The bronzes illustrated on Plates XXXVII, XXXVIII, 1, 2, and XXXIX, 4 are all unstratified and the provenance of only one of the daggers is known. This is illustrated on Plate XXXVII, 1 and comes from a site above Lahijan in the Elburz mountains east of Resht. It was presented to the Institute of Archaeology by Mrs. Iris Ainley. The dagger is 35 cms. long and the lunate pommel measures 5·9 cms. in width. Plate XXXVIII, 4 is in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (No. 422.991), and is published here by courtesy of the Associate Curator, Mr. G. W. Van Beek. It measures 38·4 cms. in length and the pommel is 4·1 cms. in width. Both the daggers (Plates XXXVII, 1 and XXXVIII, 4) show the distinctive features which relate them to daggers from the region of the Talish, where tombs excavated in both the Russian and Persian areas by De Morgan in 1890 and 1901 have yielded many comparable examples. Plate XXXVIII, 4 can be compared to my type 43 (Iraq VIII, 1946, Pt. 1, Pl. V, 43). This type cannot be included among the common types of Talish bronze dagger, but a dagger from Hiveri, published by De Morgan, has a solid hilt with three circular ribs and the type example from Veri, with one rib round the solid hilt are both comparable. A dagger from Luristan with hilt similar to the Veri example is also published by Godard, and again the skeuomorphic moulding representing the thong which bound hilt and blade together on earlier blades is visible. But, as Schaeffer has pointed out, the cemetery at Veri must have lasted for a considerable period. Most of the tombs can be assigned to his “Talish récent II” c. 1450–1350 B.C. (dated by analogy with comparable material in tombs at Hassan Zamini and Agha Evlar which contained seals of Kirkuk style) but there is an earlier group contemporary with Khodja Daoud Köpru (Talish récent I c. 1550–1450 B.C.) in which the swords are all narrow rapiers with tangs.

In the issue of this journal for Autumn, 1956, I published under the title ‘Two medical texts from Nimrud’ a fragment from the Nābû temple library which had been excavated the previous year. The piece is numbered ND. 4358, and in the issue referred to it was described as follows: ‘This text is a catalogue, perhaps sufficiently important to be called the “Nimrud Catalogue”, of a series “sa-gig”. The series in question we have not yet learnt to call by this name, but it is otherwise well known as enūma ana bīt mar marṣi āšīpu illaku.’ As to its physical description, it was stated that the fragment was ‘the lower half of a single-column tablet, obverse and reverse thus providing a continuous text which must represent about half the original.’

It is the purpose of the present communication to announce that the missing portion of the tablet has been identified.

The new piece is ND. 4366. It came to my notice through a copy made by D. J. Wiseman at Baghdad towards the end of 1959, and I am grateful for Wiseman's generous consent that I should edit the text in this publication. The text was collated by me in the course of a personal visit to Baghdad in the Spring of 1961, and I was then able to confirm my suspicion that it in fact physically joined ND. 4358. There is some loss of material at the join and down the left edge, and the quality of the surface rapidly deteriorates as the end of the reverse is reached, but every line of the tablet is now represented in some part at least. The copy will be included in Wiseman's forthcoming volume of texts from the Nābû temple library, and thus in the present edition the text is conveyed in transliteration only.

The craving for divine protection is so deeply inherent in human nature that a primitive society cannot long exist without creating for itself a god or gods, to whom are attributed the powers necessary for the preservation of mankind. Most of the great divine beings of the Babylonian pantheon were originally gods of the city-states, whose functions were multiplied according to the needs of their worshippers, until they became strongly marked personalities with very definite powers.

Secondary gods were much less clearly envisaged, and were often so nebulous that their characters sometimes changed completely in the course of ages, so that they became totally different from what they were primarily conceived to be. A god who was originally a mere phantom might, for political or other special reasons, acquire a position of some prominence, only to sink back again into the ranks when the particular circumstances which had called him forth ceased to exist.

As is well known, al-Fārābī formulated his political philosophy on more than one occasion. The most comprehensive statements of his political views are to be found in two texts which engaged the attention of the German orientalist Dieterici and whose Arabic titles may conveniently be rendered the Ideal State and the Political Philosophy. It is apparently these two works which are mentioned together in terms of the highest praise by the Qāḍī Ṣā'id of Toledo (died 462/1070). The general position developed in both works is the same, but the relation between them remains quite obscure. As certain topics receive greater development in the Political Philosophy it is natural to think of it as later in date than the Ideal State, which is said to have been begun at Baghdad in 330/941 and completed at Damascus in the following year. If this is correct, the Political Philosophy, like Plato's Laws, was produced in the last years of its author's lifetime. (Al-Fārābī died in 339/950.)

Coins of the Kākwayhid dynasty, whose princes ruled over a part of al-Jibāl (north central Persia) in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, are of sufficient rarity to warrant their publication whenever they come to the attention of students of Persian history. The period between the collapse of the Buwayhid power and the rise of the Seljūqs is a complex one and as ‘Alā’ al-Dawlah, the Kākwayhid, played a not unimportant role in the political events of the time, his coinage is of considerable interest. While making a study of the Muḥammad an collections in the American Numismatic Society in New York I came across seven Kākwayhid specimens, all of them unedited, and these, together with two likewise unpublished coins in my own possession and one formerly in the collection of Professor Ernst Herzfeld, I propose to describe in the present paper. As previous notices of the Kākwayhid coinage are scattered in the wide numismatic literature, I have thought it worth while to assemble, as an appendix to the descriptions of these ten new specimens, all the known issues of the two Kākwayhid rulers who (to our present knowledge) struck coins: ‘Alā’ al-Dawlah Muḥammad b Dushmanzār and his an Farāmare.

Each season of excavations at Tell al-Hiba confirms Jacobsen's proposed identification first made in 1953 that Tell al-Hiba rather than Telloh, as formerly believed, is the site of ancient Lagash.

During the first two seasons of the excavations in 1968–69 and in 1970–71, no less than fourteen foundation stones identifying the temple oval in which they were found as the Ibgal of Inann a were unearthed. Nine of the stones were accompanied by inscribed copper foundation figurines,figurines which represented Šulutula, the personal deity of Enannatum I, the builder of at least Level I of the Ibgal. As Hansen has indicated, however, in a wadi a mile to the north of the Ibgal fragmentary cones stating that Enannatu m was the builder of the Ibgal have been recovered. In addition it may be well to say that no such cones have been found within the extensive area of the Ibgal which has been excavated. Why this is the case is not yet known. The foundation stones and the companion figurines found in situ are, however, solid evidence that the physical location of one of the temples mentioned in the texts as being located in Lagash has been ascertained.

This paper is concerned with a distinctive type of axe-head, examples of which have been found at Chagar Bazar and Nimrud (Pl. VII and Figs. 1–2). Both have four horizontal ribs encircling the socket and a rectangular-shaped projection at the base of the blade. The Chagar Bazar specimen comes from a level I grave, to which Sir Max Mallowan assigned outside limits of c. 1750–1600 B.C. He concluded, however, that the axe-head was unlikely to be much later than 1700 B.C. (Mallowan 1947, Pls. XLI: 1, LV: 15, pp. 187–8, 218). The same date was assumed for the Nimrud axe, which, although not from the same mould as suggested by Sir Max, is certainly very similar and is probably a product of the same workshop. Indeed, they are so close there can be very little difference in date between them. Subsequent writers on axe-heads have generally followed Sir Max's dating (Maxwell-Hyslop 1949, 107; Deshayes 1960, I, 188; Erkanal 1977, 16). Sir Max found confirmation for the early date of these axes in “an almost identical axe” found in level Ib at Kültepe (Mallowan 1956, 20–21; 1966, I, 346–7, n. 36), and thus belonging to the first half of the eighteenth century B.C. The Kültepe axe (Fig. 3:1; Özgüç, T. 1955, 69–70, Figs. 40a, 42) does in fact belong to a small group of Anatolian axe-heads that have been conveniently collected together by Erkanal (1977, Pl. 5, nos. 57, 59–61).

During October and November 1977 a third season of work at Abu Salabikh was undertaken by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. On this occasion we remained at the site for less than two months, partly because we had planned to do less excavation so as to concentrate on the study of materials from the previous seasons, and partly to enable the expedition to move up to the area of the Hamrin dam, where we had a pressing invitation from the State Antiquities Organization to join in rescue excavations. Despite the short season at Abu Salabikh we were able to achieve most of our objectives, and in fact it proved necessary to undertake some minor rescue excavations of our own because of urgent irrigation drainage works close to the site. This year we were happy to welcome once more Sd. Abdul-Mejid Muhammad with Sd. Muhammad Yahya as our representatives, and are as ever grateful to them for their unfailing kindness and ready assistance. Our thanks go also to Dr. Muayad Sa‘id, Director General of Antiquities and all of the Organization's officials who helped to smooth our paths. In particular, though, we must pay tribute to the late Prof. Fuad Safar: as Director of Excavations he took the most active interest in our work, and he was especially enthusiastic about the new light it might throw on the Early Dynastic I period. So often in the past it has been his penetrating comments that led us to new approaches and objectives, and we all feel that archaeological research in Iraq can never be the same again without him.

Through the recent publication (1942) of the excellent official Guide to the Iraq Museum there has come to notice a fragment of Assyrian bas-relief which is of interest in several points. This is numbered IM.31065, and is illustrated in the aforesaid Guide by Fig. 105, p. 125. The re-publication offered here (Plate V) is from a good photograph very kindly furnished by the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, together with permission to make this use of it. For both of these favours I wish to express sincere gratitude.

Hardly more than the first glance is needed to suggest a context for the fragment; it recalls at once the tents and domestic activities in the Assyrian camp shown upon the well-known scene now (or formerly) in the National Museums, Berlin, numbered VA. 965. The connexion is very close—the curved defensive wall and bastions which surround the camp have only to be continued on VA (the Berlin fragment) in the downward direction in order to coincide with the upturned line which continues in IM (the Baghdad fragment) up to a horizontal fillet dividing the registers of the slab.

The dominant feature of the walled town, now identified as Karana, is the temple ziggurat mound which rises prominently at the centre. In this paper we are concerned only with the phases of the principal temple in the second millennium. Suffice it to note that a small Neo-Assyrian temple dated to Adad-nirari III was placed later in the north-west angle formed by the earlier temple and ziggurat.

The great temple of Karana was entirely symmetrical in plan, and attached to a rectangular ziggurat on the east axis. The approach to the ante-chamber and cella was via a courtyard with surrounding rooms. Construction of temple and ziggurat was executed in mud-brick with an elaborate architectural decoration of multi-formed columns and pilasters across the façade of the ante-chamber and surrounding the courtyard. The principal phases of building activity are the Old Assyrian c. 1800 B.C., the Nuzi period after 1600 B.C., and the Middle Assyrian after 1400 B.C.

The additional decoration of major importance which concerns us in this essay consists of four carved stone members associated directly with the functioning of the ante-chamber door. One further piece to be considered with this group is a carved stone orthostat of a winged demon, which we date on stylistic grounds to the Old Assyrian period. It is discernible immediately to the trained eye that the five pieces fall into two groups: the earlier or Old Assyrian consists of Humbaba I, the Lady between Palms, and the Winged Demon; the later group, presumably executed by sculptors of the Nuzi period, consists of Humbaba II and the Bull-man between Palms. Additional evidence comes from the various find spots. It should be emphasized that although two of the stone blocks were excavated in situ, not one of the five reliefs occurred in original context.

Many of the scenes on cylinders are evidently renderings of myths, but great uncertainty prevails as to their interpretation. This is partly due to the incompleteness of our knowledge of the contemporary literature and partly to our inability to grasp the allusions which must have been clear to the clients of the seal-cutters. Apart, however, from these inevitable handicaps, attempts at interpretation have suffered from a singular lack of method. For if it is true that our only hope of utilizing the information of the seals lies in a comparison of their scenes with the texts, it should be equally obvious that a haphazard interpretation of isolated scenes remains necessarily guess-work. If, for instance, a vanquished god is called ‘Kingu’ or a two-faced figure ‘Marduk’, such identifications do not carry conviction as long as we do not know precisely in which scenes these figures appear, which versions of each scene are extant, and what bearing the variants of any one scene have upon its interpretation. But, as is so often the case, the archaeological material has been denied the methodical treatment given, as a matter of course, to every text.

It is the purpose of this article to gather from a variety of places and publications the examples (known to me) of a particular form of game-board which was in use, at widely different periods, over a very large area of the ancient East, and to point out one historical fact which seems to have a clear connexion with it.

The game in question is that which has been called, for want of any other name, the Game of Fifty-eight Holes. In all cases but one the only requisites of the game which have survived are the boards upon which it was played, and these show in general a striking resemblance, not only in the arrangement of the holes, but in the shape of the whole object, which is roughly rectangular, but has one of the short sides straight while all of the other sides are curved, the long ones concave, the remaining short one convex. Despite individual variations this general form is common to all but a very few of the examples; it has been aptly compared with an axe-blade. As to the holes, there is always a line of these following the edges of the board and two straight lines down the middle. Occasionally the middle displays some pictorial device, a palm-tree, or a pair of eyes, so contrived that it marks out the end (?), or winning-point, of the game; but this feature is rare. The holes are arranged in groups so that, in all but one particular area, four ordinary holes occur between special holes which are always distinguished either by a mark, an inlay, or the end of certain lines connecting them with other holes of the same kind. In the middle of the curved short side is always a central hole of the special kind, generally marked in the same way as the others, but occasionally made larger, or even signalized by a sign of its own. In the particular area referred to, which is on the middle lines towards the straight end of the board, there is always a pair of groups of three special holes with only one ordinary hole dividing them.

We may want to recognise an “Akkadian period” in archaeology for two reasons. A sequence of periods is used as a system of chronological reference, and the Akkadian period conventionally represents the time from 2334–2154 BC (Walker 1995, 234). Periods are also used to define fields of analysis in which studies of social structure or other synchronic investigations may be conducted. The Akkadian period is known as the “first empire” which saw major political and administrative innovations. In archaeology periods have to be defined from the changes in artefact types, so a concordance is needed between the historical and artefactual phases. During the last thirty years McG. Gibson has persistently addressed questions of chronology, and has made an especially important contribution to the chronology of the Akkadian period. A new article (Gibson and McMahon 1995) represents the present state of this issue, based on excavations in the Diyala and Hamrin regions, and in the vicinity of Nippur. Dr McMahon has subjected thousands of sherds from stratified occupation surfaces to statistical analysis, and publication of their distribution and comparanda is expected. The resulting pottery sequence, exhaustively constructed, and summarised in that article, will constitute the principal reference sequence for archaeological sites of this period in southern Iraq. In this article, while accepting the validity and importance of this achievement, I will examine how the Akkadian period should be defined and how pottery sequences should be calibrated with respect to historical periods. I will suggest that the Akkadian pottery should be calibrated by ultimate reference to the glyptic sequence, and that this results in a different dating for the strata in question.

This text, on a small white limestone tablet found at the Nergal Gate of Nineveh in 1992–3, concerns work on the Akītu (New Year's) house. There is a longer text of Sennacherib that concerns the building of an Akītu house outside the walls of Aššur. Most of the preserved obverse of the text published here has the titles and epithets of the king (obv. 1–13). Then the text begins to narrate work on the Akītu house just before it breaks off (obv. 14–15).

The preserved portion of the reverse seems to refer to the Nergal Gate (rev. 2′) and then describes in general terms the annual celebrations in the Akītu house. The text concludes with a date (690 BC).

The “Lion-demon” (Akk. ugallu, “Big Weather-beast”) is a human-bodied creature with a lion's head, donkey's ears and human feet or, more usually, the talons of a bird (Plate XIa). With variations on this form beginning in the Akkadian period, the figure is known from Old Babylonian down through Kassite, Late Assyrian, Late Babylonian and into Achaemenid times. Since the completion of a corpus of material depicting the figure in the art of Mesopotamia and the Near East (Green 1986), I have obtained photographs of two seals dating from the virtual chronological limits of the type's depiction in Mesopotamia, one Old Babylonian, the other Late Babylonian. A fuller supplement to the work, with additional and formerly restricted material, will appear eventually, but in the meantime, as these two particular seals were included in this catalogue, as nos. 41 and 144, but with somewhat incorrect descriptions (pp. 181, 229) based upon the line-drawings of their earlier publication (reproduced ibid., Pls. 8 and 38), it seems desirable, in the interests of an early corrective, to present here these photographs (Plate XIb and c) and some brief comments, as promised in the postscript to the catalogue-article (p. 254). I have to thank Dr. J. P. A. van der Vin of the Royal Coin Cabinet, The Hague, for the photographs and for permission to publish them, and, in the year of her eightieth birthday, I offer this short piece especially to Lady Mallowan, whose interests in Mesopotamian magic and iconography are well known.

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 Babylonian poem šar gimir dadmē (perhaps best entitled in English “Išum and Erra”) has been available to scholars in its hitherto most complete form since 1969 in the admirable edition of L. Cagni. Now excavations conducted by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage at Me-Turnat (modern Tell Haddad) have produced a first-millennium tablet in Babylonian script from the Neo-Assyrian Period occupation of the site, giving the text of tablet II of the composition. Previously the second tablet could be reconstructed as three separate broken passages (totalling 112 lines) with two lacunae. The new tablet, IM 121299 (TH 319), restores the first lacuna (four lines in length), completes some broken lines and restores part of the second lacuna (at least 29 lines), establishing altogether about 45 new lines of the text, some admittedly only to a very fragmentary degree. The whole tablet must be at least 159 lines long. Unfortunately the Me-Turnat tablet is damaged, and is rather poorly written by an apprentice scribe who has made a number of evident mistakes and incorrectly formed signs. Nonetheless the text of the poem is substantially increased by it. For a photograph, see Plate XX.

This article examines UET 6/2, 414, the Old Babylonian dialogue between a fuller and a client, commonly referred to as “At the Cleaners”, from the point of view of ancient technology. Drawing upon a wide range of Talmudic and Classical sources mentioning laundry, and based on a careful philological reading of the Akkadian text, this study offers a new understanding of the different stages of washing and treatment of luxury garments in the Old Babylonian period. It is argued that the possible humorous aspect of the text is irrelevant to the fact that UET 6/2, 414 is a unique composition in antiquity, offering a long and accurate sequence of laundry instructions. Washing procedures and ways of treating luxury garments in Mesopotamia are outlined step by step; new Akkadian terms pertaining to garments and clothing are presented; wages of laundry workers in ancient Mesopotamia are briefly discussed. The study concludes with a new edition and translation of UET 6/2, 414.

Recent studies of cultural interaction in the Assyrian empire have focused on the process of assimilation and the production of alterity. In this article, I argue that Assyrian royal rhetoric goes beyond emphasizing simple difference, instead using depictions of cultural diversity to demonstrate the truly universal nature of the empire. I elucidate this rhetoric by comparison the world fairs of the 19th and early 20th-centuries. These fairs advanced European imperialism by allowing visitors to explore the vast extent of empire. I argue that the enumeration of exotic tribute in Assyrian texts and the iconographic depiction of foreigners on reliefs similarly served to concretize Assyrian power. Unlike modern European empires, however, Assyrians did not consider ethnicity to be constitutive of citizenship. Thus, while the Assyrian approach to diversity was certainly instrumentalizing, it was also inclusive of cultural difference. In this respect, the Assyrian understanding of human diversity shares much in common with the way the empire treated other types of difference, ranging from topographic variation to biodiversity. From the imperial vantage point, each of these elements had the potential to be tamed in a way that highlighted the control of the king over the four quarters of the world.

The intention of this article is to continue the process of comparing modern archaeological data relating to Babylon and its buildings with the ancient written sources. Previous work has produced results for the topography of the city, particularly the location of the city's gates, quarters and temples, and has achieved some success with two individual structures, namely the temple of Marduk under the mound Amran ibn Ali, and the eastern city wall at its junction with the river defences to the south of the same mound. A newly published text adds considerably to the textual material avail able for study of the cult-centre of Marduk, so that it is useful once again to go back inside E-sagil (E-sangil).

Given the exalted position of Marduk's temple at Babylon as the supreme sanctuary of Babylonia in the first millennium, it is no surprise that there survives a relatively large number of documentary sources which shed light on this building, its ground-plan and its interior. These include building inscriptions, of course, but such texts are not informative about lay-out so much as the work undertaken. Rituals are also useful, in that they sometimes describe the progress of processions in temples, but the most rewarding texts for those who would wish to know more about the ground-plan of the temple, its architecture and cultic fixtures and fittings, are: a) metrological texts which give measurements of temples, and b) “topographical” and other texts which list the ceremonial names of shrines, gates, throne-daises and other cultic fixtures and fittings.