Dear colleagues and friends,

It is with great emotion, as you can understand, that I stand before you today to pay homage to Barbara Parker, whose death is a great loss to us all. I am particularly honoured to be allowed to speak here in the famous Institute of Archaeology where she spent a great part of her own life, first as a student and then as a member of staff. My thanks go first to Professor David Harris and Professor David Oates, who invited me, and also to you, her colleagues and her friends brought together here. Each of you has many more qualifications to speak about her than I do, so I am peculiarly touched and grateful to have been chosen to evoke a personality I loved and admired for more than forty years.

Thanks to the Rencontres Assyriologiques Internationales, founded in 1950 by Georges Dossin and Jean Nougayrol, I met Barbara Parker year after year, in Paris or elsewhere. I was curious to see which Rencontres Barbara took part in. I found that for at least thirty years she had missed hardly any, especially after she came back from Baghdad, where from 1949 to 1961 she was Secretary-Librarian at the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. It was during the 24th Rencontre, in Paris in 1977, that Barbara informed me with an astonishing simplicity in the elevator going up to the Conservation of the Musée du Louvre that she had married Sir Max Mallowan. I was very happy, but a bit amazed, to learn the news in such a matter-of-fact way. That discretion and that modesty were a characteristic of her personality. For the same reason she never gave a lecture, but came to meet the other scholars and listen to their papers. I am quite sure that she would not like this homage to turn into a panegyric, but how can I neglect to mention the soundness of her work from both an epigraphic and an archaeological point of view, a double speciality which is so rare nowadays? I verified this again, looking through the collection of offprints she sent me from 1955 onwards, as well as the posthumous article on a cylinder seal from Central Asia sent to me recently by Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, who co-authored it with her for the Festschrift für Ruth Mayer-Opificius. Her main field was, of course, the study of the documents discovered in Nimrud and in Balawat in the 1950s, cuneiform tablets and seals. But she was interested in other aspects of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Assyrian reliefs and temple furniture. She published the cylinder seals and the bronze figurines of dogs found at Tell al-Rimah. The article on those figurines (Mallowan 1986) was her contribution to the Studies in Honor of Edith Porada, who unfortunately also left us recently.

During the Oriental Institute's seventeenth season of excavation at Nippur (1987), major new information was gathered on the history of the city walls. In addition, we investigated a recently discovered small Islamic site a short distance beyond the north-eastern city wall.

The expedition arrived in Iraq in late September and began excavation on October 10. The digging ended on December 12. The staff consisted of McGuire Gibson as director, Sayyid Muhammad Yahya as representative of the Department of Antiquities, James A. Armstrong as assistant director and archaeologist, John C. Sanders as architect, Peggy Bruce Sanders as photographer and artist, Steven Cole as epigrapher, Margaret C. Brandt as archaeologist and geomorphologist, and Augusta McMahon as archaeologist and registrar. Abraham Van As and Loe Jacobs, ceramic specialists with the Belgian Expedition, joined us for ten days to study our second-millennium pottery. The field operations were made more effective than in previous seasons by the addition of Sayyid Khalaf Bedawi as foreman. Sayyid Khalaf had been foreman at Nippur in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after which he became a permanent employee of the Department of Antiquities. Recently retired from the Department, he was again available to become a key member of the expedition. During the early part of the season, when we were engaged in moving sand and backfill from previous excavations, we hired forty local workmen. For most of the season, however, we employed twenty-three local men, six of whom we began training as pickmen.

We would like to express our gratitude to Dr Moayyad Sa'id Damirchi and the staff of the Department of Antiquities for help in making the season a success. Dr Bahija Ismail, Director of the Iraq Museum, was as gracious and accommodating as usual in her relations with the expedition. We must also acknowledge the generous aid of the Qaimakam of Afak and the Muhafadh of Qadissiyah in solving problems with the supply of water to the site.

Les ziggurats sont probablement les monuments les plus caractéristiques de la Mésopotamie antique. À ce titre, elles ont fait l'objet de nombreuses études. Pour la plupart, celles-ci portent sur la fonction ou l'aspect de ces édifices. À l'heure actuelle, on ne sait toujours pas bien à quoi elles servaient ni même quel aspect elles avaient. La masse considérable de ces bâtiments a empêché que des fouilles de grande envergure y soient menées, à quelques rares exceptions près, mais on sait qu'elles se présentaient sous la forme de gigantesques tours à étages ou plus précisément d'une superposition de terrasses de taille décroissante dont la dernière était très probablement surmontée d'un temple (Fig. 1). Les bâtiments fouillés n'étant conservés que très partiellement — la ziggurat d'Ur, la mieux conservée avec celle de Tchoga Zambil, a livré une première terrasse à peu près complète et une partie de la deuxième (Fig. 2) — de nombreuses hypothèses de reconstitution s'affrontent, notamment quant au nombre et à la taille des terrasses. On ignore également quelles cérémonies avaient réellement lieu dans le temple du sommet évoqué par Hérodote pour la ziggurat de Babylone.

Le propos de la présente étude n'est ni de définir la fonction exacte de ces bâtiments, ni même d'en préciser la morphologie mais de s'intéresser uniquement à leur mode de construction et aux moyens mis en œuvre. Nous disposons, en effet, grâce aux fouilles partielles menées sur plusieurs bâtiments, d'informations concernant les techniques et les matériaux de construction. Par ailleurs, l'étude des textes nous apporte quantité de données sur les ouvriers, leur statut ou l'organisation du travail. À l'époque de la troisième dynastie d'Ur, où apparaissent les premières ziggurats, se met en place une véritable bureaucratie qui impose une standardisation non seulement des mesures (et notamment des dimensions des briques) mais également des tâches journalières demandées aux ouvriers. Cela nous permet de mettre en parallèle les données textuelles et les données archéologiques afin d'essayer de comprendre quels furent les enjeux «logistiques» liés à ces constructions et quelles furent les solutions techniques apportées. On s'en tiendra donc à une période assez courte et bien définie dans le temps marquée par l'apparition de ces bâtiments: l'époque de la troisième dynastie d'Ur.

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.

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.

During the excavation season of 1974 and 1975 archaeologists of the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities uncovered at Hatra a huge edifice, built of ashlar masonry, located in the forecourt of the Great Temple. The building was a temple dedicated to the worship of Allat, the great Arab goddess. This identification is based on epigraphic evidence and sculptural representations, some of which offered in turn evidence for the goddess's assimilation with Nemesis, the omnipresent Greek goddess of justice and vengeance. The plan and architecture of the temple exhibit the distinctive features of the Hatrene style, characterized by the appearance of a triple iwan. In this way the temple is similar to the southern and northern units of the great iwans, the temple of the Triad and the temple of Smya, though its dimensions are larger. The inscriptional evidence indicates that it was King Sanatruq who was responsible for planning and building the temple. However, the final stages of the work were completed by his son, 'Abdsmya, who acted as Sanatruq's viceroy before succeeding him as king. Both kings left their images carved in high relief in two niches in the small iwans.

This article is a pilot study investigating sealing and seals on the published tablets in the British Museum that come from Sippar and are dated to the reign of Hammurabi. The limitations of such a sample are self-evident: the present published corpus consists of carefully selected or randomly copied or transliterated texts, which are only a minute portion of the whole of Hammurabi period texts, and are without archival context (see n. 4). While this approach cannot hope to give a complete picture of the role of seals in the Sippar of Hammurabi, it has raised points of interest in scribal and sealing practice and may generate less conventional methods in the study of Old Babylonian sealing.

The c. 177 texts referred to in this article (see n. 2) range through most of Hammurabi's reign (1792–1750 BC) and span the majority of text types: lawsuits, inheritances, bequests, nursing and adoption contracts, marriages, sales, property exchanges, rentals, leases, loans, receipts and miscellania (e.g. memoranda, hire of person, gift of millstone). By far the most common of these texts are field leases. For the sake of convenience the tablets discussed below will be referred to as long-term (e.g. sales, adoptions, estate settlements) or short-term (e.g. leases, receipts). The relevance of this to sealing will become apparent.

The present article in the series begun in Iraq 52 and continued in Volumes 56–8 offers three tablets from the Sippar library which add to our knowledge of the genre of Babylonian literature known today as “wisdom”: a manuscript of Tablet I of Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer), a copy of the great Šamaš Hymn, and a tablet inscribed with a small collection of proverbs.

Since W. G. Lambert's edition of Ludlul in Babylonian Wisdom Literature several further sources for Tablet I of this text have been identified. Most notable of these is the manuscript from Nimrud, which plugged the gap between lines 12 and 41 and partly filled out the fragmentary end of the text. Being complete save for a few lines either side of its bottom edge, the new Sippar tablet provides further improvements in both places. It contains 11. 1–50 on its obverse and 62–120 on its reverse. The scribe failed to judge his spacing accurately, with the result that towards the end of the tablet he was forced to double up a whole sequence of lines, the twelve lines 105–16 occupying only six lines on the tablet. But even this was not enough, and 11. 117–20 and the catchline (=II 1) had to be written on the top edge of the tablet. Unfortunately this left no room for a colophon, unless one is inscribed on the left edge. For the moment we are unable to ascertain whether this might be so. The tablet came from Niche 1 D of the library — that is the fourth from the ground in the row furthest left on the south-east wall; it measures 14.7 × 7.5 × 3.1 cm.

The following texts come from the Sippar Collections of the British Museum and offer substantial new data on numerous aspects of the administration of the Ebabbara, particularly as regards crown relations and privatised functions. Among the more important points are:

(a) Text No. 1, a fragmentary text dealing with the gardeners of Šamaš, mentions a royal official (rēš šarri) in charge of the gardeners and a letter (šipirtu) from Nabonidus in Tema, the first evidence for that king exercising direct control over the Ebabbara from his Arabian capital.

(b) We also have definite indication that certain official positions connected with the collection of dues payable to the temple could be hired out. Specifically this involves the collection of tithes (No. 8) and the office of gugallu (No. 7). The occurrence of the ša muhhi ešrê and gugallu in letter orders had already prompted speculation that these two duties were rented out in the same manner as the rab sūti and this is now shown to be the case. Other examples of privatised functions are a contract to supply baked bricks to the temple (No. 6) and an undertaking by a širku (temple slave) to supply some of the material requirements of the offerings (No. 2).

(c) Hints of temple affairs outside the Sippar region are given by the appearance of the šangû and the rab ummāni in Opis (No. 4). The text concerns sheep, though whether they were there for pasture, sale or provisioning temple personnel is not clear. The sheep coming from Rusapu were part of a cycle in which temple flocks might be pastured far away with animals rotated as required (Nos. 11, 12). Sheep belonging to the temple are also found on the road in No. 10.

In the first hemistich of the Akkadian Gilgamesh epic, ša nagba īmuru, the term nagbu has been interpreted in two different ways: the totality or the abyss. Most of the translators have chosen the first meaning. Stephanie Dalley, for instance, proposes: “[Of him who] found out all things”. Among those who prefer the meaning “abyss” I would mention Leo Oppenheim, who translates: “[Let me make kn]own to the country him who has seen the abyss,” but gives no explanation for his choice. Though Tournay and Shaffer choose the first meaning — “Celui qui a tout vu” — they explain briefly in a note that the term may have been intended to imply a “jeu de mots”, a pun, so that it could also be understood in the sense of “abyss”. Finally, Anne Kilmer has written an article in which she proposes the rendering: “He who saw the depths”. It seems to me worthwhile discussing the problems involved in these two translations.

Let us begin with the nuances of each interpretation. Nagbu in the sense of “totality” (CAD s.v. nagbu B) may be taken in either a concrete or an abstract sense. In a concrete sense this totality can be understood as the whole of the lands and seas, and the narrative would thus portray a hero who says about himself: “I … went through all countries … and crossed to and fro all seas.” If so, the phrase “the one who saw everything” refers to Gilgamesh's wanderings, which led him to the extremities of the world. If we take the term nagbu as conveying instead an abstract concept, then it can be understood as the trials that Gilgamesh suffered, a proposition which gives a psychological edge to his travails.

In the course of a wordy article which offers no new solution to any problem, R. L. Crocker makes a series of criticisms of articles by us on the subject of Babylonian music. It is gratifying that he, the musicologist who has been most concerned, acknowledges that Gurney's corrections to the system, published in Volume 56 of this journal, are “almost right”. However, he accuses us of suffering from and perpetuating methodological and terminological confusions, and of being insufficiently emancipated from modern European musical concepts. It seems to us that there is more confusion in Dr Crocker's paper than in ours, and that in places he is more guilty than either of us of preconception based on modern musical theory.

A real step forward in the understanding of the Babylonian tonal systems was made a few years ago when T. J. H. Krispijn produced an improved reading in 1. 12 of the crucial “re-tuning text”, UET VII 74. Line 12 rounds off the preceding list of tuning adjustments. In what had previously been read as NU.SU.U[D] “no more” (i.e. “end of sequence”), Krispijn recognized nu-sú-ḫ[u-um], “tightening”; the damaged sign on the edge is compatible with ḫu, and the reading seems secure. This has consequences for readings in all that precedes and follows. Previously, te-[x x] in 1. 15 and te-n[i]-m[a] in 1. 19 had been taken to be from enûm, thus “you alter”, and the same verb had been restored in both sections of the document. It was then open to the modern interpreter to decide whether “alter” meant “tighten” in § 1 and “slacken”in §2, or vice versa. With the new reading it became clear that § 1 was about tightenings, and that the verb in § 2 was to be read as te-n[é]-e!-[ma], “you slacken”, from nê um, while a different verb was to be restored in § 1, namely [tu-na-sà-ah]. These are the technical terms for re-tuning a string, known from the lexical texts cited by Gurney in his n. 5, and they are both present on UET VII 74. A further consequence of the new reading was that it confirmed the view for which R. Vitale had argued on other grounds,3 that the “front”strings of the instrument played the highest notes, not the lowest as others had supposed.