Cancer and its treatment are known to have a substantial psychological morbidity, but relatively little work has been done to investigate the effectiveness of psychotherapy with this group of patients. This paper outlines a newly developed cognitive behavioural approach for distressed cancer patients based on Beck's cognitive therapy. In addition to using cognitive and behavioural techniques to relieve depression and anxiety Adjuvant Psychological Therapy seeks to help patients develop a fighting spirit towards their illness. The application of the treatment is illustrated with the use of two case reports.

When the hoard of tools excavated by Loftus at Tell Sifr in Iraq, in 1854, was reassembled for publication some years ago (Moorey, 1971), a number of items mentioned by Loftus (1857, 268) could not be traced in the British Museum reserve collections nor was it then possible to arrange for the analysis of selected objects. In the intervening years the missing items have been located. The parts of two sheet-metal cauldrons (Figs. 1–3), with cast handle fittings, have now been identified whereas in 1970 only a single fragment was located (Moorey, 1971, no. 83). The “copper ingot” reported by Loftus has now also been traced (Fig. 4), as have a copper or bronze ferrule (Fig. 5) and the “dice-box” (Fig. 6). It has been possible to increase the significance of this still unique find by some investigation of the metals and alloys from which it was made (Table 1). The following notes are supplementary in every way to the original paper, whose substance is not repeated here. The numbering of objects in the previous paper is retained.

Although the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur remains among the best-known archaeological discoveries ever made in Iraq, it still offers many complex and teasing problems of chronology and interpretation. These have to be resolved before the evidence it offers may confidently be used to illustrate particular aspects of Sumerian custom and society in the third millennium B.C. On present reckoning this concentration of hundreds of superimposed graves, cut into successive levels of rubbish, extended over at least 600 years from about 2650 to 2050 B.C. In Woolley's view it included two groups of “royal” burials. The earlier, of the archaeological period Early Dynastic III A, is the better known of the two, comprising sixteen shaft-graves or “death-pits”, with multiple burials. They were separated by an interval of between four and five centuries, and by numerous single private graves, from the rather less well-known building complex described by Woolley as the “Mausolea” of the Ur III kings (c. 2112–2004 B.C.). In 1977 I attempted to elucidate the status and social function of the people buried in the Early Dynastic “royal” graves, suggesting that it was too soon to assume that all the rulers of Sumerian city-states at this time had been buried in this particular way. Not only is it to be doubted whether the men (?) buried in the three tombs 1618, 1631 and 1648 were of the same high rank as those in the other thirteen “royal” tombs, but they may even have been of men, and more particularly of women, whose status and special privileges had more to do with the character of the cult of the city-god of Ur than with any secular authority such as kings and queens in the modern sense.

In the remarkable expansion of archaeometallurgical studies in the last fifteen or twenty years Mesopotamia, where much pioneer work was done fifty years ago, has steadily slipped from view. This is in marked contrast to the time when Woolley's discoveries in the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur gave the Sumerians an assured place in general studies of early metallurgy. As research priorities in archaeometallurgy in the Near East moved to the investigation of the primary processes of metal exploitation and the development of support technologies, the source zones of Anatolia, of the Negev and Sinai, and of Iran inevitably eclipsed a region which had always been an importer of metals, to a greater or lesser degree already processed. This excluded Mesopotamia from a role as innovator in the basic techniques of metal recovery, and also probably in pioneering the skills of smelting and of alloying copper. Nor, for the same reasons, has Mesopotamia been drawn into the lively debate about the relative significance of external forces and internal transformation mechanisms in the development of metallurgy in prehistoric Europe, for which the primary eastern point of reference was Anatolia. But the certain fact that Mesopotamia had to import all her metal has kept metallurgy among the factors considered in current debates over explanatory models for the emergence of a complex society there in the later fourth and earlier third millennium B.C., some-times giving rise to conclusions hard to reconcile with the sparse archaeological record.

Some years ago at the request of Dr. R. D. Barnett, then Keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities, Mrs. Diane Gurney prepared drawings of unpublished sealings from Ur in the British Museum for a supplementary volume in the Ur Excavation Series. At the same time she also did revised drawings of a few sealings already published by Legrain in Ur Excavations III: Archaic Seal-Impressions (London, 1936). As the proposed supplementary volume has been cancelled, Mrs. Gurney's careful drawings are published here with a revision of the short catalogue and commentary which I originally wrote to accompany them. The complexity of the task facing Legrain was formidable and must never be forgotten. Criticism of his impressionistic, often idiosyncratic, renderings of these designs is all too easy. The decipherment of details is often hard enough; but it is the restoration of complete designs that is so testing of eye, hand and judgement. Those compositions combining geometric motifs or cuneiform signs, sometimes both, with representations of men, animals and objects are particularly hard to unravel. Sometimes not only the exact frame of a design, but even its orientation, is in doubt. Nor yet have we actual cylinders carved with the most intricate of such designs to guide us.

In preparing her drawings Mrs. Gurney first produced a provisional pencil sketch. After independent study of the sealing, I discussed this initial copy with her, resolving as far as possible any points at issue. Then the drawings were completed in ink, with any details which remained obscure rendered in broken line. Since the drawings best speak for themselves, catalogue descriptions have been reduced to a minimum. As far as possible cross-reference has been made to Legrain's pioneer study. His introductory remarks and his analysis of decorative motifs are as relevant to the sealings here as to his selection. This supplement adds nothing of substance; but it offers an opportunity for students to contrast another hand and eye to Legrain's in one of the most important groups of sealings yet found in Iraq.