The Expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq began its fifth successive season on March 5th, 1953, and was in the field for a period of two months until the end of the first week in May. The opening of the dig was preceded by a week of violent rain and the spring was exceptionally wet, but so effective is the drainage on an ancient mound that there was but little interruption to the work. Once again, on an average, more than two hundred workmen were employed and we made every effort to dig as much ground as we could, for this was to be our last campaign before publishing the results of what had been achieved since 1949. It is therefore intended that the report of our latest Expedition shall be followed by a book incorporating the general account of what has been done at Nimrud in the past five years. The plan of our campaign was thus directed with this end in view, and we aimed especially at assembling as much fresh information as possible about the main chronological sequence of the different periods of occupation in the city from the beginning of the ninth, until the end of the seventh century B.C.

In the season 1950–51, the Joint Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and of the Babylonian Museum of the University of Pennsylvania excavated in Nippur a cache of twenty-eight Neo-Babylonian tablets. They were found in the location TA/52, 30 cm. above level III/1 floor, and they now carry the numbers 2 NT 280 to 2 NT 307.

All but three of these texts are legal documents, the exceptions being 2 NT 306, a private letter, and 2 NT 283 and 307, the contents and paleographic features of which mark them as administrative tablets. They had been included in the cache for reasons which remain unknown. In the location TA/34 (level III/1) a tablet, 2 NT 165, was found which, because of the personal names it mentions, must be added to the present group. There is, of course, a definite possibility that the inhabitant of the house in which 2 NT 165 was found had hidden a group of valuable documents in a cache in an empty lot behind his backyard (cf. p. 70 for further discussion).

The primary question about Assyrian warfare in the Sargonid period, the constitution of the army, was long ago settled in its broader aspects by Manitius in two able articles of which the conclusions, as far as they go, stand largely unchallenged. Manitius showed that numerically the greater part of the grand army of Assyria was composed of levies raised from the provinces, under the control of the provincial governors, but that there was also a central standing army, which included units drawn from conquered territory, maintained by the king as a safeguard against over-ambitious satraps.As to the numbers concerned, Manitius pointed out that the forces under one governor alone comprised not less than 1500 cavalry and 20,000 archers, suggesting a potential grand army running into hundreds of thousands. This agrees with the fact that in major actions enemy casualties approaching two hundred thousand are claimed, which, even if exaggerated, do indicate the order of the number of troops engaged. Prisoners also are numbered in hundreds of thousands.

This catalogue contains illustrations and descriptions of the majority of cylinder seals excavated in Palestine or acquired by the Jerusalem Museum through various channels. The material was collected before the war and the catalogue has been completed under difficulties which have made it impossible to consult all recent publications, and I am well aware of several omissions. Certain seals have been omitted because I could not locate them, others because I was unable to obtain photographs, which are indispensable for any proper or useful study of this material.

The seals excluded are a number from Gezer in the Istanbul Museum published by Macalister, seals from Balata and Taanach in the Vienna Museum, seals from T. ’Ajjul and Beth Pelet, published by Professor Petrie.

The third season of excavations at Tell al Rimah lasted from March 1st to May 30th, 1966. It was sponsored jointly by the University Museum, Philadelphia, and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, assisted by grants from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels. The staff included Dr. Theresa H. Carter (Assistant Director), Mr. and Mrs. Aubrey S. Trik (architect and draughtsman), Mr. David Crownover and Miss Mary Ellen Didier (archaeologists) of the University Museum; Professor D. J. Wiseman and Miss Barbara Parker (epigraphists), Miss Elizabeth Dowman (registrar and conservator of finds), Messrs. Julian Reade, Geoffrey Turner and John Bellingham (archaeologists) of the British School. Sayyid Yasin Mahmud was the Representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities and gave valuable help with the recording of the dig in addition to his task of writing the Arabic catalogue. We were fortunate to have the assistance for shorter periods of Mr. Anthony Robertson-Pearce with the photography and Dr. Richard Adrian with the surveying, and Dr. Claudio Vita-Finzi of London University visited us to make a preliminary study of the evidence for climatic change in the area. Among other visitors whom we were happy to welcome were H.E. the British Ambassador (Vice-President of the School) and Lady Beaumont, H.E. the Mutasarrif of Mosul, Mr. G. H. Herridge (then Chairman of the Iraq Petroleum Company and a member of the Council of the School) and Mrs. Herridge, Dr. Faisal al Wailly (Director General of Antiquities) and Professor Fuad Safar (Inspector General of Excavations) with the staff of their expedition at Nineveh, and Professor Heinrich Lenzen, Director of the German Archaeological Institute in Baghdad. I must express my gratitude to all my colleagues for their help, to the local authorities for their cooperation and to the Director General of Antiquities and the Inspector General of Excavations for assisting us in every aspect of our work.

While the Diyala (Kurdish Sirwan) River Valley is storied in Near Eastern archaeology as home to the Oriental Institute's excavations in the 1930s as well as to Robert McC. Adams’ pioneering archaeological survey, The Land Behind Baghdad, the upper reaches of the river valley remain almost unknown to modern scholarship. Yet this region, at the interface between irrigated lowland Mesopotamia and the Zagros highlands to the north and east, has long been hypothesized as central to the origins and development of complex societies. It was hotly contested by Bronze Age imperial powers, and offered one of the principle access routes connecting Mespotamia to the Iranian Plateau and beyond. This paper presents an interim report of the Sirwan Regional Project, a regional archaeological survey undertaken from 2013–2015 in a 4000 square kilometre area between the modern city of Darbandikhan and the plains south of Kalar. Encompassing a wide range of environments, from the rugged uplands of the Zagros front ranges to the rich irrigated basins of the Middle Diyala, the project has already discovered a wealth of previously unknown archaeological sites ranging in date from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic through the modern period. Following an overview of the physical geography of the Upper Diyala/Sirwan, this paper highlights key findings that are beginning to transform our understanding of this historically important but poorly known region.

Nineveh, after its sack in 612 BC, had two entirely distinct histories. One is exotic and largely lost. The suspiciously Assyrian name of Assarakos appears in Homer as that of an ancestor of Aeneas (Iliad 20: 239–40), and we can envisage, from occasional Aramaic and Greek allusions, a multiplying host of fantastic tales about the city and its ancient rulers, which must have been widely current in the taverns and market-places of the ancient world (André-Salvini 1994: 29–38). These legends were to re-emerge in later European literature, such as the play “Sardanapalus” by Byron. While a few anecdotes probably reflect real events, they cannot be taken as free-standing evidence.

The alternative history is what really happened at Nineveh when metropolitan Assyria was first devastated in the late seventh century and later transformed, under Seleucid and Parthian rule, into the kingdom or province of Adiabene (see map, p. 81). Evidence for the region in these periods is widely scattered, consisting of a few serious documents and a mass of poorly digested archaeological data. The current paper deals with some of the more prominent items.

Nineveh, though not the principal centre of Adiabene, retained the natural advantages of its position as a market-town beside a crossing-point of the Tigris, and eventually regained some of its importance. Its actual name survived, remaining attached to the ruins down to modern times, but contemporary references to the city and its vicinity during the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods are problematic (Dalley 1993). A Nabonidus text names the son of a priest of the Lady of Nineveh (Zadok 1985: 238), but it is not certain that the reference is to a priest employed at Nineveh itself, since this Ishtar may still have had shrines in a number of places. Some Neo-Elamite tablets were certainly found at Nineveh, which is what one might have expected at a Median administrative centre, but their date is uncertain and a Neo-Assyrian origin is more likely (Reade 1992). We do not even know whether Nineveh and metropolitan Assyria were under the control of Medes or Babylonians or neither after 612 BC (Curtis 1989: 53–4); it must have been a very insecure region.

In his introduction to the Nimrud wine tablets Professor Mallowan has pointed out that the closest source of iron for Assyria were mines noted by Layard in Kurdistan, notably in the Berwari valley north-east of Amadiya, and also in the Tiyari mountains “particularly in the heights above Lizan”.

Iron was also observed by Layard only “three or four days journey from Mosul”, “in great quantities scattered on the sides of mountains,” and his information is confirmed by the Rev. George Percy Badger who visited Kurdistan between 1842 and 1850. He gives the following information, “of iron they have abundance in several parts of Tiyari, this they smelt and beat out into rude ploughshares and such other tools as they require for tillage. The people of Asheetha, however, are famed for tempering steel, and the best packing needles used by Kurdish muleteers are made in this village”. Deposits in the Kurdistan mountains may also have been the closest source of supply for the land of Muṣaṣir.

Although we can suspect that these sources were exploited by the Assyrians, archaeological and documentary evidence is lacking and this preliminary study concerns other possible sources in Anatolia and Syria with reference to Assyrian textual references and evidence concerning the most important deposits known to-day, including those recorded in the last century. At the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 1st millennia B.C. the expansion of the Assyrian armed forces necessitated regular and increasing supplies of smelted iron ore which could be used in the production, not only of weapons, but of tools and implements for use in building, agriculture and other allied crafts.

In her Fauna of Ancient Mesopotamia, Mrs. van Buren pointed out that if elephants in the Middle East did not become extinct till about 800 B.C., then it was strange that there are not more representations of them. There is a lapis amulet from Kish which is rather indistinct, a miniature vase of sandstone and quartz decorated with a row of three elephants which was bought in Mosul, two cylinder seals which are related to seals of the Indus Valley type, and a Hittite seal found at Beth Shan which has been dated to the fourteenth century B.C. A terracotta from Diqdiqqeh near Ur shows an elephant being ridden and should probably be dated to the late third millennium B.C. An elephant-shaped cult stand and an elephant-shaped vessel come respectively from fourteenth century Beth Shan and from Hilani I at Zincirli where it can be dated to the time of Esarhaddon, Finally, an elephant is depicted together with monkeys and Bactrian camels on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III in the ninth century.

The earliest accounts of actual live elephants are found in Egyptian records of the middle of the second millennium B.C. under Thutmoses I (1525–1495) and of the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. when Thutmoses III killed a herd of 120 elephants “near the water-hole of Niy” or, according to an alternative reading, “for the sake of their tusks.” The water-hole at Niy is probably the Lake of Apamaea.

During the 1953 season at Nimrud a considerable quantity of late Assyrian pottery was discovered in a well-dated context. It was thought that the immediate publication of this material, although in a brief and preliminary form, would be of value in providing dating criteria for other Near Eastern sites.

Of particular interest is one room (T.W. 5 3, room 19) in the private dwellings excavated along the eastern wall of the akropolis near the north-east corner of the tall. This room which had apparently served as a store-room contained pottery on the floor in a deposit several feet thick. In one corner of it was a cache of dated tablets which spanned the years 666 B.C.–c. 626 B.C.; none was earlier than the reign of Aššur-bani-pal. That this storeroom had been burned was indicated by carboni2ed grain and sesame seed in the large storage jars, heavy burning of the tablets, and traces of burning throughout the debris to a height of 1·50 metres above the floor, and also by the hard-baked mud-plaster on the walls. The room appeared to have been a kind of surdab, three low and narrow entrances (in the west, north and south walls) had been the means of access, though not all of them were in use at one and the same time. It seems quite reasonable to assume that the burning occurred not later than 612 B.C. As most of the pottery must still have been in use when the place was burnt, we may reckon on a maximum error of eighteen years (629 B.C.–612 B.C.), for the dating of the complete specimens. Many of the types were, of course, already known in the Sargonid period as will be noted in the discussion below.

Sargon's accession to the throne and the subsequent submission of Mesopotamia to Akkadian sovereignty were accompanied by a strong propaganda campaign, the first such cultural enterprise to go beyond the limits of a single city-state, the echoes of which are reflected in various sources. Being a usurper, Sargon devoted a large part of his propaganda to legitimizing his authority, on the one hand by stressing the continuity between Early Dynastic and Akkadian sovereignty and, on the other, by celebrating the religious legitimacy of Akkadian kingship (Liverani 1966: 21–4). Due to these political purposes, pictorial art achieved a central role in Sargonic propaganda (Amiet 1972: 97) as it was addressed to distinguished social groups deeply involved in the Akkadian political system (Foster 1993: 26–9; Westenholz 1993: 161). At the level of official art, royal relief became a functional medium for conveying ideological messages, as is attested by the exceptional findings at Susa and by written sources such as the copies of inscriptions on monuments erected in temples. Two steles kept in the Louvre testify to the strict links established between ideological purposes and visual media during the founding phase of the Akkadian empire.

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 purpose of the building called the giparu, built and rebuilt from possibly as early as Early Dynastic times down to the Neo-Babylonian period, was to serve as the official dwelling of the entu-priestess. This is clearly stated by the entu Enanedu herself. She describes herself as “patroness who had the giparu built for its entu office on the sacred site “, and speaks of the giparu as “my abode of the entu-ship”. King Nabonidus who rebuilt the giparu for the last time records on bricks that, “for Sin, my lord, I built the giparu-temple, the house of the entu-priestess.”

The entu living in the giparu was a priestess of the highest order, elected by the god Nanna and revealed to the country through omens. So important was the office that the priestess was always of royal blood, the daughter or sister of the king. Ninmetabarri, daughter of AN.BU, king of Mari, whose inscribed calcite cup was found at Ur, may be the first entu of Nanna who has left any written record of herself. Enanedu spoke of herself as daughter of Kudur-Mabuk, sister of Warad-Sin; and Nabonidus, who revived the office of entu after hundreds of years of oblivion, established his daughter Ennigaldi-Nanna as entu in Ur after learning through lengthy divination that she was Nanna's choice. The importance of the office of entu is further stressed by the evidence that the kings occasionally named their regnal years after the appointment and the installation of the entus.

The following paper is an account of a survey made on behalf of the Liverpool Institute of Archaeology, as part of the work of the Neilson Expedition to the Near East. The object of this survey was to investigate as many ancient sites as possible in the neighbourhood of the Jebel Sinjar, in order to link up the Khabur region, so thoroughly examined by Mr. Mallowan in 1934, with the river Tigris and the archaeologically better known area to the east of it. The writer's personal interest was largely concentrated upon the formidable array of mounds representing settlements of the pre-Christian era, with some emphasis on those dating from prehistoric times. He was, however, also fortunate in having the assistance of Mr. G. R. Reitlinger, whose comments on and photographs of some of the Islamic and other late remains form the subject of a separate section of this article in this number of Iraq. It was a chance circumstance that Sir Aurel Stein was at the same time at work upon a survey of the Roman Limes, also covering the Sinjar district. This seemed to justify a somewhat cursory examination of sites which were obviously Roman.

In association with the investigation of Albenda (preceding paper) fragments from four polychrome glazed terracotta wall plaques (knob plates) were submitted for technical examination. All are believed to date to the ninth century B.C. and represent three sites: Nimrud (WA 131663), Ba'shiqa (Tell Billah) (WAN 2037, N2038) and Arban (WA91689). Technical information on the glazed ceramics of the Neo-Assyrian period is limited. In addition to providing basic information on the ceramic technology of the plaques, the purpose of the present study was to determine if stylistic differences noted between the ceramics from the three sites were in any way reflected in their technologies.

The plaques were examined using a binocular microscope, and small (millimetre-sized) samples of glaze with associated body were removed from the edges of the fragments. These samples were mounted in epoxy resin, ground flat, polished with diamond paste and the resulting cross sections examined in the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Elemental compositions were determined by energy dispersive x-ray analysis (EDXA) in the SEM.

The first account of the discovery of the Treasure of Ziwiye was published in two places by the then Director of Antiquities of the Persian Government, M. André Godard. The first, Le Trésor de Ziwiyè: (Editions de l'Institut Franco-Iranien) gave the text of his lecture to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The other was Le Trésor de Ziwiyè, a beautifully illustrated book published at Haarlem in 1950 by the Iranian Archaeological Service. For these publications we are deeply grateful to M. Godard. I need not describe this collection in detail, only mention that it consists of objects of gold, ivory and bronze of great beauty, variety and interest which were discovered, unfortunately in the course of clandestine excavations, at Ziwiye near Sakkez in Azerbaijan 120 km. south east of Lake Urmia. It is now dispersed, some pieces being in Teheran, others in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, others elsewhere. According to M. Godard, some of the pieces, e.g., those of ivory, are Assyrian work of the ninth-eighth century B.C., and were exported from Assyria to Sakkez. The other objects, in M. Godard's view, belong to the ninth century, or in some cases to the seventh century B.C. The fact that some of these pieces contain motifs and features hitherto regarded as characteristic of Phoenician, or in other cases of Scythian art of the sixth century B.C., is explained by M. Godard by means of a new and striking theory: that we have (except in the case of the ivories, which he considers Assyrian) in these mixed works of art examples of the native art of the kingdom of Mannai, an art which later was appropriated or copied by the immigrating Scythian tribes, who afterwards dispersed it widely, and thereby caused it to be known to the modern world as Scythian. I shall not discuss this theory here, I shall offer only some notes about the dating.

The Iraq Government excavations at ‘Aqar Qūf (Dûr-Kurigalzu) resulted in the recovery of over one hundred inscribed clay tablets of the Kassite (Middle Babylonian) period, which are now in the Iraq Museum. Through the generosity of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the courtesy of the Direct or-General of Antiquities I was able to study the whole of this material in Baghdad during the early months of 1948. Fifteen of these interesting texts are published in the present article, and it is hoped to publish the remainder in subsequent numbers of this journal. I wish here to express my gratitude to the Director-General for permission to publish the texts in Iraq, and to the Curator of the Iraq Museum and his staff for theit unfailing helpfulness throughout.

The fifth season's campaign at Nimrud (Kalḫu) has resulted in a further one hundred Assyrian texts which, with the archaeological evidence to be published later in Iraq, will add to our knowledge of the Assyrian military capital especially during the years preceding the fall of Nineveh. Forty-seven of the tablets were found together in good condition, for the fire which had destroyed the private dwelling built against the inside of the Eastern citadel wall (TW 53 Room 19) had happily baked the clay tablets hard and thus preserved them so that they were immediately legible and could be copied in the field. This group of tablets comprised the records of Šamaš-šar-uṣur, a high-official (SAG) who, besides owning a house, probably that in which the tablets were discovered, and land in Calah, set himself to conduct a lively business, mainly as a money-lender like most of his wealthy contemporaries, for forty years from 666—c. 626 B.C. During this period Šamaš-šar-uṣur acquired six female and two male slaves at an average cost of 50 shekels of silver, the price of such male and female slaves being about the same. One girl, Urkittu-uknu, who a few years earlier had fetched 54 shekels, he was able to buy for the reduced sum of 15 shekels, perhaps because of her advancing age or some disability, for the physical condition of a slave controlled the price and was written into the contracts.

The 62 tablets described in the catalogue which follows were excavated during the 1952 season at Nimrud. All except one come from a small complex of rooms numbered 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17, on the Ziggurat terrace (site Z.T.), situated between the North West Palace and the Ziggurat; Z.T., as it now appears, actually abutted on to the north side of the palace and was founded at the same time by Aššur-naṣir-pal. The tablets were associated with a late floor level and when the building was burnt, probably at the end of Aššur-bani-pal's reign, they were baked, to a greater or lesser degree, in situ.

Eponyms are preserved on 52 of the tablets and 22 bear dated limmu of the Eponym canon, between 687 and 650 B.C.; 30 of the tablets have limmu dating after 648 B.C., comprising 18 limmu in all. Only one, Dadi, belongs after the reign of Aššur-bani-pal, and this tablet was found out of position (N.D. 2076).

A second full season of archaeological investigations was undertaken at the Uruk Mound, Abu Salabikh in the spring of 1990. The aims of this season's work were to begin to explore in some detail variations in production, exchange, and consumption of subsistence and craft goods within the Uruk community. Both the aims and the strategies employed were outgrowths of our previous work at the site which had sought a broad understanding of the kinds of activities in which the community as a whole was engaged (Pollock 1987, 1990a, 1990b).

The purpose of this report is to present briefly the results of the 1990 season as they appear to us shortly after leaving the field. More in-depth analysis and interpretation will be offered in subsequent publications.

As before, our field strategies included a mix of techniques. Surface mapping and surface scraping were utilized to provide extensive coverage of the site and a broad view of community layout and distributions of activities. In contrast, excavation offers more limited exposures but also far more precise and detailed information on contexts.