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.

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.

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 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).