During last winter I made some archaeological researches in the upper part of the Indus Valley, and the results of my investigations are herein published.

Some years ago, Major D. H. Gordon, a British officer on duty in the NW. Frontier Province of India, discovered that archaeological remains were coming from a mound called Sari-Dheri, near Charsadda, in the district of Peshawar. He published certain of these, which he bought from the native villagers, with what information he could gather concerning the location of the finds. These, in his opinion, belonged to the Graeco-Buddhist culture, that Hellenistic civilization which arose in India after the conquest of Alexander the Great. Now I agree with Major Gordon that some of these terra-cottas belong to the Hellenistic school of Gandharian art, towards the beginning of our era, but I believe that others among these objects, which show definitely an archaic style and technique, are far more ancient. They represent, in fact, a new aspect of the Indus chalcolithic civilization, of which, hitherto, no traces had been found in the north (Fig. I)

The Archaeological Expedition to the Ḫabur region of N. Syria, under the auspices of the British Museum and of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, undertook a second campaign in the spring of 1936.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, again provided generous grants, and we are indebted to the authorities of all the institutions concerned for their continued help and encouragement. The civil and military authorities in Syria gave us a cordial welcome on our return, and Monsieur H. Seyrig, the Director of Antiquities for Syria, gave his friendly co-operation in granting us all possible facilities for the continuance of our work. General Jacquot, in Der-ez-Zor, took a friendly interest in our activities, and we are much indebted to the practical help and kindness shown by his officers in Ḥasaka and Kamichlie.

Any one who has visited the Tall Ḫalaf Museum knows that the excavation s carried out by Max, Freiherr von Oppenheim, have produced a rich variety of material which would all repay detailed study. It is to the generosity of Baron von Oppenheim that I am indebted for permission to publish the object which is here discussed.

It is of white marble, height 14·5 cm., greatest width 7·7 cm., thickness 4 cm. (Plate VI, 1). One half is almost square in shape, the other half is a narrower prolongation with a rounded end. Where the transition from the square to the elongated part occurs there is a double moulding which is not alike on both sides (ib. 2). The square end is hollow to a depth of 5 cm., and two round holes are bored diagonally from the side with the more pronounced moulding as far as the roof of the cavity. Another hole is pierced diagonally from the top of the. rounded end to the upper part of the back. The back and sides are smoothed, and on them designs are scratched in summary fashion. On one side the forepart of a wild bull can be seen, on the other a stag; between them, on the upper part of the back surface, are two men in a light, two-wheeled chariot. It seems to be a hunting scene, and from the outline of the men's hair and beards the drawing might be dated in the Early Assyrian period. The chariot wheel seems to have eight spokes, and Professor Unger has pointed out that it is not until the time of Aššurnasirpal II that there are representations of Ghariots with eight-spoked wheels. But these rough sketches may have been added when the object had been long in use (Fig. 1). The front face is adorned with twenty sunken rectangles.

The inscribed clay tablets found by Mr. Mallowan at Tall Chagar Bazar in the season 1936 were scarcely expected, and therefore the more welcome. They were, indeed, both few and small, but happily they proved to be only an earnest of a larger discovery in the subsequent year. The study of these latter tablets will no doubt amplify and correct the few observations which can be made here upon the dozen of specimens at present available.

These belong to two quite different periods, as shown not only by their own characters, but by the circumstances of their finding, described by Mr. Mallowan above. The earlier period is here represented by one complete piece and a fragment.

During the season 1930–1 of the British Museum excavations at Nineveh, which were generously financed by Sir Charles Hyde, when Mr. R. W. Hamilton was assisting me, one of the tablets found was a letter to the king describing an earthquake and its results. Since this text is complete in itself, I am publishing it here separate from a forthcoming edition of a selection of the tablets which we found during the four seasons from 1927 onwards. It is written in Assyrian, and measures 1¼ × 2½ in., and it came from above the unburnt brick foundation of the Temple of Ishtar (6 ft. below datum level) not far from the great slab of Ashurnaṣirpal, of which the base was in situ.

The cuneiform tablet here edited belongs to the Museum of Natural History at Torquay, and I am greatly indebted to the Curator who has kindly submitted it to me for study and publication. Whence it comes is unfortunately unknown, but it seems to be of the same class as the large number of commercial documents from Nippur in middle Babylonia which now belong to the University of Pennsylvania and have been published in four volumes by the late Professor A. T. Clay. This suggestion is made especially probable by the Aramaic endorsement or summary of the Babylonian text which closely resembles those found on some of the tablets in that collection. It appears to be the only one of its class in England, so far as published collections go, since the tablets in the British Museum which bear Aramaic notes are Assyrian texts of the seventh century B.C.

Hundreds if not thousands of statuettes of the Hellenistic and Roman times of alabaster, clay, and bone have been found all over Babylonia in Graeco-Roman ruins and tombs and in many places in Middle-Mesopotamia, e.g. at Dura. They present a great interest not only from the artistic but also from the religious and mythological points of view. Those of clay have been collected and illustrated by Mrs. E. Douglas van Buren and all those found at Seleucia will soon be published and illustrated in a comprehensive study by Miss W. van Ingen of the University of Michigan. I have dealt with some of them repeatedly, especially from the point of view of the history of art.

In this short note I wanted to correct a mistake of mine regarding some of these statuettes and at the same time to draw the attention of fellow-students to one very curious variety occurring among them. I mean the statuettes which represent a human figure—without doubt a deity—in the squatting position so typical for the Orient in general.

The poem describes a battle waged, at the instigation of some unnamed goddess, by Ba'al, the god of the Rains, and his twin henchmen Kašir (‘Sir Adroit’) and Ḫasis (‘Sir Cunning’) against the gods of the sea and the rivers. The battle ends in the defeat and capture of the latter.

The interpretation of this text is really very simple. It mythologizes the natural rivalry between rain on the one hand and sea and river on the other as sources of irrigation at the end of the dry season.

In 1933 Professor B. Landsberger contributed to a volume in honour of the seventieth birthday of Freiherr M. von Oppenheim an article which placed in an entirely new light what had, until then, been considered an example, virtually unique, of a musical notation accompanying an Assyrian bilingual poem which related the culminating incident in the genesis of the world, the creation of mankind. He there demonstrated that the syllables accompanying the text, for the greater part meaning nothing and assumed to represent notes of music, occur also in other places, dissociated from the poem, and sometimes furnished with Akkadian translations of their significance, as though they represented the Sumerian column of an ordinary syllabary. Unwelcome as it may be to give up so attractive a notion, the musical explanation is hereby made almost impossible of acceptance; but this leaves us with the problem of finding a better one. In the article already quoted, Professor Landsberger, as well as pointing out other examples of this strange collection of syllables, studied their structure, the meanings assigned to some of the groups, and the use made of them in the regular series of syllabaries, but came to the conclusion that the compilation must be regarded as a work of ancient literary artifice, the method and purpose of which at present escape us. In particular, there is then question why this curious accompaniment stands beside the lines of a particular poem, and that not only in a single example (which might have been an individual freak) but in copies found both at Asshur and Nineveh. These are alike not only in the text and arrangement but in bearing colophons which allude expressly to the esoteric nature of their contents.

The Quyunjiq letter No. 81–2–4, 65 (Harper, Ass.-Bab. Letters, No. 473) has attracted no little comment from scholars, some of whom (Waterman, Royal Corresp. I, No. 473, III, 173; and Olmstead, Hist, of Assyria, 341) consider that it relates to what happened after the death of Sennacherib. It is, however, I venture to think, far from being properly understood; that it describes a rebellion is obvious, but I suggest from internal evidence that it may perhaps refer to the accession of Sargon, and that the cause of the revolt is contained in the piece of scandal alluded to by the writer that the king (whoever he may have been) had taken the wife of a prefect into his harem, which ultimately led to the upheaval.

Although Jildakī was one of the most prolific Muslim writers on alchemy, practically nothing is known of his life save that he flourished during the eighth century A.H., wrote at Cairo and Damascus, and was alive in Jumāda II, A.H. 743 (A.D. 1342). There is even some doubt about his name, for while Ḥājjī Ḫalīfa gives it as ‘Izz ad-Dīn Aidamir ibn ‘Alī ibn Aidamir al-Jildakī, a book ascribed to Jildakī and lithographed at Bombay in 1891 prefers the form ‘Alī ibn Muhammad Aidamir al-Jildakī, and the catalogue of the Khedivial (now Royal) Library at Cairo has ‘Alī ibn Aidamir ibn ‘Alī al-Jildakī. The last variation is almost certainly incorrect and probably arose through a confusion of Jildakī with an ‘All ibn Aidamir who died at Damascus in A.H. 762. E. Wiedemann, who included a section on Jildakī in his Zur Alchemie bet den Arabern, follows Brockelmann in adopting this erroneous form.

In the volume of the British Museum Catalogue of Greek Coins which deals with Arabia Sir George Hill published three copies of Athenian tetradrachms, two in base silver and one in bronze: in the Introduction he stated that these were ‘tentatively included as early examples of the Arabian imitations circulating in the northern part of the peninsula’. He did not, however, appear to regard the evidence in favour of their Arabian origin as strong, and the history of some similar copies which have been brought to notice since he wrote may justify a reconsideration of the question.

The discovery of the Precinct of Tanit at Carthage in 1921 and its subsequent excavation during the following years up to 1925 have already been described in reports published by the excavators. But these reports were short, and neither they nor an equally short paper by the present author published in 1927 can be said to have done justice to the well-stratified series of cinerary urns which the Precinct contained. These, of which two thousand or more were found during three seasons of excavations, extend as a series over the whole lifetime of the Punic city, from the eighth to the second century B.c., and form the most important single piece of documentary evidence we possess for the history of western Phoenician ceramics. It seems worth while, therefore, to provide here a fuller classification of the main types and fabrics than has been published elsewhere, and at the same time to explain in greater detail the stratigraphy of the site, and the reasons which led the excavators to claim the widest inclusive dates possible for this series of pottery.