The seventh expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq took the field on March 4th, 1956, and concluded its work on May 5th. As usual we are indebted to several institutions and to many persons for their help. Generous financial aid was received from: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Les Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels; the Iraq Petroleum Company, which also furnished the Expedition with apparatus and invaluable technical help through the good offices of the Fields Manager in Kirkuk, Mr. L. J. Teyssaud.

A small piedmont country with resources enough to maintain an active population, Susiana is surrounded by less favoured areas. Isolation is thus ensured, but communication remains possible with Iranian highlands and with Mesopotamian lowlands, with coastal plains and with North-Western foothills. Susa stands on a borderline, at a cross-road, influences streaming through, from, and to it: the story is one of fluctuating orientations, which we shall try to trace through correlations between the early local cultures and those of Mesopotamia.

The complex of buildings described in this article lies on the east side of the citadel of Nimrud, close to the south-east corner. It is bounded on the east by the citadel wall, on the north by the street leading up from the gate of Shalmaneser III, and on the west by a second street dividing it from the Burnt Palace (Pl. I). A building on its southern side, in the angle of the fortifications, was investigated by Layard, who refers to it on his plan as “The Palace of the Grandson of Esarhaddon”; his excavations were hampered by the presence of a considerable post-Assyrian cemetery and he exposed only a small part of the uppermost of the sequence of buildings on this site. Our investigations have so far touched only the outer face of its north wall, which fronted on the south wing of the Nabu Temple, but this has sufficed to show that the site was continuously occupied throughout the life of the Nabu Temple, although the buildings upon it had no connection with the Temple area; hence it is of importance only as a limiting factor in the layout of the Temple itself. It is, however, clear that the south-east corner was always, with the exception of the Ziggurrat, the highest point in the citadel, and the considerable slope, represented by a drop of some five metres in ground level from the southern boundary of the site to the street of Shalmaneser III on the north, undoubtedly influenced successive architects in planning its development.

The small group of tablets here published is the first collection of temple economic texts of the late Assyrian period to be discovered. Although therefore, the selection is limited, they are of particular interest. Except for two tablets recording gifts to the temple of land and slaves, they consist of heart-shaped dockets recording debts of grain owed to the temple. They are of the usual late Assyrian form for this kind of document, with holes for string by which they were suspended, or perhaps tied to sacks; remains of the string were still in the holes when they were excavated.

They were found together in a pit on top of a cut down wall between rooms N.T. 14 and 16, on the south side of the inner courtyard to the temple. They are dated between 668 and 652 B.C., except for an isolated tablet (ND. 5457) which is dated 699 B.C. Of the twenty-one dockets, eight are dated in the spring of 661 B.C., five of them on two succeeding days, 27th and 28th of Addaru (ND. 5447, 5452, 5454, 5459).

The god Nabu is named as creditor (lit. the amount of the debt “belongs to Nabu”), and the normal commercial rates of interest are charged, although there is a greater proportion of debts with low interest. There are some debts without interest, or so it appears; on others 20, 30, 40, and 50 per cent. is charged. The rate seems to depend on the security of the debtor in relation to the amount of the debt (we have no evidence from Calah of rates in bad years of scarcity), for of the debts with the highest interest, 5448 involves a large amount of grain, and a pledge is required as security, 5461 and 5465 are cases in which harvesting labour is required as a condition of credit and probably acts as security. In the five dockets of the 27th and 28th of Addaru, 661 B.C., the interest charged varies between 20 and 40 per cent., and in some cases there is no interest at all.

The text of this fragment consists of a number of medical prescriptions, and the six of these which are either complete or very nearly so, together with the first line of a seventh (Obv. i, 26, given as the fourth in order) form the basis of this study. Details of the discovery of the fragment were given in Iraq, XVIII, Pt. 2, p. 130; for the copy see Pl. XXV of the same issue. The system of transliteration which is adopted is that which conveys the text exactly as written, in the belief that, while this procedure inevitably makes for slow reading in a scientific work, only thus can it be safeguarded against possible transcriptional error. The translation wrestles with difficulties both of meaning and interpretation and the need for improvement should be recognised in many places.

The ostracon ND.6231 described in this article was found at Nimrud (Kalḫu), in April 1957, during the excavation of the building known as Fort Shalmaneser which was a royal depot situated in the S.E. corner of the outer town. This sherd came from room F.S., S.W.1, and lay in rubbish mixed with ash, 20 cm. above a trodden level that represents the latest occupation of the Assyrian building which was destroyed in 612 B.C. It is hoped to publish the plan of this depot, in which many wine jars, metal objects and ivories were found, in a subsequent number of Iraq.

The tablet N.D. 5435 was discovered at Nimrud in 1956, in the course of the excavations conducted by Professor M. E. L. Mallowan under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. I am much indebted to Professor Mallowan for his generous permission to publish the text in the columns of Iraq, and would also like to thank Dr. J. Læssøe, one of the epigraphists of the Nimrud Expedition in the 1956 campaign, for kindly relinquishing his right of publication and inviting me to prepare an edition of the text. Dr. Læssøe read my article in manuscript and contributed some valuable suggestions.

In Iraq XV, Pt. 2 (1953), pp. 123–125, C. J. Gadd published the inscription of a barrel-cylinder which was found, broken in three pieces, during the excavations at Nimrud. This inscription is a foundation document composed by Marduk-apla-iddina II for a shrine which he consecrated to the god Ningiš-zi-da within the E-anna temple at Warka.

At the end of his article, C. J. Gadd sought to identify the temple mentioned in this inscription with one of the many known, but undefined, temples. At the time when this attempt was made, only the two temples proposed by Mr. Gadd were considered, but both of them cannot perfectly be brought into accord with the statement of the text. In the same year in which Mr. Gadd's article was published, a new temple was excavated in E-anna at Warka, and I have the impression that this is the temple to which the statement of the inscription may best be applied. In U.V.B. X (pp. 5 ff.) and U.V.B. XI (pp. 15 ff) it was pointed out that the extension of E-anna was far greater than we had hitherto supposed. In the eastern corner a very large court was added in which the Innin-temple of Karaindaš stood, and on the North-western side of the Zigurrat another court which—as we know from the results of excavations carried out during the last years—contained only large dwelling-houses. This new discovery of two very large courts belonging to the sanctuary entirely alters the situation. By means of the court extending to the north-west that part of the building of the enclosed court called by Jordan “Aussenzingel” (outer precinct) now becomes “Innenzingel“ (inner precinct) (Plate XXXV). The part in question is that group of rooms within the Zingel enclosure which includes the so-called north-western temple. The building, newly excavated, is situated in the court of Eanna farthest to the East (Qc-e XIV4-XV1).

The great site of Persepolis, though known for centuries past from the accounts of many travellers, remained until 1931 one of the very few of the great capital cities of the ancient Near Eastern world still untouched. Yet its monuments have formed the objects of serious study since more than a century; Ker Porter's careful drawings (1817) are by no means to be despised, but the pioneer work of Flandin and Coste, carried out in 1840–1841, before Botta and Layard had even found the famous capitals of Assyria, was not merely remarkable, it was in the first class. Following it came that of Texier in 1852. But only Flandin and Coste's great work can be compared with the latest handsome presentation of the subject, which is based on every modern scientific aid and incorporates the results of large-scale excavations, with the end in view of producing a definitive and complete record.

Most persons, if asked what they considered to be the outstanding characteristic of the law of wrongs in ancient Mesopotamia, would probably reply: “The cruel, bloody sanctions, and in particular the ‘talionic’ and ‘sympathetic’ punishments.” This characteristic is too familiar to need examples. Of the 282 clauses of the Code of Hammurabi (C.H.), some 27 impose capital sentences for a wide variety of wrongs, including adultery and theft. Of the ‘talionic’ sanctions (those applying the principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”) one of the best examples is C.H.229, 230: “If a builder has built a house for a man and his work is not strong, and the house he has built collapses and kills the owner, that builder shall be put to death. If the son of the owner is killed, they shall kill the builder's son.” Clauses 196, 197 provide: “If a free man has injured the eye of a patrician, his own eye shall be injured. If he has broken the bone of a patrician, his bone shall be broken.” Of the ‘sympathetic’ sanctions, examples are more familiar in the Middle Assyrian Laws (M.A.L.), e.g. cutting off a man's lower lip for kissing a married woman (§ 9).

But in recent years earlier laws than these have become available from the same field, and they paint quite a different picture.

First, we may mention the laws now attributed to Lipit-Ishtar, King of Isin, though found sixty years ago—a Sumerian Code of an Akkadian King, dating from perhaps 164–175 years before the C.H. They contain over 100 laws of which very few are legible, and these are hardly relevant to the present purpose, save that one (§ 12) at least raises a doubt whether theft was capital in Isin as it was later in the C.H.