The sixth season of excavations at Tell al Rimah took place from the middle of March to the end of May, 1971. The work was directed by the writer, assisted by Dr. Julian Reade (Assistant Director), Miss Nan Shaw (Conservator), Mrs. Carolyn Postgate (in charge of pottery), Miss Shereen Ratnagar (registrar), Mr. David Hawkins (epigraphist) and Mr. John Curtis (archaeologist) who also took charge of the metal objects. Sayid Sabah Abboud was the Representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities, and played a full and energetic part in the work of the expedition. I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the whole staff, and to Dr. Isa Salman, Director General of Antiquities, Professor Fuad Safar, Inspector General of Excavations, and all our other friends and colleagues in the Directorate General for the warm welcome and friendly cooperation which we have always received from them. We were especially pleased this year to receive visits from Professor and Mrs. Seton Lloyd, who stayed and worked with us for some days, and from Mrs. Diana Helbaek, Director of the British School. One other visitor to the site deserves special mention, Sayid Hassan Abdullah, who worked for us for many seasons at Nimrud, but who began his career in excavation under the late Professor Walter Andrae at Assur in the closing years of the last century. The excavations were sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, assisted by grants from the British Academy, the Musée Royal d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels, and an anonymous donor.

The Late Assyrian sculptures are somewhat difficult to use as a historical source. They are widely scattered, with the compositions split up, and modern studies have been mainly concerned with artistic developments or the material culture of the Assyrians. Those who are reasonably familiar with the subject-matter, moreover, are inclined to forget that what may seem self-evident to them is not necessarily so to others, and have tended to concentrate on the elucidation of specific points rather than on more general studies. The one major exception is the work of Billerbeck and Delitzsch on Shalmaneser's Balawat gates, and there are articles on the army by J. Hunger, and on large-scale figures by L. Heuzey, which remain of fundamental value, but it may be worth seeing what can be learnt from a new approach.

In this article, therefore, which is written for the benefit of non-specialists and necessarily incorporates much that is already known, I have attempted to isolate the principal categories of Assyrian shown in the sculptures and other official monuments. One should not press evidence of this nature too far, as the sculptures like the annals are propaganda and represent only what the rulers of Assyria wished us to remember; the subject-matter is also affected by stylistic considerations. There is nonetheless, at all times, a mass of information which must bear some positive relationship to the truth.

A study of Iraq with a view to carrying out prehistoric investigations into the earliest settlements of the northern plain, suggested that one large area offered good possibilities. Not only does it stand away from those regions where, for various reasons, it is impracticable to carry out field work, but it is unknown territory as far as archaeology is concerned. That part of the Hatr a which surrounds Hatra, particularly the region to the west, is rather daunting countryside. Many thousands of square kilometres of slightly rolling, treeless and salty steppelands with seasonal salt lakes and watercourses, brackish springs and waterholes, not to mention an annual rainfall of only about 200 mm. do not seem conducive to early settlement. Nevertheless, one small Hassuna/Samarra settlement, Umm al Dhiabba, situated about 15 km. west of Hatra, had long been known. It seemed reasonable to suppose that more sites would be found in the area. Furthermore, Jebel Sinjar is only three days' walk at most N.W. from Hatr a for an unencumbered man, but moving with sheep the same journey today takes five days. The Sinjar then is close, but more important, beyond it lies the Khabur, the probable diffusion route for that conjectured third region of early cultures lying between those of the Zagros and the Levant-with-Anatolia, and perhaps located somewhere in the Mardin area. Some early settlers fanning out from the Khabur might well have established themselves along the watercourses running down into the Hatr a from Jebel Sinjar as they did across the fertile plain to the north of the area under discussion, as the large Hassuna site at Yarim Tepe and others in the Tell Afar region would seem to indicate. Finally, prehistoric research in Iraq has been largely confined to the Zagros foothills and Tigris banks; the settlements of the central northern plain were unknown. Accordingly the north central Hatr a was chosen for a short preliminary survey using Hatra as a base.

It may be said for most Mesopotamian excavations that information contained in cuneiform documents has not been fully used to give cultural elaboration to the bare outline derived from architecture, artefacts, etc. In the era of large expeditions, ending in the 1930's, texts would often be collected, turned over to an epigrapher, and published separately from the main archaeological report. Most often, the epigraphic volume would contain little or no information as to the find-spots of the texts. Likewise, tablets with dates would be, and still are being, published with the notation “seal impression” but without a drawing or photograph of the sealing, thus depriving archaeologists of precise means of determining style change, regional variations, etc. Economic texts and other mundane, relatively simple documents are routinely published in hand copy, sometimes transliterated, but almost never translated. In this way, many details of everyday life, reflecting economic and social systems, remain unavailable to the archaeologist or non-philologist who would find the information extremely interesting and useful. In short, once inscribed material is given over to the epigrapher, the archaeologist seldom refers to it again other than to date a particular level, or identify his site. Rarely are tablets studied by the archaeologist as the most valuable artefact in relation to other artefacts. Likewise, the epigrapher loses the valuable information on context in the interpretation of his texts.

In this article, I hope to demonstrate that much information can be derived by the archaeologist from texts even without detailed content analysis. He need know only the date, the subject or class, and the locus of tablets in order to have at hand an extremely useful tool to refine judgments made on the basis of pottery and other objects. Such information also allows checks to be made on archaeologically derived hypotheses dealing with the function of various parts of a site.

Since the present writer could not go to Iraq and himself pick out samples for investigation of the plant food in the above described site excavated by Diana Kirkbride, a small series of samples was brought to Copenhagen by the excavator. Although this may be described as an emergency measure, the slender results justify the labour involved. A widened investigation would probably improve the picture quantitatively, but hardly very much qualitatively. The question was whether that meagre tract was exploited for agriculture in the Neolithic, and the findings prove that this was the case.

The samples consisted of a small collection of house debris, plaster and clay, as also some earth samples suitable for notation.

Two different categories of house material were examined: a crude, sandy plaster, probably made up of gypsum and clay with many small pebbles in it; and a fine-grained levigated (wall ?) plaster of a yellowish-white colour, to an extent of c. 80 per cent soluble in acetic acid and thus mainly calcareous.

The coarse material was copiously tempered with husk and straw fragments (tibn), but gave few usable imprints. The yellow plaster, heavily tempered with the same material, produced a small number of determinable imprints of spike parts of cereals. All imprints in this material are characterized by a thin rusty-coloured coating representing the decomposed vegetable matter.

The cylinder and stamp seals published here belong to a collection bequeathed to the late R. W. Hutchinson by Olga Petrovna, Baroness da Maydell. She had bought them from various dealers both in the Middle East and in Europe, probably all between the two World Wars. Mr. Hutchinson invited me to publish some of those that came from Mesopotamia during historic times, and planned to publish the prehistoric stamp seals himself. The collection includes also Achaemenid, Sassanian, Egyptian, Cretan and prehistoric stamp seals which have not yet been published. Following his deeply regretted death in April 1970 the collection was bequeathed to Liverpool University, where it is in the care of the School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies, except for nos. 19 and 33 which he had given to me earlier. The Liverpool registration is given in parenthesis after the publication number.

The description “seals” does not exactly apply to nos. 26 and 33, which are “eye-beads” as described by Professor W. G. Lambert in the RA 63 (1969), 65–71. Measurements are given in millimetres, height × diameter of cylinders; the dimensions of stamp seals and eye-stones are stated in full.

1. (RWH 1.) Abstract pattern made with two sizes of drilled hole, in high relief. 17 × 18·5. Light grey baked (?) clay. Jemdet Nasr type.

2. (RWH 3.) Pattern of two doubly-enclosed eye-lozenges; the spaces above and below are rilled with short, deeply-cut lines; in high relief. 15 × 13. Pink felspar. Jemdet Nasr type.

BM 135586 = 1971–7–5, 1, until recently in private possession, is a hitherto unknown Neo-Assyrian letter belonging to the royal correspondence of Nineveh, and indisputably an important specimen of its genre. In 39 completely preserved lines, it contains a message to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.) from his son Šamaš-šumu-ukīn, who at that time was the crown prince of Babylon. So far only three very short and fragmentary letters sent by Šamaš-šumu-ukīn in this office had been known, and they are now completely overshadowed by the new text, which is here published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. It is of dark grey-brown colour and measures 41 by 82 mm. For all further details concerning the tablet and the script I refer to the photographs and copy published on Plate XIX.

From the earliest days of Assyriology, the neo-Assyrian deeds bearing Aramaic annotations have attracted interest for the light they throw on both of the languages involved. Since L. Delaporte compiled his Epigraphes araméens in 1912, containing thirty such texts, no more have been published. The same collection contains four pieces wholly in Aramaic and to these can be added the six from Assur published by M. Lidzbarski, Altaramäische Urkunden aus Assur (WVDOG 38), 1921, and five from Tell Halaf, published by J. Friedrich in Die Inschriften von Tell Halaf (AfO Beiheft 6 (1940)). An examination of the script of these epigraphs has been made by S. J. Liebermann, BASOR 192 (1968), 25–31. All of these texts, together with the dockets of the neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, have been collected in catalogue form recently by F. Vattioni, Augustinianum 10 (1970), 493–532. The purpose of the present paper is to make some more of these texts available.

Not having seen the Mandali region for himself, the present writer is not able to give a proper ecological-topographical description of the Choga Mami area. Therefore this introduction must needs be superficial, based upon details published by Joan Oates, supplemented by information kindly supplied by her in personal communication.

Mandali lies roughly 125 km. E.N.E. of Baghdad as the crow flies, not far from the Iranian frontier. It is a staging post on the ancient caravan route to Persia and beyond. The excavation area is fairly near to the town in a north-westerly direction, a flat plain on the borderline of the alluvium in the marginal rainfall zone. The terrain is backed towards the N.E. by two low mountain ranges a few kilometres away, locally known as Jebel Kunah and Jebel Kaum a Sang. Phyto-geographically it is in the middle of what is described as the Persian Foothills Region.

The main source of water is and has always been the small river Gangir that from the N.E. cuts through a gap between the two mountain ranges, supplemented by other, less reliable, seasonal watercourses. Although, geographically speaking, this area is an extension of the Diyala plain, neither the Gangir nor any of the other watercourses of the region reach the Diyala drainage system, but are swallowed up in seasonal mudflats in the intervening desert S.W. of Choga Mami. Even now irrigation agriculture in the district is fed mainly by the Gangir, but on its way into the desert the water gets increasingly brackish and becomes useless for agriculture.

The reports given below cover excavation work in Iraq for the year from June 1971 to May 1972; not included are sites where the work was largely or entirely restricted to restoration, such as Samarra, Aqar Quf, and Baghdad. The information on each site has been provided by the director of the excavations, unless otherwise specified, and the final version has been checked by him whenever possible. The sites are arranged in alphabetical order, and in some cases reference is made to their entry in Archaeological Sites in Iraq (published by the Directorate-General of Antiquities, Baghdad, 1970; abbreviated ASI).

The material for this report was assembled by Mr. J. N. Postgate, Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. The Editors are glad to acknowledge his efforts, and wish to express their gratitude to all those colleagues who have so willingly contributed information on their work, and especially to Dr. Isa Salman, the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, for his generous co-operation which alone has made the compilation possible.

There are two reasons for the regrettable shortage of radiocarbon dates for prehistoric Mesopotamia. One is that much of the relevant excavation took place before the development of such techniques; the second, the inconvenient fact that the prehistoric farmers of Mesopotamia were uncommonly tidy and swept clean their house floors, leaving for posterity little in the way of carbonized or any other remains. Excavations like that at Ras al ‘Amiya failed to reveal any recoverable quantity of charcoal in spite of a diligent search, while at Choga Mami, where every scrap of such material was preserved, many of the samples have proved too small for dating purposes. In this situation it is perhaps useful to publish quickly and briefly the first date from the latter site, remembering at the same time the unreliability of a single unsupported date from any site:

The charcoal sample which produced this date came from what has been termed, perhaps inadequately, the “Transitional Samarra/Hajji Muhammad phase”, so designated because the ceramic material included pottery comparable, and in some cases identical, with ceramic types of these two otherwise distinct assemblages. Although some of the pottery is indistinguishable from that found in true Samarran context, there is no doubt that this phase at Choga Mami clearly post-dates classical Samarra.

In approaching the problem of Archive keeping at Mari, it might be profitable to inspect, at the outset, the archaeological evidence. On doing so, one is immediately struck firstly by the heterogeneous arrangement of objects in storage and secondly by the apparent lack of a noticeable system in organizing the archives. A spot check of other second millennium palaces which produced appreciable quantities of texts reveals this observation to be generally applicable. In almost every major segment of the Mari palace, a cluster of chambers, really store-rooms, contained a collection of tablets, varying in size. In addition, a text or two would be uncovered here and there at unexpected quarters. For this scattering, Hammurapi's victorious troops were often blamed. This accusation is contradicted, however, by the evidence, documented with archival tags, that after its initial victory, Babylon attempted to preserve Mari's archives under a modicum of order.

In the south-east section of the palace, dubbed by Parrot as the “Eastern” and “Workshops and Store-rooms” Quarters, at least twelve chambers sheltered tablets, many of which dated to the days of Yaḫdun-Lim and his (son (?) and) successor Sūmū-Yamam. On the opposite end, tablets were found in four rooms and in one large chamber of the Administrative Quarters. More to the centre of the palace, and around the vast open courtyard no. 106, the largest proportion of tablets were stored. Rooms 115 to the east, 110 to the north-west, and 108 to the west came the closest to being strictly archival in character.

The exceptional weather during much of the 1971 season at Umm Dabaghiyah provided an unusual opportunity to observe the steppe-country of the Jazira in flood conditions. Series of violent though short-lived storms produced an effect on the land surface which was the more pronounced because of the drought, and consequent de-vegetation, of the previous twelve months. The difficulties of travel in the water-logged countryside in the short time available prevented any systematic survey, nor was the party equipped for geomorphological measurements, but even the limited observations possible revealed much of interest, both from the point of view of present-day land-forming processes, and concerning the possible geomorphological history of the area.

Umm Dabaghiyah lies within the dry steppe zone of the Jazira. The Lower Fars series dips gently to the NNW, and the surface levels consist of redeposited silts and clays, more or less cemented by gypsum, lying upon gypsiferous rocks and gravel. The topography is of shallow valleys between low, smooth hills, often with rock outcrops near their summits. The differences in elevation are usually only of some few metres. There appears to be no coherent system of drainage within the area; storm-water drains from the hills in the form of sheetwash to form playa-lakes in the lowest-lying valleys. Only exceptionally are there signs of a permanent system of linear wadis debouching into the valleys or connecting one playa with the next. Presumably this lack of incised drainage results from the small differences in elevation and the consequent low energy potential of the system.

The Iraq Museum has acquired by confiscation a number of Sumerian statues. Their provenance unfortunately is unknown, but their many similarities to statues from the Diyala sites suggest that this new group may have come from the same region. For dating these new pieces, therefore, I have relied on Frankfort's publications of the Diyala group.

The first statue (Plate XXIIa, b) portrays a youth. The head has been broken but repaired. The front of the body is damaged, presumably where it lay face to the ground. The eye inlays are missing and the nose is damaged. The hands are broken, so we cannot see clearly how they were folded. The hair is rendered in horizontal ridges and is divided into two symmetrical halves falling down over the shoulders and chest. The short kilt is in shape a truncated cone, with double overlapping tassels at the bottom. The legs are complete and are supported by a stone slab resting on a “T”-shaped base.

The back of the head is broken on the left-hand side, but the parting of the ridged hair is clear (Plate XXIIb). The tasselled girdle has been carefully worked and carved in relief. There are two statues from the Diyala region similar to this figure. One (no. 33) is poorly made and does not bear close comparison with the new piece; the other (no. 32) is roughly worked and has been damaged by salt, whereas that of Plate XXIIa, b is more carefully carved and can be ranked with the best works of the period.