The following article contains new material from the historical texts found at Nineveh during the excavations which I carried on with Messrs. Hutchinson, Hamilton, and Mallowan during the seasons 1927, 1929, 1930, 1931, on behalf of the British Museum. These were financed in the main by Sir Charles Hyde, Bt., but part of the remainder of the funds was provided from the bequest of Miss Gertrude Bell, from the Percy Sladen Fund, from my College, Merton, and from the Society of Antiquaries.

It will be remembered that, although our main excavations were carried on on the mound of Quyunjiq, during some part of the seasons 1927 and 1931 we worked on a small section (within the main, inner walls) on the flats in the fields below (Archaeologia, LXXIX, 1929, 103, and A.A.A. XX, 1933, 75, the latter reference giving its exact position). I was misled, I think, at first by finding here a brick which had come from the house built by Sennacherib for his son, and for this reason called the building ‘SH’ (Sennacherib's House), a term which, in order to avoid confusion, has been retained. From this collection of buildings came the perfect Esarhaddon prism published in P.E. and about 300 more pieces of prisms, some of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, but the majority of Ashurbanipal, of which I am now publishing here the most interesting (the majority of the rest being well-known duplicates). Besides these will be found herein (also from ‘SH’) a fragment of a syllabary (No. 39), three amulet texts (Nos. 38, 38a 41), and a small, almost meaningless note (No. 42). Why the Hittite texts (A.A.A. ibid., pl. CV) should have been stored here is a problem.

In 1926 Gadd, publishing the first considerable collection of tablets from Nuzi, came upon the phrase ana ilāni ana našê which, as he rightly saw, referred to ordeal by oath; accordingly he translated it ‘to make oath before the gods’, suggesting in a note that the verb was našū ‘to swear’, which he explained as a secondary formation from nīš ilim ‘an oath by God’.

This suggestion indeed makes good sense in Gadd's passage and elsewhere in these texts and is at first sight philologically plausible; but close examination shows it to be untenable on several grounds. Hitherto nīšu in nīš ilim has been explained as meaning literally ‘lifting up’, sc. of the hand in solemn asseveration, and hence metaphorically swearing (an oath)’ and so ‘oath’; but the Bab. nīšu is always represented in this phrase by the Sum. MU, which means not našū ‘to lift up’ but (i) nēšu ‘to live’ and (ii) zakāru ‘to declare, swear’ and so on, whence it seems that nīš ilim zakāru must originally have meant ‘to make mention of the life of the god’, that is ‘to swear by the life of the god’. Again, in Gadd's phrase našū often has both a direct and an indirect object, whether god or man; when either is a man, it is clear that the verb cannot denote swearing.