During October and November 1977 a third season of work at Abu Salabikh was undertaken by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. On this occasion we remained at the site for less than two months, partly because we had planned to do less excavation so as to concentrate on the study of materials from the previous seasons, and partly to enable the expedition to move up to the area of the Hamrin dam, where we had a pressing invitation from the State Antiquities Organization to join in rescue excavations. Despite the short season at Abu Salabikh we were able to achieve most of our objectives, and in fact it proved necessary to undertake some minor rescue excavations of our own because of urgent irrigation drainage works close to the site. This year we were happy to welcome once more Sd. Abdul-Mejid Muhammad with Sd. Muhammad Yahya as our representatives, and are as ever grateful to them for their unfailing kindness and ready assistance. Our thanks go also to Dr. Muayad Sa‘id, Director General of Antiquities and all of the Organization's officials who helped to smooth our paths. In particular, though, we must pay tribute to the late Prof. Fuad Safar: as Director of Excavations he took the most active interest in our work, and he was especially enthusiastic about the new light it might throw on the Early Dynastic I period. So often in the past it has been his penetrating comments that led us to new approaches and objectives, and we all feel that archaeological research in Iraq can never be the same again without him.

Animal remains from two seasons of excavation at the Tell of Abu Salabikh (1975–1976) were examined during a month's visit to the site in October 1977. A proportion of this material was then selected for further study and was kindly sent on loan to the British Museum (Natural History) by the Department of Antiquities, Baghdad. Work is continuing on these specimens and on the equid skeleton described by Postgate and Moorey which had been loaned to the Museum a year earlier. The photographs, Plates XIV–XVI, were taken on site by Mr. David Nicolson and our thanks are due to him for his patience in the face of dust and sandflies.

The collection of animal remains was large, numbering perhaps more than 10,000 elements which were mixed with an equal or greater number of human bones. The animal bones were in a very fragmentary condition as is usual with the remains of food. They had suffered further breakage by the action of the compacted soil of the floors under which they were buried as well as by disturbance and re-burial following human interments. Furthermore the very high concentration of salts in the soil contributed to the fragmentation process. Shortage of time prevented analysis of this comminuted bone but the dimensions of every measurable element were recorded.

The story of how Sir Max Mallowan, accompanied by Professor Jørgen Laessøe, discovered the site of Fort Shalmaneser, and how soon after he decided to begin excavations there is one that is well known to readers of this journal. Also well known is that as work progressed from 1957 to 1963 several rooms were encountered within the fortress which were filled, sometimes to the incredible depth of several feet, with broken and mutilated ivory-work. What is not so well known, or if well known is not so well appreciated, is that these “Ivory Rooms”, as we of the Expedition used to call them, frequently contained many other categories of object as well, which, though subsequently overshadowed by the ivories, were nevertheless more deserving of attention than their present state of publication would suggest. One such category is the series of miniature painted glass plaques which is our subject here, for not only are they attractive and interesting in themselves, but they must be counted amongst the earliest examples of painted glass that have survived from antiquity. It is with the aim, therefore, of more fully acquainting both archaeologists and historians of glass with the details of these plaques that Dr. Robert H. Brill and I have prepared our present studies.

As part of a long-term research project consisting of scientific investigations of the various types of glasses excavated at Nimrud, the author of this report undertook a study of three of the nine painted glass plaques included among the finds at Fort Shalmaneser. This research is being conducted in co-operation with Mr. J. J. Orchard who, in Part I of this paper, has illustrated the plaques and discussed them in detail. As is the case with so many Mesopotamian glasses, the objects involved here are very heavily weathered, which complicated matters greatly. Such objects are not only extremely fragile and difficult to handle, but also the original glass— where any remains—is completely obscured by decomposition products. Moreover, in this instance, because so few of these plaques have been found, it was not possible to remove samples for all of the experiments which might be expected to yield useful information. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, several interesting findings have come out of our experiments.

In this article are published the cuneiform texts found at Abu Salabikh during the excavations of 1975 by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. Although few in number, they are interesting both for their content and for their archaeological contexts. A few scattered tablets came from a variety of provenances : from a pit from the surface in Area A (IAS 516), from near the surface in a room of the eastern houses of Area E (IAS 517), and from the fill of graves dug into the Southern Unit during its occupation (IAS 518 from Grave 48 in the courtyard; IAS 521 from Grave 2 and IAS 519 and 520 from Grave 27, both in Room 39). None of these tablets is quite satisfactorily stratified, since IAS 517 was very close to the surface, and all the graves in question had suffered later disturbance, so that we cannot say with confidence whether the tablets came from the original fill of the grave shafts, or from robber holes. However, this lack is offset a little by the better provenance of the remainder of the tablets, now to be discussed.

At his death in December 1976 Briggs W. Buchanan had been working on the collection of ancient Near Eastern seals in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for the best part of thirty years. Illness had prevented any visits after the summer of 1974. The first fruits of his labours appeared in 1966 as a Catalogue of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in the Ashmolean Museum, I. Cylinder Seals. By early in the 1970's he had prepared a manuscript of the long-planned complementary stamp seal catalogue. A variety of problems hindered the final stages of revision and it will sadly be some years yet before a manuscript and illustrations suitable for publication can be made available. Buchanan had also drafted a concise handlist of all the cylinder seals acquired by the Ashmolean Museum after his first volume went to press in 1963, including a few seal impressions from Tell Brak and Kish overlooked in earlier years. He intended this to be an appendix to his second volume. As this volume is already of considerable size and treats a distinct aspect of ancient glyptic, it has been decided that a revised and extended version of this appendix should appear independently, so that it may more easily be used in conjunction with the cylinder seal catalogue. Virtually all the cylinder seals described here were acquired when Briggs Buchanan was not in Oxford; but his comments on them were always eagerly awaited, and readily given, when he arrived for his almost annual summer visits between 1963 and 1974.

Between 11th and 25th October 1977, an archaeological survey sponsored by the Institute of Archaeology, London University, was made in the area around Tell Rifa‘at. Thirty-four sites were studied. They were chosen because they were all marked on the 1:50,000 map with the title “Tell”. Twenty-four of them were found to have tells of ancient human occupation, while the rest could have gained the title because of their situation on some rocky prominence. The main purpose of the survey was to determine the settlement patterns in the area for every period of its past. A special interest of the expedition was the topography of Bit-Agusi, the Aramaean kingdom which flourished in the area in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.

Among the ancient Near Eastern objects in the Newell Bequest collection at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, is the gypsum stand published herewith. On the basis of its dedicatory inscription, which will be discussed in detail below, the object's provenance can be established as the sanctuary of Ningizzida and Geštinanna at Girsu (Telloh). The piece was probably found when the sanctuary was plundered by illegal diggers in August, 1924. At that time at least seven statues of Gudea and two of Ur-Ningirsu were discovered, all reportedly found together in one room. The Gudea statues are remarkable for their inherent artistic merit and because some of them show Gudea as a youth, while others depict him as a mature man.

Other furnishings from this sanctuary include a Gudea statue found by Cros and a steatite vase with interlacing serpents and dragons. The sanctuary was excavated by Genouillac in his 1929 and 1930–31 seasons. His finds included inscribed bricks and door stones; a grey marble dish dedicated to Ningizzida by Gudea; a mace-head dedicated to the same deity by Nammah, a scribe; fragments of a stele with a presentation scene; part of a blue steatite lamp showing intertwined serpents; and numerous pieces of boxes and lids of baked clay, many with representations of serpents. The architecture of the sanctuary could not be reconstructed because of the illicit digging and the inability of Genouillac's workers to trace its mudbrick walls.

Since its publication, AT 401—a delivery-note of copper—has been considered as an important piece of evidence for the reconstruction of the weight system at Alalah (Level IV). The interest of this text lies in the fact that consignments of copper are reckoned in talents and shekels, and that the total, also reckoned in talents and shekels, is provided. Consequently, we may have a clue for establishing the amount of shekels comprising the talent at Alalah. The various interpretations so far suggested have—in my opinion—failed to offer a convincing explanation of the text itself, with the result that the metrological value of the talent at Alalah is still far from established.

With increasing interest in the economic aspects of Mesopotamian history, precise determinations of the metrology in use at different times and places are becoming ever more urgent. Measures of capacity are particularly badly served, and the position for the Old Babylonian period is well described by M. Bottéro when he writes: “Quant à la métrologie absolue (ou plus exactement: ajustée à notre propre système métrique), aucune donnée ne nous permet jusqu'à ce jour de la connaître, et nous sommes contraints, si nous voulons en avoir une idée, de faire fond sur les calculs effectués autour des mesures proprement babyloniennes ou assyriennes, sans nous dissimuler que les mêmes mots pouvaient impliquer des valeurs différentes…” (ARMT VII, 347). The brief note which follows is therefore intended to convey the essential information about an Old Babylonian jar from Tell al Rimah with a note of its capacity inscribed on it. The accuracy of the determination leaves much to be desired, but in the absence of any more accurate data any such clues seem worth following up.