The fragmentary obelisk of Ashurnasirpal II published here, in an entirely new reconstruction, was excavated at Nimrud by a British Museum expedition in late February 1853. The field director was Hormuzd Rassam, under the remote supervision of Henry Rawlinson in Baghdad. Since Rassam seldom receives proper credit for his Assyrian discoveries, which included the palace and much of the library of Ashurbanipal, the so-called White and Broken Obelisks, the Shamshi-Adad stela, the Balawat Gates, and much else, and since it is convenient to have succinct names for objects of this kind, I propose that this particular monument, which now bears the number 118800 in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum, should be known as the Rassam Obelisk. I am indebted to my colleagues in the British Museum for their comments on this paper, and to Miss Ann Searight for the drawings; the photographs were taken by the Museum's Photographic Service.

The Middle Assyrian Tablet BM 130660 adds new material to the latter part of Tablet 12 of Utukkū Lemnūtu, which is imperfectly known from NA and LB sources, mainly from Kuyunjik and Assur. The gaps in the previous publications can now be restored from the MA tablet, together with unpublished duplicates from Kuyunjik, Babylon, Borsippa, and Nimrud.

The bilingual MA tablet is of particular interest because, although in SB dialect, it differs substantially from the NA and LB copies of Tablet 12. Although many of the MA textual variants are purely orthographic, the following types of significant variants can be distinguished:

First, grammatical variants in the MA Akk. may affect the meaning of a passage, such as the MA use of lipparis in place of liprus in the parallel texts (1. 26′). In some cases the MA grammatical variant may indicate a corrupt text, or a misunderstanding of the Sum., as in 1. 30′, in which the MA Akk. reads, “may the wise judges, holy ones of Ištar(?), exclude him from the house”, whereas the NA/LB recension reads correctly, “may the great wise judge Ištar exclude him from the house”.

Hammurapi's Code of Laws says that a woman who lived in the Old Babylonian period brought a dowry with her from her father's house when she married. The laws specify that if the marriage failed, and she was not to blame, she kept her dowry for any subsequent marriage. If she died, her sons or (if she had none) her father's family, not her husband, inherited it. Some texts that list dowries of the Old Babylonian period, and texts of related or similar content, are edited and discussed here.

The range of possessions that belonged to women in those times can now be illustrated from these texts, and they also indicate some activities and interests of the women, who generally came from well-to-do families. Some hints of their personalities too emerge from their possessions: Bēlessunu daughter of Ibni-Amurru, and Ṭāb-Esagila the nadītum-priestess daughter of Marduk-muballiṭ both had plans for some comfortable upholstery or mattresses, and took with them a box of palm fibre; Bēlessunu was also a business woman with her own seal and her own set of weights. Bēletum the nadītum daughter of Riš-Nabium liked to entertain in style, and so took fifteen eating-bowls with her. Narūbtum the daughter of Ikūn-pî-Sin had an enormous wardrobe, consisting of no less than 24 garments and 42 headdresses, all carefully looked after in individual clothes-chests; she also had burial shrouds ready for her death, to keep up appearances even in the grave. Not all of them were fortunate enough to possess their own slaves or slavegirls. A letter from Sippar in the time of Hammurapi tells that it was difficult even for a nadītum priestess to acquire slaves. Narūbtum daughter of Ikūn-pî-Sin was fortunate in having nine slavegirls; most of the dowries list two or one or none.

In his report on the excavations at Ur, Woolley wrote: “Every woman's grave of the old cemetery seems originally to have contained cosmetics; such were an invariable part of the tomb furniture. The ordinary receptacle is a cockle-shell, or rather a pair of cockle-shells of which one is the receptacle proper and the other the lid … In all these were found remains of the actual cosmetics used, paints or powders now reduced to a hard paste: the colours are white, red, yellow, blue, green and black, of which green and black are the most common.”

A large number of these cosmetic shells are preserved in the collection of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities in the British Museum. They vary from small fragments to complete double shells filled with cosmetic, and it is consequently impossible to make an accurate estimate of their number or of the percentage occurrence of the various colours. However an approximate count supports Woolley's observation that green and black predominate; the other colours present are blue, red, white, yellow and purple.

The Ur report includes a short note by A. K. Graham on his analysis of two samples of cosmetics; these were simple chemical analyses to identify the elements present and some of his suggestions as to the way in which the elements were combined are not supported by recent X-ray diffraction analyses carried out at the Research Laboratory of the British Museum. The results presented in Table I were obtained from a small group of samples chosen to represent the whole range of colours; the X-ray diffraction analyses were, where necessary, complemented by X-ray fluorescence analysis and by optical microscopy.

The land of Kirruri, frequently mentioned by the Assyrians, is a key area for the understanding of Assyrian political geography, and has been the subject of a number of attempted identifications. Billerbeck placed it in the region centred on the pass of Kalishin, whilst Streck identified it with the plain west and southwest of lake Urmia, bounded by Ushnu, Urmia and Solduz. Consideration of the references to Kirruri in the light of more recent knowledge shows the impossibility of these areas for an identification, inasmuch as Kirruri was within (albeit only just within) the area of customary Assyrian control from the early ninth century, whereas the areas mentioned by Billerbeck and Streck were still not firmly in Assyrian control when Sargon II came to the throne in the late eighth century. Forrer placed Kirruri much nearer to metropolitan Assyria, siting it in the Harir plain (often known as the Dasht-i-Harir) north of Shaqlawa, although he did not give his arguments in detail. The question was re-examined by L. D. Levine, who accepted Forrer's siting as in the right area, but too limited in extent. More recently J. E. Reade, in a useful article, has returned inter alia to the question of the position of Kirruri, placing it in the area between Koi Sanjaq and Rania near to the Lesser Zab, adducing as the main specific evidence for this siting Tukulti-Ninurta II's campaign of 886 B.C.

The Neo-Assyrian stone vase BM 93088 (82–5–22, 300a) was briefly described in E. A. W. Budge's Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities (3rd ed., 1922), p. 196 no. 220. That description misleadingly suggests that the vessel is made of na4na-aḫ-bu-[x]; in fact the term referred to the vase itself as the full text of the inscription (Fig. 1) shows:

a-na-kuI.dsin-PAP.MEŠ-SU šar4kurAŠ na4na-aḫ-bu-[ṣ]u an-ni-u a-naIaš-šur-DINGIR.MU-TI.LA.[B]I ˹DUMU˺-[ia]

at-ti-din man-nu šá TA pa-ni-šú TA DUMU.MEŠ-šú DUMU.ME DUMU.ME-šú i-na-áš-šú-u-nidŠÁR šar4 DINGIR.MEŠ

˹a-di˺ DUMU.MEŠ-šú TI.LA li-ki-mu-šú-nu a-du ma-li-ke-e-šú MU-šú-nu NUMUN-šú-nu ina KUR lu-ḫal-li-qu

“I, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, have presented this naḫbuṣu to my son Aššur-ila'a-muballissu. Whoever takes it away from him, from his children (or) his grandchildren, may Aššur, king of the gods, take the life of his children (and) make the name (and) seed of his counsellors disappear from the land.”

With the curse-formula compare D. D. Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (OIP 2), 139, 68–72 and 147, 36–39 and 148, 27–29. The plural forms here are presumably the result of abbreviating a longer original. Note the use of the preposition adi/adu, “as for, concerning”, for which the current dictionaries give only Old Assyrian attestations.