La fouille de Tell Haddad, locus II, pièce 30, a livré plusieurs fragments sumériens de Gilgameš. H 154 (Mt1) et H 157 (Mt2) donnent la fin de l'oeuvre que nous appellerons Gilgameš, Enkidu et les Enfers (GEE), mais dans une version qui présente une certaine originalité par rapport à celles que nous connaissions jusqu'à aujourd'hui.

On savait qu'il existait des versions divergentes. Les textes d'Ur le montraient déjà clairement, et A. Shaffer avait tenu compte de l'incompatibilité des sources en éditant à part U 16878 (= UET 6/1, 58). Les textes d'Ur aussi bien que ceux de Meturan posent le problème de la conclusion de l'oeuvre; ce problème mérite une étude que nous essayons d'ébaucher ici, avant de donner l'édition des textes.

The collection of the cuneiform documents in the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, was mainly acquired between 1903 and 1923 by Professors H. W. Hogg and Canon C. H. W. Johns; these texts form the nucleus of the collection. In addition, most of the six hundred tablets in the Rev. C. L. Bedale's private collection were presented to the Library by his wife in 1919, and six more by his son, Mr Paul Bedale, and daughter in 1979. Bedale described a number of his Umma tablets for a Library publication between 1901 and 1905. A selection of these texts was published by him in 1915.

Many of the Sumerian texts, in all 884 tablets, were catalogued and published by T. Fish in 1932. Further tablets, letters of Old Babylonian date, were studied and published by him in 1936. Other tablets were also published by Fish, in Manchester Cuneiform Studies and elsewhere. More Old Babylonian tablets were studied by the late Douglas Kennedy, some of which were given numbers following on from those published by Fish. F. R. Kraus's edition of the Library's Old Babylonian letters, which appeared in 1985, included these as well as Fish's letters, and a few more unpublished letters that had not been assigned numbers in the Library's running sequence. In 1973 Claus Wilcke published most of the Sumerian literary texts, and J. N. Postgate published three of the Assyrian tablets. At that time these were also without JRL numbers.

The late Peter Hulin devoted much of his scholarly life to the study of the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria (859–824 BC). He copied and studied a number of texts of this monarch excavated at Nimrud. Among them, the inscriptions on the throne base (ND 11000) were published in 1963. Unfortunately, however, his death in 1993 prevented him from publishing the further fruits of his effort.

After Hulin's death his file of Shalmaneser III texts was placed at the disposal of Professor A. K. Grayson for use in his third volume of the series Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods: Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858–745 BC), Toronto, 1996 (RIMA 3). Thus Hulin's study of several new texts from Nimrud, as well as some others, was effectively utilized and incorporated in RIMA 3, with full respect being paid to his contribution.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement RIMA 3 by publishing Hulin's hand copies of Shalmaneser texts found among his papers in a publishable state, together with several photographs, and to add some philological notes on them. Among Hulin's copies, those of the lengthy texts on the large stone tablet ND 6237 (below, No. 1) and on the broken statue N D 5500 (below, No. 2) are of primary importance. These texts were originally assigned to Hulin by Professors M. E. L. Mallowan and D. J. Wiseman for publication in the journal Iraq. His copies were entrusted to Dr Jeremy Black of the Oriental Institute, Oxford University, by Mrs Mary Hulin and are gratefully used in this publication by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

The article of Manitius published in 1910 has never really been superseded: that is because it was based on the Assyrian royal inscriptions, which were well understood at the time and to which there have been few major additions (and those principally from before the reign of Assur-naṣirapli II). With new texts from Nimrud and new editions from Helsinki of the Kouyunjik archives, the time is overdue for a reassessment of the textual evidence for the composition of the Neo-Assyrian army. In any case Manitius only covered some aspects of military organization and he himself wrote that he hoped to publish a work which “would present the development of the whole military world of the Assyrians, exploiting the entire available material in literature and sculpture”. No doubt the Great War foiled these plans, and indeed there is still no comprehensive study of the Assyrian army which pulls together the evidence from both the texts and the reliefs. Two recent books on the Assyrian army have no illustrations (Malbran-Labat 1982; Mayer 1995). Yet the palace reliefs are an inexhaustibly rich mine of information which is always susceptible of further interpretation. The most important initiative in exploiting this resource and achieving Manitius's goal has been Reade's article of 1972, but the textual sources have improved significantly since then. This present article is thus a partial and belated response to his plea of a quarter of a century ago that “the epigraphists who are at present rewriting and re-interpreting” the administrative documents “will bear the evidence of the sculptures in mind” (p. 108).

Among texts dating from the reign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (705–681 BC) are descriptions of a courtyard built on the king's behalf for the temple of Assur in the city of Assur. The texts note the names and orientations of the courtyard's gates, and mention the mythical figures that were included in its decoration. In this paper I will argue that an overall theme governed the choice of names and influenced the selection of mythical figures. The theme, as we shall see, was chosen to provide the temple's god, enthroned in his chamber, with a cosmic setting proper to his dignity as chief Assyrian divinity, and to refer in particular to Assur's leadership in the assembly of the gods in springtime.

Babylon has been associated with incantation bowls since the first discoveries in the mid-nineteenth century. The “Rawlinson” collection of eight incantation bowls (seven were written in Aramaic and one in Mandaic) was accessioned on 9 October 1851 by the British Museum and, according to Trustees Minutes, had been “found in a tomb at Babylon”. Austin Henry Layard does not seem to have been privy to this provenance information when three of these incantation bowls were transcribed and translated in his book, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. Instead he claimed that the bowls from the “Rawlinson” collection were “obtained at Baghdad, where they are sometimes offered for sale by the Arabs; but it is not known from what sites they were brought.” This misinformation has been perpetuated and no further information has come to light on the unusual findspot.

Amongst the vast collections of the Iraq Museum are numerous incantation bowls from Babylon, to which IM 9726 can now be added (Fig. 1). The entry in the Register of the Iraq Museum, dated 1927/1928, is scant, not even mentioning the script of the bowl: “Bowl with Incantation Text. Baked clay 12.5 × 6.5 [cm]. Presented by Mey Marian”. Thirteen years later, Cyrus Gordon included IM 9726 in his resumé of international collections of incantation bowls that appeared in the 1941 issue of Orientalia. It was one of the eleven incantation bowls Gordon recorded from the Iraq Museum collection, which he noted “has increased considerably since my last visit to Baghdad in 1935” and which he correctly predicted “should eventually become the largest and the best”. However, Gordon, who noted that IM 9726 had nine lines of Aramaic, only presented excerpts of its text. He did not supply any photograph or drawing of this incantation bowl nor any other information.

Among the spectacular finds Sir Leonard Woolley reported from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, the head-dress and “diadem” found in Puabi's tomb are among the best known. Parts of these items look like plants, and many plants had symbolic value to the ancient Sumerians in addition to their practical importance for food, fodder, fuel and all manner of material culture. Insofar as the Ur ornaments refer to real plants, it is therefore important to know what those plants are.

Plant classifications at the level of genus (e.g., oak [Quercus], rose [Rosa], date [Phoenix]) are frequently consistent cross-culturally, which suggests that the way humans process sense data from the natural world is similar, and that the features of plants salient for identification and classification have both a reality in nature and a reality in human perception. That is why we can even hope to recognize stylized and abstracted versions of plants and animals created by people of different times and places, such as those of ancient Sumer. Meaning, being culturally constructed, cannot be dealt with so simply; for example, we may accurately identify the horse depicted in Lascaux, but not know why it was painted. Fortunately, our database for ancient Mesopotamia is so rich archaeologically and textually that we can reasonably try to interpret a representation once we have identified it.

The new exhibit mounted by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, “Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur”, and publication of the associated catalogue prompted the current reconsideration of the material. Detailed justification for previous identifications and new identifications for some of the plants represented in the ornaments from the Royal Cemetery are presented.

Traditional views on the development of rotary motion were outlined by Childe (1954). He envisaged a progressive development of a concept that had originated in prehistoric times. Thus, perforated artefacts composed of shell and soft stone from Upper Palaeolithic levels yielded the earliest evidence for hand-held drills (Semenov 1964: 74–8). At least seven thousand years later, during the second half of the fourth millennium, potters in several parts of the Near East, including southern Mesopotamia, made first use of rotary motion (Rice 1987: 12, 132–5). Pictographic signs inscribed on Mesopotamian tablets suggest that the first use of wheeled vehicles was also made at about this time (Piggott 1983: 38) and, for the past twenty five years, it has been thought that the introduction of the lapidary engraving wheel coincided approximately with these two other innovations (for example, see Nissen 1977: 16; Gwinnett and Gorelick 1979: 25–7; Collon 1986: 13–14). However, our recent observations on engraved cylinder seals suggest that the date of the first use of the lapidary wheel should be revised.

The fine intaglios of stone cylinder seals preserve detailed evidence for the lapidary technology of Mesopotamia and the surrounding areas of the Near East. A comparative study by the authors of the engraved features on these seals (Sax and Meeks 1995, see also 1994) and those produced experimentally (Sax et al. 1998) has shown that it is possible to identify the methods used to engrave the seals. The various techniques, tools and abrasive materials can usually be recognized from the characteristic morphology or “tool-marks” of engraved features.

The excavations carried out during the 1926–7 and 1930–1 seasons at Ur by C. L. Woolley brought to light two large sectors (AH and EM) of the Old Babylonian city characterized by private dwellings dating from the Larsa domination but partly re-used until the Kassite period after the destruction of the city by King Samsu-iluna of Babylon, in the eleventh year of his reign (1729 BC) (Woolley 1955: 163–94; Woolley and Mallowan 1976; see also Pinnock 1995: 101–11). These sectors offer important documentation about daily life in lower Mesopotamia at the beginning of the second millennium BC and meaningful data concerning architecture and urbanism in the Middle Bronze Age, as well as hundreds of cuneiform tablets discovered in the archives of private citizens. The presence of several graves below the floors and in particular the existence of corbel-vaulted family tombs in baked brick, built with sophisticated technique beneath what seem to be domestic chapels (Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 29–30, 33–9, Pls. 43–8), usually placed at the back of the houses, led Woolley to identify cultic activities linked to ancestors, suggesting close kinship between the persons living in a house and the dead buried beneath it. In spite of the criticism raised by M.-Th. Barrelet a few years after the publication of the final report, it seems very probable that Woolley's hypothesis is correct, as confirmed at other Mesopotamian sites (e.g. the tombs related to private residences found at Larsa; see Calvet 1996).

The purpose of this paper is to give a brief survey of the representations of camels in the Assyrian bas-reliefs of the first millennium BC. The available evidence consists of actual sculptures in museum collections and also of original drawings made by the excavators, who did not bring back all the reliefs they found, but did make drawings to record many of those now still in the soil. The British Museum holds the drawings made by Austen Henry Layard and draughtsmen working under him at Nineveh and Kalḫu (Nimrud). These, conventionally referred to as Or.Dr. (Original Drawings), are mounted in seven bound volumes in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, and copies made from a selection of these were published in Layard, Monuments I [steel engravings] and II [lithographs]. The appropriate drawings have been published, together with those actual reliefs which were removed from the sites and which match them, in the volumes by R. D. Barnett and his collaborators on the sculptures of Tiglath-pileser III, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. The appropriate references to these volumes are given in the entries below. Drawings made by Eugène Flandin of the sculptures of Sargon found at Khorsabad are kept in a bound volume in the Département des Antiquités Orientales in the Louvre, and have been published in Albenda, Sargon. Steel engravings taken from these were published in Botta and Flandin, Monument. Photographs of the actual reliefs from Khorsabad dispersed in different museums, which have appeared in various publications, are republished in the volume by Albenda.

When Alexander the Great was a boy in the 340s, entertaining Persian ambassadors at his father's court, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Mysteries of the Orient, not yet a Wonder of the World but the kind of thing about which he might have been expected to enquire. Instead, according to Plutarch (Moralia 342B), he asked about roads and the military organization of the Persian empire. Plutarch was writing in the first or second century AD, but maybe the story is true. We all know how Alexander used such information; it carried him to Babylon and his death.

According to Greco-Roman writers, the gardens were located at Babylon (Fig. 1) on a high structure in or beside a palace. They were the gift of one of the kings of Babylon to his Median or Persian wife Amyitis, who was homesick for mountain scenery. No remains of any such structure have yet been confidently identified at Babylon. We are free to speculate on their location, since brick-robbing continued at Babylon for thousands of years and removed all but the foundations of many major buildings.

Some nineteenth-century travellers liked to see a relic of the gardens in a solitary evergreen tree which grew near the summit of the Kasr mound, close to its north-eastern corner (Figs. 2 and 12). In 1765, as Niebuhr recounts (1774–8: 289), there had been more than one such tree here and there among the ruins, and the species was different from any that he had observed between Kerbela and the Gulf. Niebuhr already remarked on the great age of these trees.

In this paper I intend to use the Heracles figure, a prime example of the application of Graeco-Roman imagery to the ever-varying process of expressing Near Eastern forms of religion in the Roman period, to illustrate and guide a brief discourse on the methodological problems concerning the approach to a religious world which was more heterogeneous than is sometimes thought. Iconographic representations of a male figure with club and lion's skin as his main attributes are widespread in the Near East, and indeed far beyond, in the Roman period. In what follows I will concentrate on the place and functioning of this so-called Heracles figure within the context of the religious life of Palmyra and Hatra, two desert cities which, each in their own distinctive way, present examples of a complex religious system in which different elements coexisted and might have influenced each other. Evidence from elsewhere in the Near East that may contribute to our perception of the variety of values which a Heracles figure could embody for different groups of worshippers will also be taken into account.

With regard to the places on which I am focusing, I prefer to refer to the figure with club and lion's skin not as “Heracles” but as the “Heracles figure”, because neither at Palmyra nor at Hatra is that figure ever called by his Greek name in accompanying inscriptions. What the evidence does reveal, though, is that the Heracles figure enjoyed great popularity (especially at Hatra) and was clearly conceived of as deeply rooted in the divine world of both places. As we will see below, it is possible, although not “proven”, that both in Palmyra and in Hatra the Heracles figure was identified with Nergal, a deity with certain chthonian aspects from the Mesopotamian divine world. Nevertheless, the identifications are problematic, and one ought to attend to the names and epithets actually given by worshippers.