The story of Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living is one of a small group of Sumerian epic tales in which human beings rather than gods dominate the narrative. It is now generally agreed, from the evidence of alternative textual sources, that Gilgamesh was a historical figure; the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk who lived between 2700 and 2650 B.C. Kramer, Lambert and other Sumerologists accept that some of the events recounted in these “human epics” may preserve a historical basis. It is recognized, however, that the processes of communication by oral tradition and the literary embellishments of the scribes who first recorded and then copied the tales resulted in the introduction of “unhistorical motifs such as exaggerated notions of the hero's powers, omniscient dreams and the presence of divine beings”. The present article will consider the question of a practical motivation for the visit of Gilgamesh to the Land of the Living. We shall also examine the evidence for the geographical location of this region and attempt to identify the species of tree called by the Sumerians ERIN, which grew there. A source for the monster Humbaba whom Gilgamesh confronts, will also be considered.

Trade being the main theme of this Rencontre, I thought it of some interest to give some reflections on the theme from a general view-point, notably on the role of trade in connection with the diffusion of civilization and on trade as a factor in the economy of ancient Mesopotamia, in short trade as a cultural and an economic factor, and a possible connection between these two. Did trade play an important role in the diffusion of features of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia and surrounding countries? Can it be said that trade was an important element in the economy of that area?

The reflections are mainly based on my own observations and my own, I hope, logical reasoning, the theoretical literature being left out of consideration. I had not been able to gain access to the papers of the seminar held in Santa Fé in 1973, published under the title Ancient Civilization and Trade in 1975, before the Rencontre. Having taken cognizance of this book, it can be stated that the approach to the problems is different from that in this paper; the studies, analysing the trade itself, mainly in prehistoric and protohistoric times, have a clear theoretical character, whereas this paper only regards the two above-mentioned aspects in historical times, starting from some conspicuous facts and questions arising from them.

The series “Topography of Babylon”, known from its first line as DIN.TIRki = Bābilu, was first put together from several fragments by Eckhard Unger in a chapter contributed to F. Wetzel, Die Stadtmauern von Babylon (WVDOG 48, 1930), then repeated with some minor changes (not always for the better) in his book Babylon, Die heilige Stadt (1931). In a long review of the latter book in ZA NF 7 (1933) B. Landsberger and F. H. Weissbach made a number of improvements in the text and its translation. But the only major additions to the preserved text as presented by Unger have come from tablets excavated at Kish, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and published by P. E. van der Meer in Volume 5 of this journal (1938) and in Archiv für Orientforschung 13. While cataloguing the Ashmolean collection I have succeeded in joining not only two of the fragments published by van der Meer but also six more pieces of this same tablet, which now has at least parts of every line with the exception of a few at the beginning and end. It is the purpose of the present article to present an edition of this important tablet, with its duplicates, containing as it does an almost complete list of the “daises”, i.e. chapels, of Marduk (parakkí), a section which was largely missing, together with the gates, walls, rivers and streets of the city, the totals for the different items, and a section at the end describing the ten districts of the city which is also partly new. The article is dedicated to Sir Max Mallowan, who has lectured on Babylon at Oxford, in the hope that he will find some interest in a dry catalogue of the city's topographical features such as this tablet offers.

Among the discoveries made in the course of the excavations of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq at Nimrud in the spring of 1962 was a well-preserved hollow clay barrel-cylinder of Esarhaddon, ND. 11308 (Plate XXXV, opposite p. 117), found just outside the south wall of the ancient town near its south-east corner; it had presumably fallen from a building above in Fort Shalmaneser. It is now in the Iraq Museum.

The cylinder, virtually undamaged except by the pick-mark of unexpected discovery, is 17·7 cm. long; it has a maximum diameter of 10·4 cm., and a diameter at each end of 9 cm.; at the left end is a circular hole 1·8 cm. in diameter, at the right end a circular hole 1·5 cm. in diameter: it bears an inscription of 64 lines, each c. 15 cm. long, lines 1–62 of which are duplicated (except in minor points listed below) by lines 1–62 of the inscription on the cylinder ND. 1126 (BM 131129), whose measurements in the same dimensions are 19 cm., 10·2 cm., 9·7 cm., 1·7 cm., 1·8 cm., and c. 16 cm. respectively.

Most of the Nimrud letters bearing important identifiable historical allusions have now been published. There still remain, however, about a hundred further documents, of which the letters of the present selection are amongst the best preserved. All the letters here published are from those which fell to the share of the British School of Archaeology at the division of the Nimrud tablets, and it has therefore been possible in every case to collate the copies (made in 1954) against the originals prior to publication.

The letters in this group are connected by no common theme, though there are several which relate to similar situations. In the first two (LXXI and LXXII), and in one of the three letters in Babylonian dialect and script (LXXXI), the writer excuses himself for failure to perform the king's orders; though despite the similarity of subject-matter there is a very different tone in the different letters. Thus, whilst in LXXXI the writer is full of apology, blaming his apparent neglect to communicate with the king upon the shortcomings of his messenger, the attitude of the writer of LXXI shows a sturdy independence of spirit. He declines to do what is asked of him in connection with a horse train, and after quoting what appears to be a proverb — ‘he who answered the king back died’ or ‘he who turned against the king died’ — sums up with the words ‘Now after I have sent a message let the king my lord do what he will do’.

Inscribed in two columns upon the base of a clay cone found at Ur and recently presented to the British Museum (no. 130729, measuring 15.4 cms. in diameter) is the following text. Its imperfections are indicated by the photograph and copy (Pls. xiii, xiv); they cannot be supplemented from the duplicate which doubtless existed upon the shank of the cone, for this has completely disappeared.

Col. I. 1. en-an-e-du, 2. en-(d)nanna 3. nam-gal nam-en-na šà-kù-ta nam-ge7-an-na 4. šà-ki-àg (d)nin-gal-e nì-bár nam-en-na bar šu-ta-gar 5. me-te é-kiš-NU-gál zag-gub utaḫ (U+GA)-ḫi bàd-na 6. ḫé-du7 é-nun-na u4-sa-sa-a7 kalam-šè è 7. múš nam-en-šè kù-gi-eš-e túm-ma 8. giš-ḫur šu-luḫ nam-dingir-šè zi-dè-eš-e pà-da 9. nun-ní-tuk du8-maḫ é-lugal-la-na-šè šu-luḫ-luḫ-ḫa-ta al-gub-bu-a 10. en-an-e-du7 11. en-igi-du8-a (d)nanna-(d)nin-gal-bi 12. urí (Kl) uru(KI)zag-è ki-en-gi-ra 13. ki-šu-tag za-na-ru en-(d)aš-im-babbar-e 14. lù ge6-pàr nam-en-bi-šè ki-sikil-la dù-a gal-bi túm-ma me-en 15. u4(d)nanna-(d)nin-gal-bi 16. sakki-zalag-ga-ne-ne-a igi-bar-ra-bi nam-ti-la 17. igi-ḫúl-la-bi mu-un-ši-in-sè-eš-àm 18. èš é-kiš-NU-gál ki-tuš-nam-dingir-ne-ne-a 19. mu-mu mi-ni-in-maḫ-eš-a 20. ka-mu-sikil-la nam-X nam-ti-la mu-nn-gar-ri-eš-àm 21. šu-si-sá-mu u4-nam-ti (d)ri-im-(d)sin 22. šeš-mu u4-ma-na-mu 23. sù-sumun-u5-dè mu-un-ne-ri-eš-a 24. kur gu-erím-gál-la-ni (Col. II) 25. šu-ni-šé bí-in-si-iš-eš …. 26. u4-ba ge6-pàr-kù-ga ki-tuš-nam-en-na-mu 27. sig4-bi úr-bi-ta nu-ús-sa 28. en-an-e-du7 29. en mu-maḫ zi-dè-eš pà(?)-da(?) 30. dumu ku-du-ur-ma-bu-ug me-en 31. ge6-pàr-kù-ga úr-bi-sumun-na sig4-zi-DU ḫé-ni-ús 32. ingar-bi šu-si-tag-ga IM-KÚŠ-ḫu-mu-ag 33. é-bi bil-bi-eš ḫu-mu-tu 34. u4-ba unú-ŠEŠ-ba-an-DU ki-UD nam-tar-ra 35. en-en-e-ne libir-ra-méŠ 36. ki-bi bàd nu-um-gú gìr-bi ŠIM-BÚR-bi ḫé-šub 37. en-nu-un ba-ra-gar ki-bi ba-ra-sikil 38. gá-e geštú-gal-zu-mu-ta 39. nam-tar-u4-da-egir-ra ki-bi bi-kin-kin 40. diri ki-ná en-en-e-ne libir-ra-meŠ 41. ú-zu-ug-dagal-la ḫu-mu-gar 42. ki-bi-šub-ba bàd-gal-e ḫu-mu-dub 43. en-nu-un-kal-ga bí-gar ki-bi ḫu-mu-sikil 44. mu-pà-da-nam-en-na-mu pà-pà-dé-dé 45. kin-bi ki-bi-šè ḫé-im-mi-gar 46. temen šuššar nam-en-na-mu mu-sar (?) 47 … . a … . gál-la … . ka-ta ḫé-im-mi-ús(?) 48. bàd-bi ní-te-gá-mu ḫé … im(?)-i(?) mu-bi ḫé-im-mi-sa4.

This article formally documents an important correction to the provenance attribution of three reclining female figurines from Babylon that reside in the Nippur collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and were published with that corpus. Few scholars have noticed the misattribution of these figurines, and the problem has not been formally documented for scholarship. Through historiographical analysis of the late nineteenth century Nippur Expeditions and early twentieth century cataloguing and publication of the Nippur corpus, this article reconstructs how and why these three reclining figurines have been continually misassociated with Nippur, and traces the continued impact of this confusion on scholarship's understanding of the Nippur figurine tradition. Most critically, the publication of these three figurines as Nippur objects lent credence to the testimony of an antiquities dealer who sold an additional eight reclining figurines “from Nippur” to the Harvard Semitic Museum; these figurines continue to be regarded as Nippur objects. This article casts doubt upon that provenance. The figurine tradition of Seleucid-Parthian Nippur is reevaluated in light of the absence of securely-provenanced reclining female figurines at that site. An art historical evaluation of these figurines is undertaken, which links these figurines to the general use of hybrid Greek-Babylonian imagery in Seleucid-Parthian figurines, and connects the specific motif of the reclining figure to Greek banqueting imagery. It is proposed that the Nippur community's lack of interest in reclining female figurines can be correlated with a disinterest in pan-Hellenistic ceramic tablewares; together, these lacunae indicate Nippur's non-participation in negotiated Greek-Babylonian banqueting practices. These differences in cross-cultural interaction between Nippur and the neighboring Babylonian communities have not been fully recognized nor explored, due to scholarship's misunderstanding of the use of reclining female figurines at that site. It is this confusion that this article attempts to resolve.

Folk specialists in snake-lore may exercise their interests in several directions. They may seek out, detect, handle, and remove snakes; they may manipulate them for entertainment; they may possess, claim, or confer impunity in the handling of snakes and immunity to their venoms, and they may possess or claim special powers in the treatment of snake poisoning; finally they may train apprentices to these various ends. Such specialists (professional snake-charmers apart) are often persons endowed with supernatural power in other spheres of activity. They may be seyyids (descendants of the Prophet), fakirs, holy men, practitioners of folk-medicine, dervishes, sorcerers, or persons possessed of holiness or baraka for any reason. Common terms used of such people in Iraq are sheikh and seyyid.

Such specialists fall naturally into several groups. There are the frankly insane, the victims of dissociation and the subconscious; there are the ignorant simpletons who have so far been lucky, and to this category belong the conscientious but deluded religionists; there are the informed and quick-witted rogues who know their species and take care to handle the harmless snakes only, and lastly there are the genuine charmers, who have specialist knowledge and skill, who know their natural history and who handle poisonous species, over which they have obtained safe control either by the taming of familiarity and gentle handling or by extracting periodically their fangs, or venom, or both. The last group may also immunize themselves to specific venoms by inoculation. In Iraq the writer did not encounter or hear of any of this last type.

This is the second article in a series detailing archaeological results from salvage excavations conducted in northern Iraq during the 1980s and early 1990s. An introduction and background information to the overall salvage project and specific information on fifteen excavated sites in the northern Jazirah, near the Iraq-Syria border and mostly within T. J. Wilkinson and D. J. Tucker's North Jazira Survey (NJS; see Wilkinson and Tucker 1995), were provided in the first article (Altaweel 2006). In that article the project was called the Ray Jazirah Project (RJP), and the fifteen sites were referenced as RJP 1–15. Since then I have been informed that a more appropriate name is the Jazirah Salvage Project. Nevertheless, for consistency with the last and future articles, the RJP initials will be maintained for referencing archaeological sites and the project in general.

This report provides data for the second set of excavated sites in the North region of the RJP. As in the first article, my role has been to provide this information to a wider audience prior to publication in Arabic and to conduct comparative analysis of the source material with other archaeological sites. I have attempted to maintain fidelity to the original source material, including using Iraqi conventions such as the system of numbering levels and ceramics, with only my commentary added to help in the interpretation of the data. In a similar manner to the previous report, very detailed descriptions on any one site will not be provided; rather, the primary purpose is to give summary data on the excavation results, with significant emphasis, where possible, on the ceramic remains. A list of the sites' occupation history and a table listing RJP sites with corresponding NJS sites (Table 1) are provided prior to the discussion of archaeological results. This report includes some additional details from a previously discussed site (RJP 5). The new sites discussed, including the first fifteen sites in the earlier article, can be seen in Fig. 1 according to their RJP numbers.

Exactly sixty years ago, the great cuneiformist Th. G. Pinches, whose immense services to Assyriology are not always fully realized, published in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology five fragments of tablets of an entirely new type: Sumerian and Akkadian texts written in the Greek alphabet. Commenting on some of these texts in the same issue of the Proceedings, A. H. Sayce added a sixth fragment. A further text, in two fragments, was published in 1928 by W. G. Schileico.

The corpus of these most interesting texts can now be doubled by eight new fragments from the British Museum collections published here. Credit for this substantial addition must, however, be given to Pinches, for it is among the unpublished British Museum texts which he copied in the late nineties that I had the good fortune to find either copies of, or references to, the new fragments.

In the following pages, I have attempted to give a catalogue of the extant texts arranged according to their subject-matter. They may be divided into two main groups—(A) Lexical, and (B) Literary texts, the word ‘literary’ being taken in its broadest sense. To these groups it has been thought preferable to add a third one, namely (C) Unclassified texts, rather than withhold those texts which I could not understand; it is thus hoped that other scholars might succeed where I have failed.

The second season of excavations at Tell Taya lasted from the beginning of December, 1968, to the end of February, 1969. They were again sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which provided equipment and the loan of the Rimah dig-house, and were financed largely from the School's Jebel Sinjar Fund, set up by an anonymous donor to assist research on northwest Iraq during the third millennium B.C.; part of a grant to the writer, given by the Gerald Averay Wainwright Fund (Oxford University) for work on this period, was also used.

The staff consisted of the writer as director; Mr. Hugo Blake, who worked mainly on site Si, as assistant-director; Miss Nina Shaw, who was responsible for the conservation and registration of objects, and also did much of the photography; and Miss Ann Hechle, who recorded the pottery. Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Postgate were with us for a time, and in the absence of inscribed material the former undertook part of the surface survey while the latter helped on the excavation generally. All members of the staff, however, did far more than this bare list of assignments might imply, and I am deeply grateful for their devoted perseverance through what was said, at Tel'afar, to be the worst winter in living memory. The Iraq Directorate-General of Antiquities was represented by Sd. Mahfudh Abdullah and Sd. Nehad ar-Rawi, and we were as usual indebted, both to them and to many other government officials in Baghdad, Mosul, and Tel'afar, for their invaluable interest and support.

Now that Palestinian archaeology is subjected to a period of enforced inaction it would appear to be an appropriate moment to publish a short résumé of what is known of Palestinian temple plans.

The development of Palestinian shrines seems to follow a certain consistent plano The earliest recorded shrine appears to be that of Jericho, Stratum XL It consisted of a single inner chamber entered through a narrow ante-room from a columned portico (Fig. 1). Only the post-holes remained, so the posts were probably of wood; in the centre of the inner chamber were two similar holes probably to hold posts to support the roof. The building had plastered walls and mud floors; the floors were laid upon a bed of limestone chippings several centimetres deep, and both the walls and floors were finished with a smooth lime surface coloured brown or red and burnished by rubbing with a smooth stone. Within the entrance and extending beyond the precincts were found numerous plastic clay and mud figurines representing chiefly domestic animals, among which can be recognised cows, sheep, goats, pigs and dogs (?). Other models suggest a cobta's head, the male organs, small cones and a model pillow. In the forecourt were a number of trap-like openings which resemble sheep-pens. This shrine had been rebuilt more than once—Garstang has suggested as many as five times; which shows that once an area was sacred it tended to be regarded as such by future generations.

Students of comparative religion and historians of historiography have for some time now been debating the value, or even the validity, of an “historical outlook”. Within the swamps of this impossibly large debate, one of the few points of seeming bedrock is that the historical outlook which is characteristic of Western civilization was alien to the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Hebrews possibly excepted. One awkward fact which this consensus must leave out of account is that in first-millennium Babylon there was something which looks like historical writing—the chronicles. So far as I know, they have been completely ignored in this debate.

On the other hand, the chronicles have occasionally been singled out for high praise. Students of ancient historiography who, like myself, must depend on translations of the cuneiform texts, have generally supposed that of the many genres represented by these texts the most “historiographic” are the chronicles. One historian concluded that “the great Neo-Babylonian Chronicle” was indeed “the apogee of ancient Near Eastern historiography (exclusive of the Old Testament) and deserves to rank in importance with such milestones as the histories of Thucydides, Orosius and Ranke. Secular history as we know it today here first appeared”.

It has been noted with some regret, although with little surprise, that most of the tablets belonging to the Neo-Babylonian library discovered within the temple of Šamaš at Sippar duplicate texts already known to us. The medical tablet presented here, apart from being a welcome addition to the scarce number — compared to the Assyrian medical tablets — of medical texts from Babylonia, is therefore especially interesting as it contains an excerpt text for which no duplicate has been hitherto identified.

The tablet IM 132670 (Sippar 8/352, which measures 215 × 133 mm) contains four columns of text and is almost completely preserved; only the upper right and the lower left corner are broken and a crack and some rubbing impede the understanding of column iii. The text is a collection of thirty-eight prescriptions that treat diseases affecting the head, temples, ears, eyes, nose, teeth and lungs. Their arrangement follows the scheme known in Akkadian as ištu muḫḫi adi šēpē “from head to foot” (literally: “from the cranium to the feet”). All major text collections that treat parts of the body are thus arranged, like the therapeutic, diagnostic and physiognomic series and the lexical list Ugu-mu. Numerous prescriptions of the new text have parallels in other medical texts. In most cases these parallels encompass only one or two entries. In two Assyrian texts, however, several consecutive prescriptions are paralleled. The text AO 11447 parallels §§3–12 while in BAM 44 §§ 33–8 are noted. BAM 44 lists the prescriptions in the same order, only inserting two additional prescriptions at one point. AO 11447, on the contrary, not only adds several other prescriptions but lists them in a different order to the effect that the same prescriptions are used for different symptoms.

The Middle Assyrian tablet fragment BM 98496 (Th 1905–4–9, 2), published here by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum, was excavated by Campbell Thompson at Nineveh in 1905, and a correct description of it as a bilingual arranged in parallel columns was given by L. W. King in his Supplement to Bezold's Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum (1914). An excellent photograph of the best preserved side appeared on Pl. iii of this volume. Despite this initial publication the text remained unnoticed until R. Borger drew attention to its similarity to KAR 118 and 119, bilinguals of Tukulti-Ninurta I (HKL I (1967) 659). J. S. Cooper also voiced the same opinion in ZA 61 (1971), 2. The present writer's interest arose from studying a copy of the text by F. W. Geers in Chicago, since there were plain allusions to the Assyrian King List (henceforth AKL), and these are the earliest attestation of this historically and chronologically important document.

War, and imminent battle in particular, put any Babylonian or Assyrian king, whose rule and security very much depended on successful campaigns, in a precarious situation. While careful military planning certainly helped to defeat one's enemies, victory in the end was determined by the gods. Before entering battle, oracles were consulted to make certain that the king's decisions had the gods' favour, and a number of other rituals could be performed to ensure that the gods supported the king's cause. These rituals — dubbed “war rituals” by modern scholarship — are not very well known, and the texts attributed to this group are a rather mixed set of royal rituals related to the king's campaign and to potential aggression by enemies. They include traditional Babylonian rituals to be performed before setting off on a military campaign or immediately before a major battle, as well as specifically Assyrian rituals for the same purpose. It is not suprising that two of these texts include the performance of divination rituals, while others focus on the binding of substitute figurines representing the enemies and also use figurines representing the king himself. In line with the general ideology of war, the rubrics of the rituals clearly indicate that the reason for the king's military action is the enemy's aggression against his land, and that the king himself only acts in defence of his own land's borders. It seems that all these texts, apart from the Assyrian rituals in the narrow sense, were assembled in a “series ‘battle’” (iškar tāḫāzi) that is mentioned in the famous letter of an Assyrian king demanding the collection of various scholarly texts from the Ezida and scholars' houses in Borsippa. The same text refers to rituals (or a ritual) “So that in Battle Arrows do not Come Near a Man” that are also known from the catalogue of exorcistic texts (KAR 44 //). Apparently they were not thought to be part of the iškar tāḫāzi; but in the letter the two text groups are named together within a longer list and they were certainly closely associated with each other. Special namburbi rituals could be performed on campaign to avert evil indicated by accidents of the king's chariot, but there is no reason to assume that they belonged to the iškar tāḫāzi too. Other namburbi rituals were used to protect the land's borders when an earthquake had signalled an imminent invasion of the enemy.

It is appropriate that the eleven letters here published, mostly concerned with imperial and military administration in the Assyrian Empire, should be dedicated to my teacher Professor Sidney Smith on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday, since to him I owe both the origin of my interest in this subject, and also invaluable assistance in my initial steps towards the interpretation of letters of this collection.

This publication, like that of previous sections of my ‘Nimrud Letters, 1952’, is to be taken as provisional only, since there still remain to be edited and published almost another hundred letters or fragments of letters, the contents of which may throw further light upon letters already published or necessitate some modifications of conclusions previously drawn from them. I am planning to publish all the Nimrud Letters in book form, with full grammatical and historical discussions, and to assist towards this project I have already collated all those Nimrud Letters previously published which are now in the Baghdad Museum; since these letters have been cleaned since I originally copied them, collation has in a number of instances produced improved readings.

Since the present writer could not go to Iraq and himself pick out samples for investigation of the plant food in the above described site excavated by Diana Kirkbride, a small series of samples was brought to Copenhagen by the excavator. Although this may be described as an emergency measure, the slender results justify the labour involved. A widened investigation would probably improve the picture quantitatively, but hardly very much qualitatively. The question was whether that meagre tract was exploited for agriculture in the Neolithic, and the findings prove that this was the case.

The samples consisted of a small collection of house debris, plaster and clay, as also some earth samples suitable for notation.

Two different categories of house material were examined: a crude, sandy plaster, probably made up of gypsum and clay with many small pebbles in it; and a fine-grained levigated (wall ?) plaster of a yellowish-white colour, to an extent of c. 80 per cent soluble in acetic acid and thus mainly calcareous.

The coarse material was copiously tempered with husk and straw fragments (tibn), but gave few usable imprints. The yellow plaster, heavily tempered with the same material, produced a small number of determinable imprints of spike parts of cereals. All imprints in this material are characterized by a thin rusty-coloured coating representing the decomposed vegetable matter.

The public availability of photographs of the entire British Museum Kuyunjik collection has allowed the identification of many hitherto unplaced fragments. Some of them are particularly relevant for the reconstruction of passages in a number of ancient Mesopotamian literary texts. These are published here for the first time. They include three new fragments of the Gilgameš epic, one or two of the Theodicy, several of the Diviner's Manual and of the Rituals of the Diviner, several prayers previously only poorly known, and fragments from the seventh tablet of the exorcistic series Muššuʾu.