The first season of excavations at Tell al Rimah was undertaken from March 1st to May 13th, 1964, by a joint expedition of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the University Museum, Philadelphia. My thanks are due to my colleagues on the staff for hard work in the difficult circumstances of makeshift accommodation and a new site. Mrs. T. H. Carter of the University Museum was Assistant Director and took charge of Area C of the excavations. Miss Barbara Parker was epigraphist and photographer, assisted in the latter task by Mr. Nicholas Kindersley, who also undertook a part of the surveying. Mr. Julian Reade supervised the excavation of Area A, the temple, and Mr. David Crownover of the University Museum joined us in the second half of the season to give valuable assistance with the supervision of the dig and the cleaning and recording of finds. Many visitors gave us generous help; Mr. David French in the survey of other sites in the area, Mr. Jeffrey Orchard with the catalogue of finds, Professor Jørgen Laessøe with the epigraphy, and Miss Ann Searight and Miss Nan Shaw with the cleaning and conservation of finds. Sayyid Tariq al Na‘imi was the representative of the Directorate-General of Antiquities, and his energy and local knowledge were invaluable to us. We owe a great debt to the officials of the Government of Iraq for their hospitable assistance, to H. E. the Mutasarrif of Mosul Liwa and to Sayyid Ahmed al Mufti, Qaimaqam of Tell Afar. In Mosul Sayyid Selim al Jelili, Inspector of Antiquities for Mosul Liwa, was always ready to help with our problems. And, as always, the success of our work was largely due to the aid and advice, both practical and scholarly, of Dr. Faisal al Wailly, Director-General of Antiquities, and Sayyid Fuad Safar, Inspector-General of Excavations, and their staff.

The latest volume of cuneiform texts published by the British Museum contains one piece of exceptional interest as nothing exactly like it has been discovered before. It is part of a tablet with three columns of writing on each side. The upper part of the tablet is missing, and since the Babylonians and Assyrians turned their tablets from top to bottom, and not from side to side, this means that the beginnings of the first three, and the ends of the last three columns are missing, which includes of course the beginning and end of the text. A substantial portion of each column is missing, though just how many lines are involved cannot be estimated. The left edge of the tablet is also missing, so much so that only the extreme right-hand ends of the lines are preserved in columns I and VI. While some disconnected words can be made out in these two columns, no sense results and they will not be referred to again. We have, then, three portions of the text left: parts of column II, columns III and IV (which are consecutive because they are on different sides of the tablet), and column V.

The first of these surviving sections begins as though it were prophecies of social disorder. Texts of this kind do indeed exist, and up to line 21 no objection could be taken to this interpretation. The rich and powerful are to oppress the poor. The judges will pay no heed to justice and will not lecture the oppressors on the error of their ways. (A specimen of such sermonising is actually given in 11. 9–13.) However, suddenly in line 22 we are abruptly introduced to the opposite, both in tense and spirit: a king devoted to justice and burning midnight oil to write down a just code of laws for his land and regulations for his city and his own royal office. The change is so abrupt that one must assume textual corruption, and indeed at a number of points there are erasures, badly written signs, and passages which simply do not hang together. In the translation an asterisk indicates where the present writer at least finds no connexion between clauses and assumes corruption.

Plaine immense, de 900 à 950 km de longueur et de 100 à 200 km de largeur, la Mésopotamie a toujours créé beaucoup de difficultés aux archéologues et aux historiens lorsqu’il leur fallait localiser des sites antiques. Bien qu’extrêmement aride en effet, – il tombe moins de 200 mm de pluie dans toute la région située entre Bagdad et la mer, – la Mésopotamie est parcourue par deux grands fleuves: l'Euphrate et le Tigre, aussi étrangers au pays que le Nil peut l'être à l'Egypte; à la différence de ce dernier cependant, ils ne coulent pas, encaissés dans des vallées capables de les contenir, aux très hautes eaux. A partir de Ramadi pour l'Euphrate, de Beled pour le Tigre, ces deux fleuves dominent les pays environnants comme le font le Rhin et la Meuse dans les Pays-Bas. Or, à Ramadi et à Beled, l'Euphrate n'est plus qu'à 47 m 20 d'altitude et le Tigre à 31 m 55 alors qu’ils ont encore à parcourir respectivement 890 et 970 km jusqu’au Golfe Persique. En temps de crue, les fleuves peuvent donc se répandre sur des milliers de km2 et submerger tout le pays.

In 1849 Sir Henry Layard's excavations among the ruins of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (the South-West Palace) produced a considerable collection of clay sealings, specimens of which were duly published in A second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. In his description of this find, Layard discussed a ‘royal seal’, a circular stamp showing the king killing a lion, and mentioned that, on the impressions, the device ‘is frequently encircled by a short inscription, which has not yet been deciphered, or by a simple guilloche border.’ Until now these impressions, preserved in the collections of the British Museum, do not seem to have been illustrated, although Professor Sachs was able to list forty uninscribed examples of bullae and sealings bearing the same motif, fourteen of them showing the guilloche border, in his paper entitled ‘The Late Assyrian Royal Seal Type’.

In all thirteen pieces of clay bearing impressions of inscribed ‘royal’ seals have been located so far in the Museum's collections, including additions made to Layard's original group (Collection no. 51, 9–2) from the excavations of Rassam, Smith, and Budge. They are here presented by courtesy of the Trustees.

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’.

Une “construction énigmatique” a été dégagée à Tello sur un des tells dits de l'Est. A. Parrot, qui est l'inventeur de cette construction dont on ne possède jusqu'à présent aucun autre exemple, en Mésopotamie, a proposé d'y reconnaître un hypogée réel ou symbolique. Le chef de la mission archéologique de Tello, faisant état des objections qu'avaient suscitées cette explication, écrivait en 1948: “Cette identification n'a sans doute pas paru convaincante, mais les difficultés d'interprétation sont telles que jusqu'ici personne n'a proposé quelque chose d'autre”. Effectivement, il fallut attendre 1960 pour que soit formulée, par Th. Jacobsen, une nouvelle hypothèse: la construction érigée au tell de l'Est aurait, dans l'antiquité, fait partie d'un ouvrage hydraulique.

De nombreux objets en terre cuite, dont nous avons fait l'étude, ont réapparu au cours de déblaiement de la “construction énigmatique”. Qu'y faisaient-ils? C'est, au départ, pour tenter de serrer de plus près cette question que nous avons été amené à rassembler tout ce qui avait été écrit au sujet de la construction, à classer les données, à approfondir la deuxième hypothèse, peu explicitée. Un dossier se trouva ainsi constitué. Il pouvait intéresser les spécialistes de l'Iraq ancien, d'autant plus qu'il allait être jumelé avec un article d'Etienne de Vaumas, Maitre de Recherche au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, article précisant la provenance des eaux de Tello et faisant connaître aux philologues et archéologues le point de vue d'un géographe spécialisé dans les questions iraquiennes. C'est pourquoi Iraq, après avoir estimé que ce double travail entrait dans son cadre, a bien voulu l'accueillir.

In 1892 the Rev. G. J. Chester presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a freestanding figure in bronze of an Assyrian demon, which he said came from San el-Hagar, a small fishing village close to the mound of Tanis in the Egyptian Delta. Recently, when this figure was cleaned for the first time, a badly corroded inscription in Aramaic or Phoenician characters was revealed down the outside of each leg. Fortunately, it was still possible to make out some portions of the text. Although this does not provide direct evidence of the figure's identity, close similarity to a well-known inscribed figure of a demon in the Louvre, and the absence of any female characteristics which might denote the iconographically similar Lamashtu, indicate that this is the demon Pazuzu. See Plate VIII.

The figure is 10·8 centimetres high and represents the demon standing on a small rectangular base. Although the ears are human, the bulging eyes, wrinkled jowls, snout-like nose and protruding tongue give the face a leonine expression. A pair of goat's horns rising from the brow curve back to form part of a suspension loop on top of the head. The arms are raised on either side of the head with the ‘hands’ open, empty palms held forward. These are too worn to show certainly whether they were the animal paws usual on these figures. Though the double pair of wings is badly damaged, the feathers are carefully incised on both back and front of the surviving fragments. A pronounced ridge runs over each shoulder from the centre of the back to the chest, so that the wings appear to be strapped on to the body. The creature is ithyphallic, probably with a serpent's head at the end of the phallus. The thighs and legs, terminating in three talons, are rendered like those of a bird of prey. The demon has a scorpion's tail curled up to meet a short bar, which emerges from the lower part of its back, to form a second suspension loop.

The palace of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud was the best preserved of all those discovered in the nineteenth century. The slabs along its walls had never been burnt, and most stood or survived to their full original height. But because the sculptures upon them were generally repetitive and so not necessarily required by the British Museum which paid for their excavation, while the subjects had a special appeal to missionaries and lovers of the picturesque, they became more widely dispersed and consequently misunderstood than those of any other building. The narrative reliefs have been frequently illustrated, but these were found only in the throneroom B and the eroded west wing; the remaining rooms were decorated with pictures either of genies and sacred trees or of the king flanked by genies and courtiers. These formal reliefs outnumber all those surviving complete from elsewhere; a study of them is essential for any understanding of the techniques and procedures used by Assyrian sculptors. A preliminary need, however, is to work out the positions in which the extant slabs stood before their removal. The following article is an attempt to point out, by reference to unpublished examples, some of the main characteristics which distinguish the reliefs from different rooms and on which the full list of provenances in the appendix is based.

Ashurnasirpal moved the capital of Assyria to Nimrud-Calah in his fifth year (879 B.C.), but vital public buildings were still being constructed long after his death. Presumably the palace was given priority, as the king was resident in Calah just before starting on his sixth campaign, but the standard inscriptions which are carved on every wall-relief in the palace as well as on the inaugural stela include a mention of his expedition to the Mediterranean; since this was not undertaken until some time between his eighth and nineteenth years, a reasonable date for the completion of the decoration may be a little before 870.

In recent years many different suggestions have been made in an effort to solve the admittedly difficult problem of the chronology of the last kings of Assyria. Any new proposal must take account of the following:

1. Aššurbanipal (a) accession year, 669 B.C. year 1 begins with Nisannu 668.

2. Aššur-etillu-ilani (a) ruled in Assyria a minimum of 4 years, 8 months (Clay BE VIII, 1, No. 5: Nippur, i.viii.4, šar (mât) Aššur (ki)).

Six or seven years ago a tourist bought a small carved ‘Hittite stone’ in Izmir as an attractive souvenir. Returning to Washington she read that I had been on Hittite excavations and asked me to look at her curio. One maybe grateful for her layman's interest, for her piece, which turned out to be one half of an ancient trinket mould, sheds an interesting light on trade between Anatolia and Mesopotamia at the end of the Third Millennium B.C.

The Nimrud tablet IM 67618/ND 5576 was excavated at Nimrud in the 1956 campaign. During a stay in Baghdad in the autumn of 1964 I copied the text and identified it as a duplicate of IM 67619/ND 5577, the tablet found next to it in the excavation. Both tablets were found in the ruins of the Ezida Temple, in the pit in NT 12. When excavated they were unburnt. ND 5576 is a fragment of a tablet the lower part of which is preserved. It measures 12·8 × 10 cms. ND 5577 is a tablet with both obverse and reverse preserved. The obverse is much defaced and its upper part is almost destroyed. The tablet has no colophon. It measures 25 × 10·5 cms.

The text of ND 5577 was copied and edited by the present writer some years ago. It contains three bilingual incantations. According to their subscriptions the first (obv. 1–26) and the second (obv. 27–43) were catalogued as nam-erím-búr-ru-da “(incantation) for absolving evil”. The third incantation (ob. 44-rev. 48) has an abbreviated ritual subscription mentioning the god Nun-ura. In their style and phraseology they offer strong resemblance to the texts of the series Utukkī lemnūti. ND 5576 provides another version of the greater part of the third incantation preserved on ND 5577. The present article will give a revised edition of the first incantation of ND 5577 based on a renewed collation of the text and a critical edition of the two versions of the third incantation. Copies of the text of ND 5576 will be found on Plates XXXIII–XXXIV.