The series of silver coins struck at Aradus in the last two centuries B.C. contains, in the letters added to the reverse type, rather more information upon the relations of the successive issues than is commonly to be derived from Greek coins: and a study of the specimens in the British Museum and Oxford collections, with the aid of casts from Berlin, Copenhagen, and Paris, has suggested that there may be a profitable field for investigation of the organization of this and the neighbouring mints. The statistics collected have therefore been recorded here as a starting-point.

The splendid discoveries made by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur in the years between 1927 and 1931, of tombs with a wealth of grave-goods unparalleled before or since in Western Asia, were given a sombre aspect by the revelation that such sacrifice of material wealth had been accompanied by no less lavish expenditure of lives. The principal occupants of those tombs had been attended by a whole cohort of human and animal victims, put to death at the time in their places and attitudes and with all the equipment which had been proper to them in their lives and services. So plainly was all this revealed by the excavations that the whole scene of the funeral could be reconstructed by a modern artist in a picture which scarcely needed to draw upon the imagination.

Some controversy took place in the succeeding years upon the character of these human sacrifices, but it would now be generally agreed, I think, that they were no other than at first supposed, a dramatic example of the ancient (though late-lingering) rite of sending a deceased lord into the other world fully furnished with all the ministers as well as all the gear of his earthly state. Both written descriptions and archaeological discoveries have repeatedly attested this gruesome practice in various parts of the world, and it is no longer true that in the abundant literature of Sumer and Akkad there is no trace of such an observance—I allude, of course, to the Sumerian fragment published by Dr. S. N. Kramer and called by him ‘The Death of Gilgamesh’.

Despite the fact that Mohenjo-daro is of world-wide interest, and is such a rich field for discussion and speculation, until recently only two books had been written giving an authoritative account of the excavations, and the remains and the culture which they disclosed. These have now been joined by a third, namely, Dr. Mackay's full-length monograph on the excavations from 1927 to 1931.

When one has viewed the excavations, and read the works of Sir John Marshall and Dr. Mackay, and one realizes the immense amount of hard work and scholarship which has been lavished on them, it seems petty and churlish to raise the carping voice of criticism. Mohenjo-daro is not easily reached, and once the traveller has arrived there, without a well-prepared scheme of provisioning it is a difficult place in which to maintain oneself for a period of days while engaged in study. The fact that the available works of authority are so few and the visits of competent observers so rare makes it necessary that some more independent voice should be heard, even though it be a critical one. Without this, the few works would gain an almost Biblical authority and infallibility; this would be most deplorable, as it is almost always the least fortunate observations that secure the most frequent repetition. There is another point also which often escapes attention, and that is the relative proportion of certain objects, styles, and fabrics to the whole, stress being laid on them often in such a way as unintentionally to mislead the student and to give a false impression of quantitative importance.

Figs, 1 and 2 show a conspectus of the restorable pot-shapes of both plain and glazed ware found in the Sassanian buildings excavated at Kish in 1932-3. Almost all of them come from the SS 7 complex, at an average depth of 2 metres: a few are from SS 6 or SS 8, at a similar depth. They form a group that should prove most valuable for purposes of dating on less well documented sites in Iraq, for it seems most probable that this pottery belongs to the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. The latest coin found with the pots is one of Justinian I (A.D. 527-65).

A. Plain ware. The commonest shapes are the hemispherical and truncated conical bowls which often bear Aramaic incantations; jugs which have ovoid bodies and rounded or pointed bases; jugs with pinched lips and flat bases or base-rings; and large three-handled jars for storing liquids.

In his book Zur Datierung des Königsfriedhofes von Ur (Rudolf Haibert Verlag Bonn, 1966) Nissen has re-examined the sequence dating of the Royal Cemetery of Ur and attempted to relate it to history. The archaeological analysis is necessarily based on the two great volumes written by the late Sir Leonard Woolley in 1934. This is not the first attempt of the kind, for another, unsuccessful one was made by Pallis many years ago. The fact is that the stratigraphic evidence of many critical points is defective and the major problems cannot be solved by using the internal evidence alone.

Nissen's new assessment of the situation depends largely on one important observation, namely: that Woolley made an error in the orientation of the Neo-Babylonian Temenos Wall which measures 103° on all plans except on pl. 274 where it is 98°. The discovery of this error has led Nissen to re-draw the cemetery plan with the wall aligned at the correct angle and to re-orientate many graves which during certain seasons Woolley specifically states were plotted with reference to that base line.

During 1970 the Ashmolean Museum acquired at auction in London two Syriac-inscribed bronze censers of a now well-known but insufficiently studied type decorated with New Testament scenes in relief and with incised ornament on their plain surfaces. The following speculations about these objects are offered in admiration to Sir Max Mallowan, and as a reminder of bumpy but delightful journeys to certain ancient monasteries in the Mosul area where such objects will have been used: forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.

Several fresh examples of these censers have come to notice in recent years, so that the number known to exist in museums or private collections must now exceed 30 or even 40, while the number still in ecclesiastical possession is presumably very much greater. All of those recently acquired by museums must once have belonged to churches or monasteries of the Near East; and one may suspect that some of these communities have either recently been robbed or, more probably, have been induced to sell or succeeded in selling some of the more battered contents of their sacristies.

At the foot of, and roughly south-south-east of, the ziggurrat at Nimrud stood the temple of Ninurta, on the floor of room 1 of which, excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in 1956, were found “a number of fragments, some of them inscribed, of a burnt white limestone statue of Shalmaneser III, in the round.” These fragments, now in the Iraq Museum, were numbered as a group by the excavator ND 5571, and by the Iraq Museum IM 60497. They comprised the right elbow and a small part of adjacent body behind and below (IM 60497A), two subsequently joined inscribed fragments (IM 60497B), a fragment of clasped hands (IM 60497C), and some other fragments including one bearing traces of seven lines of inscription so very slight as to be, for the present writer, beyond consecutive comprehension.

The right elbow of the statue of Shalmaneser III “found in fragments by a ploughman in fields in the outer town near the foot of the south-east corner of the akropolis” is missing; but not only is the thickness (13 cm.) of the forearm at the lower end of the elbow-fragment IM 60497A considerably too small to fit the upper end of the right forearm of the statue found by the ploughman, but it also extends too far above the elbow (that is, it extends upwards beyond the point above the elbow down to which the statue's upper arm is preserved) to allow any possibility of regarding it as having belonged to the ploughman's statue.

The messenger staff Huṭāru was a non-anthropomorphic deity in the Neo-Babylonian Eanna temple of Uruk that also had a practical function: it served as a symbol of authority of the goddess Ištar during the collection of taxes and dues. In this article I edit and discuss two hitherto unpublished texts that shed new light on this little known divine object. Furthermore, I suggest its identification with the “Doppellöwenkeule”, a ceremonial mace with animal protomes that is represented alone or carried by Ištar on seals and terracotta plaques from the Old and Neo-Babylonian periods.

This paper makes available clay sealings found during the last campaigns of the Italian expedition at Seleucia on the Tigris whose publication was delayed by the 1990–91 Gulf War. The sealings were discovered in the North Agora—where a large archive building containing more than 25,000 sealings was also unearthed—and provide additional information on the iconography and style of the subjects impressed on their surfaces by official and private seals. Most of the sealings were found in the context of the stoa, a public building facing the archive on the opposite side of the agora, but seem to have been displaced there accidentally or for some reason, difficult to ascertain, only at a later date: originally they were probably kept in the archive building itself.

The study presents a reconstruction of the arrangement of the soldiers of Lagash as represented in the first and second registers of the “Stele of the Vultures” of King Eannatum according to both philological and iconographic data. Through a process of deconstruction, it is possible to read the composition as the result of a combination of two perspectives employed by the Sumerian artists.

The princesses in the royal family of the Ur III state had a role in developing and revitalizing the economy. In ancient Iraqi society women operated in all fields of work. Cuneiform texts recorded their activities in the processes of receiving, delivery, distribution and mediating between people. Living in the community, Iraqi women played an important and positive role in ancient Iraq's society. Šāt-Eštar first became known as a princess in the texts treated in the author's MA Thesis in 2010. The study of the texts which mention princess Šat-Eštar shows that this character played an important role in processes of receiving, delivering, distributing and mediating between people. She was specialized in trading several materials, primarily barley and flour and then dates, as well as textiles and clothing types. The people she dealt with were Agatia, Šulgi-mudah, Abituni, Šāt-Su'en, Šāt-Nūnu, Šeškala, and Lugal-nisaĝ-e.

This article presents new editions of three Old Babylonian wisdom texts. Text A contains dialogues between different professionals and their customers(?), Text B is a dialogue between a friend and his fellow, and Text C contains several riddles. All three texts are poorly preserved and the interpretation is tentative in many points.

This article seeks to demonstrate that the correct arrangement of the bronze bands on the Shalmaneser III gates from Balawat can be established by comparing the position of the nail holes on the ends of the bands with those on the edging strips that were fixed to the edges of the doors and partly overlap the ends of the bands. This new approach confirms the order previously proposed by Curtis and Tallis for the bands on the left-hand gate, but a new arrangement is suggested for the four lower bands on the right-hand gate.

This paper studies a group of documents produced in the course of investigation into the activities of a gang that operated in Uruk in the latter part of Nabonidus’ rule. It examines the composition of this criminal group and the offences committed by its members. Above all, however, it seeks to reconstruct the procedures implemented by the temple officials in response to a hitherto unpublished royal writ BM 114574, a document that throws new light on the involvement of the king in the administration of justice in the Neo-Babylonian period.

The inscribed clay tablets found by Mr. Mallowan at Tall Chagar Bazar in the season 1936 were scarcely expected, and therefore the more welcome. They were, indeed, both few and small, but happily they proved to be only an earnest of a larger discovery in the subsequent year. The study of these latter tablets will no doubt amplify and correct the few observations which can be made here upon the dozen of specimens at present available.

These belong to two quite different periods, as shown not only by their own characters, but by the circumstances of their finding, described by Mr. Mallowan above. The earlier period is here represented by one complete piece and a fragment.

En se multipliant depuis une quinzaine d'années, les découvertes en Orient ont fait surgir en abondance des éléments de haute époque, qui incitent à reprendre le problème de l'origine de l'art minoen, tel qu'il s'est constitué au IIIe millénaire avant notre ère. Lors de ses premières découvertes à Cnosse, à partir de 1900, Sir Arthur Evans n'avait guère à sa disposition, pour établir des comparaisons dans un passé lointain, que la documentation égyptienne. Les remarquables découvertes, qui avaient tant surpris les égyptologues, de J. de Morgan, Fl. Petrie, Quibell, Reisner et autres, ouvraient la voie à des rapprochements entre le premier essor de l'art crétois et la civilisation déjà développée des temps prédynastiques et protodynastiques en Egypte, ce qu'on a appelé aussi la civilisation protolibyenne. Elle s'affirmait par l'art des palettes de schiste, par de beaux ivoires sculptés, des stèles royales, des vases finement taillés dans des pierres diverses, notamment ces bols en albâtre avec les curieux replis dits «à moustache», la technique de la glaçure, etc…Cependant, dès cette époque, en Egypte même, s'affirmait l'influence asiatique, qu'on a qualifiée d'influence sumérienne. Certes Sumer est à l'origine, mais ce mouvement, venu d'Asie, ne s'est répercuté jusqu'enÉgypte que par l'intermédiaire des Sémites. La langue égyptienne est un témoin certain de cette action, mais aussi tel monument comme le célèbre manche en ivoire du Gebel el Arak dont G. Bénédite, en le publiant, avait constaté qu'il n'avait pas de répondant dans l'art égyptien. Le motif du dieu, qu'on y voit, entre deux animaux affrontés peut remonter à un prototype sumérien, mais le costume du dieu est proprement sémitique. Ces mêmes Sémites sont apparus à Warka où ils chassent le lion à la lance et à l'arc — arme que les Sumériens abandonnent aux nomades et dont la flèche est armée d'un silex évasé qu'on retrouve sur les palettes de schiste égyptiennes.

This paper reviews the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the three sets of Late Assyrian bronze gates on Tell Balawat (Imgur-Enlil). Attention is drawn to the strategic importance of the site in the light of recent investigations at Balawat. Architectural aspects of the elevation view of Imgur-Enlil depicted on the Mamu Temple gate erected by Assurnasirpal II are discussed in terms of the possibilities and problems in attempting to correlate graphically the elevation view with plan views of unidentified square enclosures on the campaign gates of Shalmaneser III. The logical graphical transposition from elevation to plan view and the narrative context suggest that three square empty enclosures are representations of Imgur-Enlil.

The discovery by Hormuzd Rassam of two bronze-clad gates of Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) and his successor Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) in 1878 added a new dimension to the knowledge of the art of Assyria (Rassam, 1880/82: 1897: 200–20). However, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that Tell Balawat was accepted as the true provenance of the gates and firmly put on the Assyrian map as the site of the town of Imgur-Enlil (Lloyd, 1947: 173).

To the memory of the library's excavator,
my good friend Walid al-Jadir

As reported in Iraq 49, four tablets of the bilingual version of Lugale, the myth of Ninurta, were excavated in the library of Šamaš's temple at Sippar: complete manuscripts of Tablets I, III and IX, and a fragment of Tablet XIII. All the tablets have brief colophons, three of which identify the owner of the tablet as Nabû-ēṭir-napšāti, a member of the Potter family (Paḫāru), who is known from other colophons as the son of one Marduk-šuma-uṣur. They all come from niche 3 A.

The tablets are given here in copy, photograph and transliteration. The transliterations are based on a first draft made directly from the original tablets in 1986, the year that they were discovered. The copies are provisional, having been traced from the photographs, which, with the transliterations, must be regarded as the primary witnesses to the cuneiform. Collations were made from a different set of photographs, not published here, which became available after the copies were made. Such collations are marked in the text with an asterisk.

Since the text of the Tablets given here was already fundamentally complete in the Old Babylonian version when the myth as a whole was last edited, there is no call for a fresh translation. Where the new sources add significantly to our knowledge is in filling out the often extensive lacunae of the bilingual version, especially in Tablets III and IX. The changes in the Sumerian text that seem to have been engendered by the exercise of furnishing it with an Akkadian translation are a matter which needs to be tackled with reference to the whole text, and a topic which cannot be addressed at length here. Nevertheless, some commentary on these and other points has been provided by A. R. George and follows the transliterated text as an appendix.