The sixth season of excavations at Tell al Rimah took place from the middle of March to the end of May, 1971. The work was directed by the writer, assisted by Dr. Julian Reade (Assistant Director), Miss Nan Shaw (Conservator), Mrs. Carolyn Postgate (in charge of pottery), Miss Shereen Ratnagar (registrar), Mr. David Hawkins (epigraphist) and Mr. John Curtis (archaeologist) who also took charge of the metal objects. Sayid Sabah Abboud was the Representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities, and played a full and energetic part in the work of the expedition. I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the whole staff, and to Dr. Isa Salman, Director General of Antiquities, Professor Fuad Safar, Inspector General of Excavations, and all our other friends and colleagues in the Directorate General for the warm welcome and friendly cooperation which we have always received from them. We were especially pleased this year to receive visits from Professor and Mrs. Seton Lloyd, who stayed and worked with us for some days, and from Mrs. Diana Helbaek, Director of the British School. One other visitor to the site deserves special mention, Sayid Hassan Abdullah, who worked for us for many seasons at Nimrud, but who began his career in excavation under the late Professor Walter Andrae at Assur in the closing years of the last century. The excavations were sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, assisted by grants from the British Academy, the Musée Royal d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels, and an anonymous donor.

The Late Assyrian sculptures are somewhat difficult to use as a historical source. They are widely scattered, with the compositions split up, and modern studies have been mainly concerned with artistic developments or the material culture of the Assyrians. Those who are reasonably familiar with the subject-matter, moreover, are inclined to forget that what may seem self-evident to them is not necessarily so to others, and have tended to concentrate on the elucidation of specific points rather than on more general studies. The one major exception is the work of Billerbeck and Delitzsch on Shalmaneser's Balawat gates, and there are articles on the army by J. Hunger, and on large-scale figures by L. Heuzey, which remain of fundamental value, but it may be worth seeing what can be learnt from a new approach.

In this article, therefore, which is written for the benefit of non-specialists and necessarily incorporates much that is already known, I have attempted to isolate the principal categories of Assyrian shown in the sculptures and other official monuments. One should not press evidence of this nature too far, as the sculptures like the annals are propaganda and represent only what the rulers of Assyria wished us to remember; the subject-matter is also affected by stylistic considerations. There is nonetheless, at all times, a mass of information which must bear some positive relationship to the truth.

It may be said for most Mesopotamian excavations that information contained in cuneiform documents has not been fully used to give cultural elaboration to the bare outline derived from architecture, artefacts, etc. In the era of large expeditions, ending in the 1930's, texts would often be collected, turned over to an epigrapher, and published separately from the main archaeological report. Most often, the epigraphic volume would contain little or no information as to the find-spots of the texts. Likewise, tablets with dates would be, and still are being, published with the notation “seal impression” but without a drawing or photograph of the sealing, thus depriving archaeologists of precise means of determining style change, regional variations, etc. Economic texts and other mundane, relatively simple documents are routinely published in hand copy, sometimes transliterated, but almost never translated. In this way, many details of everyday life, reflecting economic and social systems, remain unavailable to the archaeologist or non-philologist who would find the information extremely interesting and useful. In short, once inscribed material is given over to the epigrapher, the archaeologist seldom refers to it again other than to date a particular level, or identify his site. Rarely are tablets studied by the archaeologist as the most valuable artefact in relation to other artefacts. Likewise, the epigrapher loses the valuable information on context in the interpretation of his texts.

In this article, I hope to demonstrate that much information can be derived by the archaeologist from texts even without detailed content analysis. He need know only the date, the subject or class, and the locus of tablets in order to have at hand an extremely useful tool to refine judgments made on the basis of pottery and other objects. Such information also allows checks to be made on archaeologically derived hypotheses dealing with the function of various parts of a site.

The cylinder and stamp seals published here belong to a collection bequeathed to the late R. W. Hutchinson by Olga Petrovna, Baroness da Maydell. She had bought them from various dealers both in the Middle East and in Europe, probably all between the two World Wars. Mr. Hutchinson invited me to publish some of those that came from Mesopotamia during historic times, and planned to publish the prehistoric stamp seals himself. The collection includes also Achaemenid, Sassanian, Egyptian, Cretan and prehistoric stamp seals which have not yet been published. Following his deeply regretted death in April 1970 the collection was bequeathed to Liverpool University, where it is in the care of the School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies, except for nos. 19 and 33 which he had given to me earlier. The Liverpool registration is given in parenthesis after the publication number.

The description “seals” does not exactly apply to nos. 26 and 33, which are “eye-beads” as described by Professor W. G. Lambert in the RA 63 (1969), 65–71. Measurements are given in millimetres, height × diameter of cylinders; the dimensions of stamp seals and eye-stones are stated in full.

1. (RWH 1.) Abstract pattern made with two sizes of drilled hole, in high relief. 17 × 18·5. Light grey baked (?) clay. Jemdet Nasr type.

2. (RWH 3.) Pattern of two doubly-enclosed eye-lozenges; the spaces above and below are rilled with short, deeply-cut lines; in high relief. 15 × 13. Pink felspar. Jemdet Nasr type.

From the earliest days of Assyriology, the neo-Assyrian deeds bearing Aramaic annotations have attracted interest for the light they throw on both of the languages involved. Since L. Delaporte compiled his Epigraphes araméens in 1912, containing thirty such texts, no more have been published. The same collection contains four pieces wholly in Aramaic and to these can be added the six from Assur published by M. Lidzbarski, Altaramäische Urkunden aus Assur (WVDOG 38), 1921, and five from Tell Halaf, published by J. Friedrich in Die Inschriften von Tell Halaf (AfO Beiheft 6 (1940)). An examination of the script of these epigraphs has been made by S. J. Liebermann, BASOR 192 (1968), 25–31. All of these texts, together with the dockets of the neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, have been collected in catalogue form recently by F. Vattioni, Augustinianum 10 (1970), 493–532. The purpose of the present paper is to make some more of these texts available.

The reports given below cover excavation work in Iraq for the year from June 1971 to May 1972; not included are sites where the work was largely or entirely restricted to restoration, such as Samarra, Aqar Quf, and Baghdad. The information on each site has been provided by the director of the excavations, unless otherwise specified, and the final version has been checked by him whenever possible. The sites are arranged in alphabetical order, and in some cases reference is made to their entry in Archaeological Sites in Iraq (published by the Directorate-General of Antiquities, Baghdad, 1970; abbreviated ASI).

The material for this report was assembled by Mr. J. N. Postgate, Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. The Editors are glad to acknowledge his efforts, and wish to express their gratitude to all those colleagues who have so willingly contributed information on their work, and especially to Dr. Isa Salman, the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, for his generous co-operation which alone has made the compilation possible.