The following article contains new material from the historical texts found at Nineveh during the excavations which I carried on with Messrs. Hutchinson, Hamilton, and Mallowan during the seasons 1927, 1929, 1930, 1931, on behalf of the British Museum. These were financed in the main by Sir Charles Hyde, Bt., but part of the remainder of the funds was provided from the bequest of Miss Gertrude Bell, from the Percy Sladen Fund, from my College, Merton, and from the Society of Antiquaries.

It will be remembered that, although our main excavations were carried on on the mound of Quyunjiq, during some part of the seasons 1927 and 1931 we worked on a small section (within the main, inner walls) on the flats in the fields below (Archaeologia, LXXIX, 1929, 103, and A.A.A. XX, 1933, 75, the latter reference giving its exact position). I was misled, I think, at first by finding here a brick which had come from the house built by Sennacherib for his son, and for this reason called the building ‘SH’ (Sennacherib's House), a term which, in order to avoid confusion, has been retained. From this collection of buildings came the perfect Esarhaddon prism published in P.E. and about 300 more pieces of prisms, some of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, but the majority of Ashurbanipal, of which I am now publishing here the most interesting (the majority of the rest being well-known duplicates). Besides these will be found herein (also from ‘SH’) a fragment of a syllabary (No. 39), three amulet texts (Nos. 38, 38a 41), and a small, almost meaningless note (No. 42). Why the Hittite texts (A.A.A. ibid., pl. CV) should have been stored here is a problem.

Despite the fact that Mohenjo-daro is of world-wide interest, and is such a rich field for discussion and speculation, until recently only two books had been written giving an authoritative account of the excavations, and the remains and the culture which they disclosed. These have now been joined by a third, namely, Dr. Mackay's full-length monograph on the excavations from 1927 to 1931.

When one has viewed the excavations, and read the works of Sir John Marshall and Dr. Mackay, and one realizes the immense amount of hard work and scholarship which has been lavished on them, it seems petty and churlish to raise the carping voice of criticism. Mohenjo-daro is not easily reached, and once the traveller has arrived there, without a well-prepared scheme of provisioning it is a difficult place in which to maintain oneself for a period of days while engaged in study. The fact that the available works of authority are so few and the visits of competent observers so rare makes it necessary that some more independent voice should be heard, even though it be a critical one. Without this, the few works would gain an almost Biblical authority and infallibility; this would be most deplorable, as it is almost always the least fortunate observations that secure the most frequent repetition. There is another point also which often escapes attention, and that is the relative proportion of certain objects, styles, and fabrics to the whole, stress being laid on them often in such a way as unintentionally to mislead the student and to give a false impression of quantitative importance.

Between May 20th and June 8th, 1939, I visited the Sinjar district on behalf of the Department of Antiquities of the Government of Iraq, and, assisted by the Department's chief inspector, Hussein Awni, made soundings in three mounds which had attracted my attention during an archaeological survey of that area recently published in this Journal. The results of two of these soundings are described below. Our work at the third site, Gu' Kummet, will be published elsewhere, and consisted of clearing up certain doubtful points raised during the removal earlier in the year of a fine, sculptured mihrab which has now found a place in the Islamic Museum in Baghdad.

In 1926 Gadd, publishing the first considerable collection of tablets from Nuzi, came upon the phrase ana ilāni ana našê which, as he rightly saw, referred to ordeal by oath; accordingly he translated it ‘to make oath before the gods’, suggesting in a note that the verb was našū ‘to swear’, which he explained as a secondary formation from nīš ilim ‘an oath by God’.

This suggestion indeed makes good sense in Gadd's passage and elsewhere in these texts and is at first sight philologically plausible; but close examination shows it to be untenable on several grounds. Hitherto nīšu in nīš ilim has been explained as meaning literally ‘lifting up’, sc. of the hand in solemn asseveration, and hence metaphorically swearing (an oath)’ and so ‘oath’; but the Bab. nīšu is always represented in this phrase by the Sum. MU, which means not našū ‘to lift up’ but (i) nēšu ‘to live’ and (ii) zakāru ‘to declare, swear’ and so on, whence it seems that nīš ilim zakāru must originally have meant ‘to make mention of the life of the god’, that is ‘to swear by the life of the god’. Again, in Gadd's phrase našū often has both a direct and an indirect object, whether god or man; when either is a man, it is clear that the verb cannot denote swearing.

The following pages have been written in continuation (and necessarily, to some extent, in correction) of the former specimen publication in Iraq, IV. 178 ff. They comprise the whole of the written tablets and fragments found at the above places, in circumstances to be described by the excavator, Mr. Mallowan.

The date and character of the tablets from Chagar Bazar (i.e. nearly the whole of the material, for those found at Tall Brak are almost insignificant) are so homogeneous that it seemed a mere waste of labour and of space to print complete copies of them; the great bulk of the material belongs to the self-same year and consists very largely of mere lists of allowances and names. Indeed, it can hardly be said with truth that the information conveyed as a whole, despite many details of undoubted interest, is quite in proportion with the pains bestowed upon its extraction. It is hoped, therefore, that everything essential will be obtained by the method of a catalogue, supplemented by full lists of names, places, and words, an introduction summarizing the results, and specimen copies of twelve tablets representing the various kinds of document. Such is the scheme of these pages.

On the morning of April 27th last I was delighted and astonished to discover in the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff a tile inscribed in Neo-Punic letters. I published a summary account of the graffito in The Illustrated London News on August 12th, 1939. Here I should like to say a little more about the inscription, not so much to amplify the short account in The Illustrated London News as to leave a permanent record in an archaeological journal of a discovery which is unique in the annals of British archaeology.

Arabia has given Britain one inscription: as long ago as 1878, a fine Roman altar, inscribed in Latin and Palmyrene characters, was discovered in the Roman camp near South Shields, and is now to be seen in the Free Library at that place. But this is the first time that an inscription from the hand of a descendant of the old Phoenician branch of the Semitic race has been found in Britain (or rather, recognized as such, for the tile was found during the excavation of Holt in the years 1907–15).

The object of these notes is to give an account of the recent archaeological discoveries which have thrown considerable light on most ancient Cyprus. A good number of problems concerning the prehistoric culture of this island have been solved, while simultaneously others have emerged opening a good field for future archaeological work and speculation on the origins of Cypriot culture. As Professor Myres states in his most recent general review of the origin of Cypriot civilization, ‘A neolithic chapter has been added at the head of the long island story…’. This naturally does away with the previous theory that the red-ware culture of Bronze Age Cyprus, thought of Anatolian origin, is the earliest in the island. But even with the discovery of earlier cultural stages the problem of the origin has not yet been solved. Whether, however, the red-ware culture of the Bronze Age will continue to be considered as ‘suddenly introduced as a ready-made and a different culture’, as Professor Myres states in the above-mentioned survey, is a matter which should be examined in the light of new discoveries.