as all the gear of his earthly state. Both written descriptions and archaeological discoveries have repeatedly attested this gruesome practice in various parts of the world, and it is no longer true that in the abundant literature of Sumer and Akkad there is no trace of such an observance—I allude, of course, to the Sumerian fragment published by Dr. S. N. Kramer and called by him ‘The Death of Gilgamesh’.

The late antique Christian chronicle preserved as the Excerpta Latina Barbari contains a brief, but extraordinary notice on the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar; many of its unusual details can be understood in the contexts of traditional stories about Nebuchadnezzar and the interests of the work itself. The best clue to the meaning of the passage on Nebuchadnezzar is the Excerpta's closely parallel passage on Alexander the Great. In the Excerpta Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander reflect one another and in a sense compete with one another. Many of the odd details of the notice on Nebuchadnezzar can be explained as directing the reader toward this parallelism. The parallelism itself seems to serve two purposes. First, to provide symmetry to the Excerpta's idiosyncratic account of world history in which Alexander liberates the world conquered by Nebuchadnezzar. And second, to show Nebuchadnezzar subtly outdoing Alexander, so that Alexander's encounter with the God of the Jews, as it is found in the Excerpta, can be provided with an implicit interpretation and characterization.

The late Peter Hulin devoted much of his scholarly life to the study of the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria (859–824 BC). He copied and studied a number of texts of this monarch excavated at Nimrud. Among them, the inscriptions on the throne base (ND 11000) were published in 1963. Unfortunately, however, his death in 1993 prevented him from publishing the further fruits of his effort.

After Hulin's death his file of Shalmaneser III texts was placed at the disposal of Professor A. K. Grayson for use in his third volume of the series Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods: Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858–745 BC), Toronto, 1996 (RIMA 3). Thus Hulin's study of several new texts from Nimrud, as well as some others, was effectively utilized and incorporated in RIMA 3, with full respect being paid to his contribution.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement RIMA 3 by publishing Hulin's hand copies of Shalmaneser texts found among his papers in a publishable state, together with several photographs, and to add some philological notes on them. Among Hulin's copies, those of the lengthy texts on the large stone tablet ND 6237 (below, No. 1) and on the broken statue N D 5500 (below, No. 2) are of primary importance. These texts were originally assigned to Hulin by Professors M. E. L. Mallowan and D. J. Wiseman for publication in the journal Iraq. His copies were entrusted to Dr Jeremy Black of the Oriental Institute, Oxford University, by Mrs Mary Hulin and are gratefully used in this publication by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.

The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:

At the foot of, and roughly south-south-east of, the ziggurrat at Nimrud stood the temple of Ninurta, on the floor of room 1 of which, excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in 1956, were found “a number of fragments, some of them inscribed, of a burnt white limestone statue of Shalmaneser III, in the round.” These fragments, now in the Iraq Museum, were numbered as a group by the excavator ND 5571, and by the Iraq Museum IM 60497. They comprised the right elbow and a small part of adjacent body behind and below (IM 60497A), two subsequently joined inscribed fragments (IM 60497B), a fragment of clasped hands (IM 60497C), and some other fragments including one bearing traces of seven lines of inscription so very slight as to be, for the present writer, beyond consecutive comprehension.

The right elbow of the statue of Shalmaneser III “found in fragments by a ploughman in fields in the outer town near the foot of the south-east corner of the akropolis” is missing; but not only is the thickness (13 cm.) of the forearm at the lower end of the elbow-fragment IM 60497A considerably too small to fit the upper end of the right forearm of the statue found by the ploughman, but it also extends too far above the elbow (that is, it extends upwards beyond the point above the elbow down to which the statue's upper arm is preserved) to allow any possibility of regarding it as having belonged to the ploughman's statue.