The Near Eastern seal collection of the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, University of Durham, had a single immediate origin. It was part of the collection of antiquities belonging to the Dukes of Northumberland, formerly housed in Alnwick Castle. Most of the Egyptian antiquities were acquired by the 4th Duke during the first half of the 19th century, and in 1880, at the expense of the 6th Duke, a printed catalogue of the whole collection as it then existed was issued, compiled by Samuel Birch, Keeper of Egyptian, Assyrian and Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum. This describes four Near Eastern cylinder seals, nos. 2016–2018 and 2020, a very modest start. The greater number of these was collected after this time by the eldest son of the 7th Duke, who first came to public attention as Lord Warkworth, but was later styled Henry Algernon George, Earl Percy. He was born in 1871, travelled extensively in the Near East in 1895, 1897 and 1899, and died prematurely in 1909. As noted in the Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement 1901–1911, 904, “true to the traditions of his family, he began to collect antiques, particularly cylinder seals”, and significantly an Akkadian cylinder seal design adorns the front board of his book Notes from a Diary in Asiatic Turkey (London, 1898). This material joined the family collection, and it appears that he was the last of his line to pursue this interest, so that nothing was added after 1910. The collection remained in Alnwick Castle until the 9th Duke deposited it on loan in the British Museum in 1939. The easier access which this move was intended to create was, however, prevented by the outbreak of war. In 1950, when conditions had returned to normal after the war, thanks to the generosity of the present Duke and the initiative of Professor T. W. Thacker of the University of Durham, the whole Northumberland collection, with a few exceptions, was acquired for that University, where it is now housed in the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, close to its ancestral home.

Legal documents relating to marriage have always attracted the attention of Assyriologists, and rightly so, since they throw light on the social as well as the legal customs of their time. Although the laws and contracts between them have permitted some detailed studies of marriage customs in Babylonia, the evidence for Assyria is much scarcer, and in his edition of Neo-Assyrian legal documents A. Ungnad was able to transliterate no more than four “marriage texts”, three of which belong to a single archive and are extremely similar in content. However, the excavations at Nimrud have made substantial additions to our documentation, and the time seems ripe to summarize what evidence is now available, and to present some which is new. The subject of marriage in any society is a complex one, and it is hardly necessary for me to point out that no attempt has been made to pursue the legal or anthropological implications of these texts. In the first place, the writer is not qualified to do this in either field, and secondly, it seems very doubtful, given the variety displayed by the texts in question, whether we yet have a body of evidence sufficient to warrant a more penetrating study. Nevertheless, it is clearly desirable that what evidence we do have should be readily accessible, even to the non-cuneiformist, and we hope that this medley will serve a purpose.

Up to 1973 Assyrian rock reliefs found in Turkey numbered only a few. Those of Cudi Dağ and Birklin (“the Tigris Tunnel”) were published early in this century, while a further relief at Eğil in the province of Diyarbakir has been long known but not satisfactorily published until recently.

In 1973, the author undertook systematic surveys with the help of assistants in the Adana Regional Museum, Cilicia, and was able to locate a Neo-Assyrian rock relief at Ferhath-Uzunoğlan Tepe, near Kozan in the province of Adana, which he reported and subsequently published. Later, in 1974, while on survey in the province of the Hatay (Antakya), he located what appeared to be a Neo-Assyrian open-air sanctuary at Karabur, with four rock reliefs depicting gods and in one case the human figure of a worshipper. These too were reported and published.

Some years ago at the request of Dr. R. D. Barnett, then Keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities, Mrs. Diane Gurney prepared drawings of unpublished sealings from Ur in the British Museum for a supplementary volume in the Ur Excavation Series. At the same time she also did revised drawings of a few sealings already published by Legrain in Ur Excavations III: Archaic Seal-Impressions (London, 1936). As the proposed supplementary volume has been cancelled, Mrs. Gurney's careful drawings are published here with a revision of the short catalogue and commentary which I originally wrote to accompany them. The complexity of the task facing Legrain was formidable and must never be forgotten. Criticism of his impressionistic, often idiosyncratic, renderings of these designs is all too easy. The decipherment of details is often hard enough; but it is the restoration of complete designs that is so testing of eye, hand and judgement. Those compositions combining geometric motifs or cuneiform signs, sometimes both, with representations of men, animals and objects are particularly hard to unravel. Sometimes not only the exact frame of a design, but even its orientation, is in doubt. Nor yet have we actual cylinders carved with the most intricate of such designs to guide us.

In preparing her drawings Mrs. Gurney first produced a provisional pencil sketch. After independent study of the sealing, I discussed this initial copy with her, resolving as far as possible any points at issue. Then the drawings were completed in ink, with any details which remained obscure rendered in broken line. Since the drawings best speak for themselves, catalogue descriptions have been reduced to a minimum. As far as possible cross-reference has been made to Legrain's pioneer study. His introductory remarks and his analysis of decorative motifs are as relevant to the sealings here as to his selection. This supplement adds nothing of substance; but it offers an opportunity for students to contrast another hand and eye to Legrain's in one of the most important groups of sealings yet found in Iraq.

Among the Neo-Assyrian “deeds and documents” still retrievable from the recesses of Bezold's catalogue of the Kouyunjik collection and its supplements, text K. 8434 stands slightly by itself, as regards both dimensions and contents. It is a relatively large (18·5 × 12· 5 cm), reddish-coloured fragment of an eight-column tablet, but only five of the prearranged partitions are inscribed in full, in an upward-slanting Assyrian hand. They hold the remnants of a long list of personal names—specifically, of the types of names usually borne by women—thus providing a certain amount of new material to the least-known sector in onomastic research for the Neo-Assyrian age.

The fact that the names in the tablet were prevalently applicable to women is a conclusion to be reached from an analysis of the onomastic data themselves, which bear ample evidence of (1) feminine morphemic affixes, relevant to East or West Semitic linguistic affiliation, and of (2) goddesses and female theophorous figures as subject-elements in complete or abbreviated sentence names. That they may have been exclusively borne by women is a deduction stemming—oddly enough—from the very fact that no absolute certainty is possible as to whether they were women's names or not, since no trace of the determinative SAL preceding the attestations survives.

The Birmingham City Museum's collection of cuneiform documents has been assembled over the years from a variety of sources. Many of the Sumerian royal inscriptions are from Sir Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur (1922–34); most of the Assyrian material is derived from R. Campbell Thompson's excavations at Nineveh (1927–32), and the excavations of Sir Max Mallowan at Nimrud (1949–63). Where known, excavation numbers are given in the catalogue. The rest of the collection has been bought from dealers in antiquities or acquired from private collections.

The twenty-four texts which form the latter part of this article are published by kind permission of Mr. John Ruffle, Keeper of Archaeology at the Birmingham City Museum, whom I wish to thank for the help and encouragement he and the staff of the Department of Archaeology have extended to me. I am deeply indebted to the generosity of Professor W. G. Lambert who has given so liberally of his time, advice and learning. Further thanks are due to Dr. Edmond Sollberger for comments on many of the Sumerian texts, and to Professor F. R. Kraus for his suggestions concerning the Old Babylonian letter (48).

The recovery of the Assyrian Empire from the time of confusion and hardship had begun, though slowly, as early as the end of the tenth century B.C. But Assyria's real expansion dates from the time of Aššurnaṣirpal II (883–859 B.C.). He recovered Assyria's former settlements in the land Na'iri, which had been seized by the Aramaeans in the days of his predecessors, and founded new colonies in North Syria. Likewise, his son Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) restored the old Assyrian bases on the Euphrates and added to the colonies that he had built in the same region, designating them as his “royal cities”.

Yet the rising power of Assyria and its expansionist policy did not go unchallenged. The people whom the Neo-Assyrian kings attempted to subdue mustered their considerable strength to fight against the destructive might of the Assyrian army, and their strongly fortified cities were among the major sources of their power of resistance, as we are told in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. Kaprabi in the land of Bit-Adini, for example, is described as a well fortified city that had “hovered like a cloud in the sky”, while Pitura on the Tigris was, “exceedingly difficult; it was surrounded by two walls; its citadel had the form of mountain peak”. All these strong cities are designated as āl dannūti, “fortified city”, in the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. When the ruler of a city is known, the city is designated as “his fortified city”, while a city of tribal people, whose country is only loosely organized, is usually called “their fortified city”, whether the name of the ruler of the city or land is known or not (see Table I).

The years 1977 and 1978 witnessed a spectacular increase in the number of archaeological excavations in Iraq, both Iraqi and foreign. The chief reason for this was the intensive rescue operation mounted by the State Antiquities Organization in the Hamrin basin, where many ancient sites are threatened by a dam now nearing completion. The conspicuous success of this operation, in which foreign excavators were able to take advantage of the generous allocation made by the Iraqi government, will be apparent in the following pages. The amount of work did however make it impossible for Mr. Postgate to prepare a separate report for 1977, since he was in the field at the time. Hence we have to offer a biennial report, covering more than 60 sites.

The reports have been collected and edited by Mr. J. N. Postgate and Mr. P. J. Watson, both members of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. Our gratitude goes not only to them, but to all the directors and other archaeologists who have generously contributed to the collection. In some cases we have failed to collect a report, and in this case a brief note is included; this, and a certain unevenness in the length of the reports, is an inevitable result of the size of the undertaking, and we wish to apologize to those directors whose sites are not properly covered. The collection is divided into two parts: normal excavations (including three sites in the Haditha dam area), and sites in the Hamrin basin rescue project, each arranged in alphabetical order. We wish to express our gratitude here to Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof and Sd. Sabah Jasim for their assistance in collecting reports on the Hamrin and Haditha sites respectively, for which they are the overall directors. Information has sometimes been culled from the Organization's journal Al-Athari, and in this case the source is acknowledged at the end of the report. Otherwise the data come from personal visits, written reports submitted by the excavators, and contributions to the Babylon, Assur and Hamrin conference in Baghdad in December 1978.