The literary composition known to Assyriologists as the “Weidner Chronicle” has been edited most recently by A. K. Grayson. I. L. Finkel has published the texts of a small fragment of a bilingual version (almost certainly a back-translation into Sumerian of an Akkadian original) and another small fragment. A preliminary description of the exciting discovery at Sippar of a complete Neo-Babylonian temple library with the tablets in situ on the shelves has been given in an earlier number of this journal. Among the tablets found in the library was a complete manuscript of the “Weidner Chronicle”. The tablet (which measures 14.4 × 11.4 × 2.4 cm) was found on the floor of the library and may originally have fallen from the shelves. It contained the whole text of the composition, but is extensively damaged. The scribe, Marduk-eṭir, also indicated that he was copying from a damaged original: he has marked hīpi, “break” in various places, and, quite exceptionally, has attempted by careful and deliberate cross-hatching on the tablet (e.g. lines 1, 31–3, rev. 20–3) and diagrammatic triangles (rev. 31–38) to represent explicitly the cracks, damage or breaks in the exemplar from which he was copying. It is quite clear that these marks are intentional and not subsequent damage. The colophon (hal-qa gur) requests return of the tablet if it is lost. This manuscript is obviously the product of a scholar.

Although well known from Roman times on, and still in use today in parts of the Near East and North Africa, two early threshing implements—the tribulum or threshing board and the plostellum punicum or threshing wheel—appear now to be documented in ceremonial contexts in the ancient Near East. The first may be identified on three figured documents of the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods and the second in cuneiform texts of the Early Dynastic period. A recently published cylinder-seal impression, an unpublished cylinder seal and a long-known, small stone plaque in the British Museum provide early illustrations.

The seal impression, of Uruk style, from recent excavations at Arslantepe, near Malatya in southeastern Anatolia, preserves the greater part of a scene centering around what has been described as “a regal figure in a sledge vehicle” (Fig. 1). The figure is on a seat with short legs and beneath an arched baldaquin. Roughly rounded projections at front and rear of the seat suggest litter-pole terminals, an interpretation supported by two early documents from Egypt. One is king Narmer's macehead (Fig. 2) which illustrates a figure seated in an arched litter, the latter's legs set on the ground and its carrying poles—with terminals—shortened to conform to the available space. The other is the reconstructed open litter of queen Hetepheres, showing actual pole terminals reminiscent in profile of those mentioned above.

This note examines the textual evidence bearing on Mesopotamian threshing implements, in the hope of throwing some light on the Uruk representations of sledges discussed in the first part of this article. The relevant terminology is limited to four words: giš-bad(-rá), kissappu, and dajaštu, and ḪAR-ḫa-da. “Of these, giš-bad(-rá), kissappu, and dajaštu have previously been recognized as denoting threshing implements; the suggestion that another such term is ḪAR-ḫa-da is new.

The British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq conducted a second season of excavations at Jemdet Nasr from 21st October to 31st December 1989. Our gratitude for support is in the first place due to the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage, and in particular to its Director-General, Dr. Mu'ayyad Said Damerji, and the ever helpful staff of the External Relations section. We are also grateful to the Director of the Iraq Museum, Dr. Munir Taha, particularly for permission to export lithic material for analysis by M. Pope. A special debt of gratitude is due to our representative, Sd. Abdulrazaq Abboudi, for his wholehearted assistance in all aspects of our work. We also thank Sd. Doni George for making a video film at the site. Financial support was most gratefully received from the British Academy and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

The team this year consisted of: Roger Matthews (director), Petr Charvát (archaeologist), Sarah Collins (pottery specialist), David Knight (camp support), Alan Lupton, Wendy Matthews, Helen McDonald, Susan Pollock (archaeologists), Melody Pope (photographer and lithics specialist), Madeleine Sarley (archaeologist) and David Schofield (illustrator). Our epigraphist, Robert Englund, waited patiently by the telephone in Berlin but, alas, an absence of tablets meant we made no call upon his expertise.

One of our main aims this season was the construction of a site dig-house in order to facilitate future work at Jemdet Nasr, particularly with regard to storage and living conditions. With exceptional assistance from our representative a three room house, 18 × 5·5 m in ground area, was completed in December, its construction having consumed a substantial proportion of our funds and energies for the season.

In 1987 and 1988 the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq conducted two further seasons of excavations at Tell al-Hawa in the north Jezirah. The inscribed objects recovered during these excavations were an Old Babylonian tablet, an inscribed Neo-Assyrian potsherd, fragments of inscribed cones of Shalmaneser III, and a piece of stamped brick. They are published here as texts nos. 1–4.

No. 1. IM 113547 (HW 236). Fig. 1

No. 1 is the very damaged top half of an Old Babylonian administrative tablet picked up in 1988 in a canal cutting away from the main mound, in the “Lower Town Area” (mound D, area ND 11; dimensions 46 × 41 × 21 mm). The fragmentary text lists amounts of, probably, grain in volume measure (homer and seah), but for what purpose the goods were being issued or, more likely, received it is not possible to determine. The real interest of the piece lies in the mention, in the last lines of the reverse, of the toponyms Hadnum and Shuruzi. Hadnum is perhaps the same as Hadna, which is known as a north Mesopotamian locality of the Old Babylonian period from the archives of Mari (ARM II 50, 5: ma-a-at ḫa-ad-naki) and Tell al-Rimah (OBT Tell Rimah 202, 4: ḫa-ad-naki), though nothing can be said about its exact location. Shuruzi also appears in a letter from Mari, as Shuruzim (Bottéro, Habiru = CRRAI 4, p. 19, no. 20, 59: šu-ru-zi-imki). This is generally accepted to be the same place as Shurushim, known from another letter from Mari (ARM II 135, 18: šu-ru-ši-imki) to have been located on the eastern route from Shubat-Enlil to Eshnunna—so presumably somewhere between Tell Leilan and the Tigris. Although this road would almost certainly have passed Tell al-Hawa, there can be no suggestion on the available evidence that Tell al-Hawa was called Shuruzi(m)—or, for that matter, Hadnum—in the early second millennium, but the presence in this document of the two toponyms does at least confirm the site as being in the orbit of the known centres.

Nergal-ereš begegnet uns erstmals im Jahre 803 v.Chr. als Gouverneur der Provinz Raṣappa. Der Stellung dieses Amtes innerhalb der assyrischen Verwaltungshierarchie entsprechend hielt er auch das Eponymat dieses Jahres, des siebenten der Regierungszeit Adad-nararis III. (810-783 v.Chr.). Damit hatte er bereits am Beginn des von uns verfolgbaren Abschnittes seiner politischen Laufbahn eine ziemlich hohe Funktion inne. Über seine Herkunft und Abstammung wissen wir nichts. Dem Zeitgeist dieser Epoche entsprechend wird seine Familienzugehörigkeit in keinem Text erwähnt.

797 v.Chr., im Eponymat des Bēl-tarṣi-ilimma, fügte Adad-narari per Dekret die Provinz Ḫindānu dem Verwaltungsbereich Nergal-ereš's hinzu und ließ dies auf einem Steinmonument in Ninive festhalten. Die Schlüsselrolle, die Nergal-ereš vermutlich bei den militärischen Unternehmungen des Königs westlich des Euphrat spielte, führte in der Folge zu einem weiteren Anwachsen der politischen und territorialen Macht des Gouverneurs. Die Tell al-Rimah-Stele erwähnt neben Raṣappa und Ḫindānu die Provinzen Lāqê und Māt Sūḫi sowie eine Reihe von Städten in ihnen. Die Saba'a-Stele fügt dem noch das Gebiet um Qatni und Dūr-katlimu nebst weiteren Orten im Euphrat-Habur-Gebiet hinzu.

This, the second report on the activities of a team from the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq in the north Jazira, will present an overview of the results of the first four seasons of fieldwork. A review of settlement change since the first millennium BC will be reserved for a future publication. The first two seasons of survey (autumn 1986 and 1987), which concentrated on the region around Tell al-Hawa, were followed, in autumn 1988, by a season of excavation of three sites within the hinterland: Tulul al-Biyadir, Tell al-Hilwa and Khanijdal. The most recent season, conducted over some four months between September 1989 and February 1990, resulted in a total survey coverage of some 475 sq km. In addition, a single Late Assyrian/Hellenistic/Parthian site (Khirbet ‘Aloki) was excavated to investigate the sequence of settlement within the area of putative Neo-Assyrian colonisation. The first interim report (Ball, Tucker and Wilkinson 1989, henceforth, Ball et al. 1989) presented an introduction to the area and the rescue project; this report will focus upon the development of settlement and the influence that early route systems had upon settlement patterns.

The following article derives from field-work carried out by the authors at Nineveh from January to March 1987. This work would not have been possible without the kind permission of Dr. Muayyad Damirji, Director General of Antiquities, to whom we are most grateful. We would also like to extend our thanks to the many other Iraqi archaeologists who showed interest in our work and gave us assistance, in particular Dr. Abd as-Sattar Jabar al-Azawi, Muzahem Mahmoud Husein, Samir Dhahir Muhassin al-Saraf, Mohammed Ali Mustafa, Dr. Tariq Madhloom, Dr. Behnam Abu as-Soof, Hazim Abdul Hamid, Fadhil Abbas Ahmed and Salim Yunis Hosein; to Professor David Stronach for the opportunity of working on the University of California at Berkeley excavations at Nineveh in 1989 and for assistance in completing our earlier work; to Dr. Jeremy Black, Nicholas Postgate, Dr. Roger Matthews, Tony Wilkinson, Dr. Julian Reade, Dr. Trevor Watkins, Professor Anthony Snodgrass and Professor Malcolm Colledge for their academic and/or logistic support; to Dr. P. R. S. Moorey and the other participants in a seminar held in Oxford in October 1989 for their valuable discussion and comments; and to Jim Roberts for his translation of works in Arabic.

Although topographically simple, the landscape of the lower Mesopotamian plain masks a complex of sedimentary environments: old river channels, levees, flood basins, artificial channels, aeolian dunes, ancient irrigated soils and archaeological sites (both buried and at ground level). Many of these features owe their origin, either directly or indirectly, to the hand of man. In order to study early channel systems, the prime objective of the fieldwork, it was necessary to examine both the landscape and the sub-surface features beneath in order to produce a three-dimensional view of the area.

Fieldwork was conducted over some ten weeks in the springs of 1988 and 1989 as part of the Abu Salkabikh project, directed by J. N. Postgate. The immediate objective was to determine if an early branch of the Euphrates ran through the site, and if so, to attempt to trace its course. The presence of such an early course is implied in the name Buranuna (Akkadian Purattu from which the word for Euphrates is derived) and which is thought to have flowed through Sippar, Kish, Abu Salabikh, Nippur, Shuruppak, Uruk and Ur (Adams 1981, 159 and fig. 27; also Gibson 1972, fig. 69). It has been assumed that such a channel probably ran north-south between the Main and West Mounds of Abu Salabikh, and its presence must have determined or limited the growth and shape of the Uruk and Early Dynastic towns. A more general aim of the fieldwork was to determine how the settlement pattern may have evolved as a result of changes in the systems of channels or canals.

The 1987 field season was the first full season of work on the Uruk Mound at Abu Salabikh (see Postgate & Moon 1984 and Pollock 1987 for discussions of previous work). The interests and questions guiding this work center on the political economy of the Uruk period—the ways in which decisions of a political nature structure, and are structured by, economic activities. Our work thus far has provided preliminary insights into patterns of production, distribution, and consumption of both craft and subsistence goods. Because our samples are relatively small, the results of this season's work must be viewed as suggestive rather than definitive. The reader should also bear in mind that the analytical and interpretive study of the material is still underway. Fuller discussions of the work will be presented elsewhere (Pollock n.d. a, n.d. b).

In the 1987 season 2280 m2 of the mound was surface collected and 1805 m2 was scraped, mostly in 10 × 10 m units (Fig. 1). The scraping enabled us to further elucidate the plan of a large, well-constructed building in the 3D95 grid square that was first identified in 1985 (Pollock 1987). To the north of this building, we followed out an area of solid brick construction, revealing the remains of a mudbrick platform more than 55 × 32 m in extent. On the west edge of the mound, in grid squares 2C12–13, 23–24, we also found a massive brick construction, approximately 17 m wide. Its location near the mound's edge is suggestive of a town wall, but until we trace it further this idea remains highly speculative. Elsewhere, the scraping revealed either little in the way of coherent architecture or enigmatic areas of brick that do not at present yield any meaningful architectural plans.

Work during these two seasons included the clearance of another hectare of the surface of the mounds; the completion of the excavation of a large ED III house on the east side of the Main Mound, with several intramural burials; and the initial investigation of another large ED house to the west of Area E and of a potter's work area at the northern end of the Main Mound. Various smaller soundings through the city wall and elsewhere complete the picture, and the line of the city wall round the Main Mound is now clear. The separate but contemporary South Mound was also sampled for the first time. Detailed quantitative analysis of occupation layers was continued in conjunction with Mrs. W. Matthews' micromorphological research. For the results of Mr. Wilkinson's survey and soils work round the site see above, pp. 751–831, and Plate XIVa, b.

My purpose in this paper is to examine the proportions of standing figures in Neo-Assyrian art using methods similar to those that have proved effective on the art of ancient Egypt. In Egypt artists developed a canon of proportions for the human figure during the Old Kingdom, and by the 12th dynasty they had introduced a squared grid system as an aid to obtaining these proportions. Standing figures were drawn on a grid consisting of 18 squares between the hairline and the baseline, and key points of the body lay on or near particular lines. The junction of the neck and shoulders related to horizontal 16, the breast to 14, the elbow of the hanging arm to 12, the small of the back to 11, the lower border of the buttocks to 9 and the top of the knee to 6. The width across the shoulders was six squares and between the armpits four squares, so that the upper arm was a square wide.

Standing figures continued to be drawn on an 18-square grid at least into the 19th dynasty and probably throughout the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. By the 25th dynasty the grid system had altered, and the 18-square system was replaced by one in which the squares were five-sixths of their size in the early system, so that there were now 21 squares between the base and top of the eye. Before this, however, from the mid-18th dynasty onwards, bodily proportions began to change, and this process can be charted by the changing relationship between some of the key points of the body and the lines of the grid. The levels of the small of the back, the lower border of the buttocks and the top of the knee all rise above their original positions, while the width across the shoulders was often reduced by roughly half a square and the width of the upper arm became less than a square wide.

The third season of fieldwork at Sāmarrā’ took place between 27th February and 24th April 1989. The 1989 season at Sāmarrā’ had three broad aims:

(1) to initiate excavations at the Glassworks (ma‘mal al-zujāj) at Qādisiyya, the site of the small town of Qādisiyya of Sāmarrā’, which was occupied from the Sasanian to Middle Islamic periods (site N1). The surface features of this site were described in our previous report.

(2) to initiate a surface survey of the canal remains in the area of Sāmarrā’, including an assessment of the geomorphology of the region.

(3) to conduct a new photographic survey of Sāmarrā’.

The report on the canal remains and geomorphology is written by T. J. Wilkinson, and the description of the excavations at Qādisiyya is provided by Robin Falkner. In addition a note is appended on the historical evidence for the heads of the Nahrawān, and two monuments connected with them.

As work continues on the Neo-Babylonian library recently discovered within the precincts of the temple of Shamash at Sippar, it is becoming clearer that much of its contents is already well known to us. Only a very small number of completely new texts have been identified so far, and our reaction to the material retrieved is at present much as that of a previous generation of scholars to the Sultantepe tablets. We are confirmed in our belief that the major products of the Babylonian literary tradition are, in varying states of preservation, already to hand. A corollary of this belief is that future discoveries of Neo-Babylonian libraries should be expected to yield more literature not so much by furnishing new literary texts as by filling the lacunæ in texts of the established corpus. It goes without saying that since many known texts are still in a very poor state of preservation this is an exciting prospect.

The importance of the Sippar library, then, will principally lie in its capacity to restore known but damaged texts to a more satisfactory state of completion. This capacity is already well demonstrated by the inauguration of this series of texts from the Sippar library with a surprising new source for the composition previously known as the Weidner Chronicle. The present article continues this pattern, though with less unforeseen results, by publishing a manuscript of Tablet II of the Babylonian Creation Epic. The tablet came from niche 5 C of the library—that is the third niche from the ground in the fifth row from the left. Enūma eliš II has remained until now the least well preserved of the Seven Tablets of Creation, the middle part being very badly damaged. Four sections of disconnected text were separated, as it seemed, by three gaps of uncertain length. The line-count of the Tablet was itself unknown.

The purpose of this article is to present a hypothesis that the moon-god, Sumerian Nanna, Akkadian Su'en or Sin, and Amorite Erah or Yarah, called Sin-Amurru in AbB II, 82:10-11, may have been the patron god of a major group of Amorites in the early Old Babylonian period, and to consider possible implications particularly in Kish and Assur. The work was mainly done by Wu Yuhong as part of his thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Philosophy at Oxford University. It arose from his questioning the prevalent assumption that the moon-god invoked in oaths with a king was the patron god of a city with temporal power, suggesting instead that the patron god of a semi-nomadic Amorite tribe need not be linked to a single, specific city. Some information and assessment has since been added. The work was supervised by Dr. Stephanie Dalley, who composed the article and included the implications for the Assyrian King List and a number of details to support the hypothesis.