At Balawat in 1956 M.E.L. Mallowan excavated a small group of 18 Neo-Assyrian documents near the Mamu Temple. These are now published here in copies by A.R. Millard and J.N. Postgate, along with four tablets from his later work at the site in 1957 which were not included in Barbara Parker’s edition of the majority of the texts from that season. They are all Neo-Assyrian utilitarian documents from the 7th century BC, mainly “legal” but in a few cases administrative. Parker observed (1963: 89) that the 1956 tablets “are a quite distinct group from the present collection” (that is, the 1957 group), and indeed there is little overlap in respect of content and prosopography between the two groups. A few of the 1956 tablets show that individuals whose private documents were kept in the town were engaged in agricultural and horticultural activities in (presumably) neighbouring villages, but they also include some rather informal conveyances of males and females.

This article discusses two imperial Roman literary descriptions of architectural space (Luc. 10.111–35 and Stat. Silv. 4.2) as responses to the real architectural space of two imperial palatial complexes in Rome, Nero’s Golden House and Domitian’s Palatine palace. Building on definitions of baroque spatiality in architecture and on concepts of literary space, it explores the interplay between the textual worlds created by these writers and the real spaces fashioned by Roman imperial architects. It considers the convergences and divergences between the architects’ ‘Baroque’ spatial strategies and the authors’ literary conceits that intimate an illusory materiality, and between the narrated memories or virtual reconstitutions of desolate imperial vastness and the physical experiences of populated space. Finally, it reflects on both differing and common perspectives towards real and literary space constructed in the ‘Baroque’ manner by considering neo-Baroque sensibilities today in both literature and the visual arts and how these might not only problematise but also allow a convergence between the spatial turn of archaeological studies and the exploration of similar spatialities in literary culture.

From Ovid to Chaucer, the ‘go, book’ refrain is a recognisable motif in the poetry of the classical tradition. This article collects evidence for the emergence and formalisation of the vade, liber formula from its antecedents in Catullus 35 and Horace Epistles 1.20 to its development in the exile works of Ovid and Martial and beyond. We see that the poetic envoi has its very origins in Latin poetry of the first centuries BCE and CE, without direct Hellenophone precedents. Attending to the dynamics of presence and absence, nearness and farness, fixedness and mobility that are highlighted in the poetic address to the book, the article argues that the personification of the book as an authorial messenger develops in response to the changing sense of spatiality of writers vis-à-vis their real and imagined audiences during the period of Rome’s imperial expansion. In the hands of these authors, the book becomes a moving object.

This article is the publication of the first bilingual inscription from Hatra, combining Greek with Hatran Aramaic. It is known only from a slide in the archives of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Hatra and, as the first bilingual document from the city itself, it deserves special attention from a multidisciplinary perspective. The inscription is discussed here in its wider context, first with regard to what it can contribute to our understanding of codeswitching between Greek and Aramaic, at Hatra itself and within the wider Near East, and second concerning our knowledge of the development of the city’s local religious life. It is argued that the new inscription casts light on the way in which the goddess ʾAllāt, under influence of the royal house, came to join the Sun god Šmeš (Šamaš) at the heart of Hatrene religion.