Twenty-two years ago, on joining the Nimrud expedition for part of the 1952 season, I had the unforgettable privilege on arrival of being shown round the excavations by the Director, Max Mallowan. He had the gift of making every chamber of the Burnt Palace, every fragment of ivory, every slab and every sculpture, breathe with life as though there had been drawn back the curtain of two and a half millennia which separated us from the vitality and bustle of Calah when it was the capital of Assyrian kings.

Within a few days of my arrival the main archive of Nimrud Letters began to appear. When C. J. Gadd, the expedition epigraphist, with characteristic generosity waived his claim to publication of these letters, Max Mallowan did me the honour of inviting me to deal with them. Thus, whilst the present article constitutes my formal tribute to Sir Max Mallowan on his 70th birthday, my previous publications of Nimrud Letters and those yet to come are no less a testimony of my debt, and my gratitude, to a great Assyriologist.

The military achievements of Assyria so flamboyantly proclaimed in the royal annals would have had no enduring success had they not been followed up and supported at every step by the work of the Assyrian bureaucracy. This must not be taken to imply an essential dichotomy between the military arm and the Civil Service: indeed, military activities and civil administration were often aspects of a single continuing operation, and the same officials could be involved in both. Prisoners needed to be moved, fed, housed, and settled; whilst within subjugated territories it was a matter of importance to Assyria no less than to the subject populations to produce conditions in which the economic activities of the area—its agriculture or lumbering or horse-breeding or metallurgy—could return to normal as soon as possible.