It is well-known that close contacts between Greece and the Near East were already being forged in the Geometric Period (c. 1100–750 BC) and this resulted in objects of Near Eastern origin being imported into Greece well before the mid-8th century, for example ivories and metal bowls. It is assumed these Oriental goods and influences were transmitted to Greece and the islands via the Phoenician ports on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and to a lesser extent overland through Anatolia. In the subsequent Archaic Period (c. 750–500 BC), particularly in the so-called Early Orientalizing Period, these contacts were intensified and the importation of Near Eastern luxury goods is attested by the presence of ivory plaques for furniture, bowls, cauldrons, weapons and jewellery. In this period, too, Oriental forms and motifs were copied or adapted to produce objects in a so-called Orientalizing style. The problem is therefore twofold. The first difficulty is to distinguish between objects imported from the Near East and those produced locally but deriving their inspiration from the Near East (Oriental versus Orientalizing). The second problem is to decide, if an object is Oriental, which part of the Near East it comes from. It is clear that many different cultures are represented: as well as Assyrian and Babylonian, there are also Phoenician, Syrian, Neo-Hittite, Urartian, Phrygian, Iranian, Caucasian and Egyptian. It is often difficult to distinguish between the products of these cultures, even when the material is found in the Near East where there was considerable interchange of goods particularly in the early 1st millennium BC, and it is even more difficult when it is found in Greece. Pierre Demargne took a particularly pessimistic view. He wrote:

Ever since the Rostovtzeff's famous book Palmyra is commonly called a “caravan city”. As a matter of fact, it is the only real caravan city among those considered as such by the great scholar. Both Gerasa and Dura-Europos were calm, provincial towns living off the countryside, and no signs of a commercial vocation are on record in either. Petra was above all a royal capital, and the importance of its trade, though likely there, remains entirely to be demonstrated. We might now add that Hatra, also a royal city and a major religious centre, owed its prosperity more to these characteristics than to far-flung commerce.

I shall leave aside the Jordanian cities, Petra and Gerasa, very different from each other and from the other three, including Palmyra, which have participated in a particular brand of civilisation, often and rather mistakingly called Parthian.

These urban societies shared a common language, Aramaean, and a body of customs—religious and social—resulting from a mixed heritage in which a substantial nomad Arab contribution predominated over more ancient traditions of Syria and Mesopotamia. While practically no trace of Iranian influence can be detected, there was certainly a more or less thin veneer of Hellenism, generally supposed to have spread within the limits of the Parthian empire. Actually, there is not much to show in this respect for the Iranian part of the realm, or for the capital Ctesiphon. What is known concerns mostly the Greek cities of Susa and Seleucia, and does not manifest any close relation to the conditions of the Aramaic speaking cities we know further west. Whether Palmyra was a “spiritual daughter” of Seleucia, to quote an influencial and imaginative formula of Henri Seyrig's, is a question still waiting, after sixty years, for a documented answer.

This article presents a number of short, but important, inscriptions found on objects excavated at Tell Haddad and elsewhere. Texts nos. 1–6 are from Tell Haddad or the neighbouring site of Tell al-Sib, no. 7 is from Sippar and nos. 8–10 are of unknown provenance.

1. Inscription of Arīm-Līm of Mê-Turan. IM 124744; Haddad 577 (Figs. 1–2)

This inscription, written on a stone foundation tablet re-used as a door socket (overall dimensions 36 × 22 × 13·8 cm), was excavated at Tell Haddad, out of context near the Neo-Assyrian buildings in Area 3, Level 1, but derives originally from the early Old Babylonian period. The text was made available some years ago to the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project of the University of Toronto, in whose system it is catalogued as E4.16.1. A transliteration and translation has been published by D. Frayne, Old Babylonian Period (RIME 4), p. 700.

Classical sources describing the Hanging Gardens give a wealth of detail which has never matched up with information from cuneiform sources or archaeological finds. This study reconciles them. In doing so it shows how some confusions in Classical accounts may have their origin in Akkadian sources, and are not due simply to misunderstanding and error.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the world in Classical tradition, were marvellous not merely for being raised upon vaults, but also for an innovative system for watering them. Popularly attributed to Nebuchadnezzar II, of the 6th century B.C., they are not mentioned in any of the copious and remarkably complete written sources for that king's reign, nor have they come to light in extensive excavation of his palaces in Babylon, carried out by a large German team over more than a quarter of a century.

It has been argued that the city elders constituted a certain institution of urban authorities in the Syro-Palestinian kingdoms in the Late Bronze Age, such as Alalaḫ, Ugarit and the Canaanite city-kingdoms of the Amarna period. While subordinate to the royal palace, as representatives of a city-community they were frequently involved in political, economic and legal affairs in the state administration. Now new sources on this issue have been provided from the eastern part of this region, i.e. Emar (Meskene-Qadime) on the Middle Euphrates.

The recently published texts from Emar and its vicinity reveal that it was a kingdom under vassalage of the Hittite empire from the 13th to the early 12th century B.C. The Emar dynasty in this period has been reconstructed as having the following five reigning kings for four generations: Iasi-Dagan, dIM(Ba'lu/Adad)-kabar, Zū-Aštarti, Pilsu-Dagan and Elli. Besides the kings, the city elders of Emar were also involved in real estate sales, legal agreements and religious ceremonies.

Their close association with the city god Ninurta in real estate sales is particularly noteworthy. They frequently sell houses, fields, etc., under their joint ownership. For example, Emar VI 126: 8–14 reads: “From Ninurta and the elders of Emar (dNIN.URTA ù LÙ.MEŠ.ši-bu-ut URU.e-mar.KI), the owners of the house, Ḫimaši-Dagan, son of Ilu-malik, has bought the house for 1,000 (shekels) of silver, the full price”. According to the stipulation concerning the payment of fines, one who should lay claim to the house is to pay 1,000 shekels of silver to “Ninurta” (1. 19) and the “city (URU.KI)” (1. 20), respectively. This suggests that the terms “elders” and “city” are interchangeable and thus it has been assumed that the elders were representatives of the city-community of Emar. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that, though only once, “Ninurta” is also paraphrased by the city of “Emar”.

Concentrations of substantial ruins, sometimes occurring as isolated but neighbouring structures, have been recorded at a number of locations in the foothill zone of the al-Ḥajar mountain range in south-eastern Arabia (Fig. 1), an area widely identified with the ancient copper-producing land of Magan. These assemblages are always distinguished by the presence of large, circular structures and may also include the remains of houses and other features, as well as cemeteries either in close proximity to the buildings or sited on nearby hills. They are attributed to the 3rd millennium B.C. by their related pottery, by carbon-14 dates where these are available and, when such criteria are lacking, by their architecture, masonry and brickwork which are notably different from those of adjacent 2nd and 1st millennium buildings. In view of their close environmental relationship with the al-Ḥajar range and in order to separate them from the late 3rd millennium buildings and tombs which were first discovered and excavated on the island of Umm an-Nar, Abu Dhabi, and which have since been located at many sites in the al-Ḥajar zone, I shall refer to these 3rd millennium assemblages as the al-Ḥajar settlements.

Environmental factors within the southward draining basins of the Jabal al-Akhḍar, in the Oman mountains, are described and considered in terms of the constraints which they impose upon early agricultural settlement. There is some conflict between the palaeoclimatic deductions from the South Akhḍar sedimentary record, and the generally accepted regional view of late Holocene climatic deterioration.

In Iraq 30 (1968) I published a fragmentary text from Ur, then numbered 7/80, containing part of a treatise on the tuning of the sammû instrument, and with the collaboration of the musicologist David Wulstan, who himself contributed a companion article, I added an interpretation, with a table showing that the text described seven different tunings, with instructions in two chapters for the conversion of each one to the next, first by lowering, then by raising the pitch of one string by a semitone. The copy of the text was subsequently published again as UET VII 74 and the number 7/80 was abandoned when the tablet was sent to Baghdad and renumbered in the Iraq Museum. This text, usually known as “the tuning text” — a better name would be “retuning text” — provided the decisive clue to the understanding of the Babylonian musical system and its terminology, which have since been expounded by several musicologists and compared with the Greek system of “octave species”. So well established did the theory become that it was applied without question by several scholars when a few years later a tablet apparently containing a musical notation using the same terminology was recognized among the tablets from Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Little notice was taken in 1982 when Raoul Vitale wrote an article calling in question the basic assumption of the theory that the tuning system and the scales were upward rather than downward. Only recently has M. L. West proposed in this article “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Human Melodic Texts” (Music and Letters 75/4 [1993], 161–79) that Vitale's theory should be seriously considered.

This paper reviews the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the three sets of Late Assyrian bronze gates on Tell Balawat (Imgur-Enlil). Attention is drawn to the strategic importance of the site in the light of recent investigations at Balawat. Architectural aspects of the elevation view of Imgur-Enlil depicted on the Mamu Temple gate erected by Assurnasirpal II are discussed in terms of the possibilities and problems in attempting to correlate graphically the elevation view with plan views of unidentified square enclosures on the campaign gates of Shalmaneser III. The logical graphical transposition from elevation to plan view and the narrative context suggest that three square empty enclosures are representations of Imgur-Enlil.

The discovery by Hormuzd Rassam of two bronze-clad gates of Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) and his successor Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) in 1878 added a new dimension to the knowledge of the art of Assyria (Rassam, 1880/82: 1897: 200–20). However, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that Tell Balawat was accepted as the true provenance of the gates and firmly put on the Assyrian map as the site of the town of Imgur-Enlil (Lloyd, 1947: 173).

The Neo-Babylonian contracts in which one or more parties put up money to fund shares in a harrānu (caravan, trade venture) have been studied in detail by Lanz in his book Die neubabylonische harrānu-Geschäftsurkunden (1971). The present texts come from the Sippar Collection of the British Museum, two from Sippar and one from Borsippa.

The Brooklyn Museum houses twelve stone slabs with carved decoration from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. The motif of a stylized tree — the so-called Sacred Tree (see Figs. 1, 4, 6) — appears on seven of those slabs which come from rooms F, I, L, S, T of the ninth century palace at Nimrud. These tree renderings are representative of the sacred tree-type found in ten rooms of the royal residence and the west wing. Approximately 96 sacred trees, in two-register arrangement, appeared on the pictorial decorations in room I; the same motif occurred about 75 times in one-register arrangement on the reliefs of the other rooms. The abundance of the sacred tree motif on the wall decorations of the Northwest Palace attests to the significance of this plant. Its design deserves investigation; in Layard's words, “the tree, evidently a sacred symbol, is elaborately and tastefully formed.”

In his study of the Ashurnasirpal II reliefs in American collections, Stearns did not attempt to list the sacred trees, because “variations in the sacred tree occur only in minor details,” and “the tree in itself is rarely useful in identifying the location of the reliefs.” These statements make clear Stearns' belief that the sacred trees were nearly alike. Other scholars, notably Weidner and Reade, have pointed out that on a number of slabs now in American and European museums are carvings of matching half trees, therefore indicating that when paired, these trees belonged to adjoining slabs originally. In trying to match half trees, one finds that individual sacred trees do differ in the rendering of specific details. Bleibtreu, in her analysis of the sacred tree-type, lists three variants of the flower found on the palmette-garland framing the individual tree on three sides. The present author, after examining the sacred trees carved on the slabs in The Brooklyn Museum, concludes that the design of the tree-type is more varied than heretofore presumed, and that its construction is more complex than indicated in previous descriptions of the subjects. An analysis of the Assyrian sacred tree-type may lead to possible conclusions regarding its intended image: a stylized palm tree, a cult object, an emblem of vegetation or “tree of life”, an imperial symbol, or a combination of those forms. In addition, one may consider to what extent the rendering of individual trees was the consequence of artistic inventiveness.

This article continues the publication of tablets from the library of the temple of Šamaš at Sippar begun in volume 52 of this journal. Presented here are the library's copies of two texts which have in common the fact that they are not what they purport to be: Maništūšu's cruciform monument, and a literary letter of Samsu-iluna. Both texts are clearly fictitious compositions which postdate their supposed royal authors by a long time. Their purpose was apparently to supply evidence of historical precedent. The invented evidence which these documents present as fact would be intended to substantiate or advance the claims of those who wrote them. While both tablets are duplicates of known texts, each adds to a greater or lesser degree to our knowledge of these texts, not least by filling lacunae and by confirming or rebutting the restorations of previous editors.

The identification of a tablet from niche 8 B as a duplicate of the last column of a large Neo-Babylonian exercise tablet from Ur allows this text to be properly identified for the first time. It is one of several royal letters in Akkadian, some apparently genuine, others certainly bogus, which entered the scribal tradition and survive in late copies. This example purports to be from Samsu-iluna, the son and successor of Hammurapi of Babylon, to Enlil-nādin-šumi, a man whose several titles identify him as a very senior figure, and apparently a royal prince. As is the case with the Cruciform Inscription of Maništūšu, anachronisms in the text mark the composition out as later than it purports to be. Following the formulae which name the letter's addressee and sender the text itself opens with the phrase umma ana narê, an expression that also appears in a probably genuine letter of Nebuchadnezzar I.

Qasr Serij lies near an old route running along the southern foot of the Jabal al-Qusayr between Mosul and Nisibis (cf. Wilkinson, 1990: 50–51, Route B; Wilkinson, 1993: 552). As the name suggests, the site comprises the partly standing remains of a church originally dedicated to St Sergius, a popular eastern saint (Fiey, 1961). It has been identified as the stone church said to have been founded between 559–75 by one Mar Ahudemmeh at a spot known as Ain Qenoye or Ain Qena (‘Spring of Reeds’) in the vicinity of Balad (Eski Mosul) (Fiey, 1958). Preliminary descriptions, accompanied by the first known photographs of the ruins, were made by Gerald Reitlinger (1938: 148–49) and Aurel Stein (finally published in 1985: i, 105–107, Pl. 31c) following their respective surveys of medieval and Roman sites in the Jazira during the wet spring of 1938 (see also Lloyd, 1938: 136, No. 15; Ibrahim, 1986: 74, Site 211). In his subsequent study of the still-unexcavated ruins, David Oates (1962; 1968: 106–17, Pl. XIII) drew architectural parallels with fifth century and later churches in North Syria. Recently, in a series of important articles on early church architecture, Okada (1990; 1991; 1992) has drawn attention to the contrast in plan and fittings of these basilica-type churches with Sasanian and Early Islamic churches in southern Mesopotamia, the Iraqi Western Desert and the Gulf.

It has been recognized in glyptic and other studies (for example Ogden, 1982 and Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1992) that considerable advances in engraving technology were made once the bow drill, originally used vertically with a cap stone, had been adapted so that a cutting wheel could be fitted to a spindle mounted between fixed bearings (an arrangement similar to a “horizontal engraving spindle” or a “fixed lapidary lathe”). In some recent publications it has been suggested that this key innovation occurred as early as the fourth millennium B.C. (see for example Nissen, 1977; Collon, 1986; Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1992). In this paper we present some observations which we have made on Mesopotamian cylinder seals; they suggest that the introduction of the wheel occurred considerably later, probably not until the Old Babylonian period in the first half of the second millennium.

The designs engraved in intaglio around the convex sides of cylinder seals have been extensively studied by antiquarians and archaeologists since the end of the eighteenth century (see Collon, 1987). More recently consideration has been given to the techniques used to shape and polish the seals and to drill their perforations. The seals were usually made from natural minerals or stones and some of the major lapidary methods employed in Mesopotamia during the 3000 years or so of cylinder seal production, a time span which stretched from the Chalcolithic period to the Iron Age, have been identified (Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1978 and 1989 etc). Advances in lapidary methods, which allowed harder stones such as hematite and subsequently quartz to be commonly worked for seals during the second millennium, appear to reflect the advantages gained by the availability of emery, a more efficient abrasive material than quartz (Heimpel et al., 1988). Other advantages appear to have been gained by the change from stone-based lapidary techniques to those employing metal (copper alloy) tools (Gwinnett and Gorelick, 1987).

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief stratigraphic summary of the 14 seasons of excavations at Tell Brak from 1976 to 1993, under the auspices of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, and more recently, the McDonald Institute of the University of Cambridge. These excavations cover four millennia and have been carried out at a number of different parts of the site which, owing both to distance and site morphology it has not been possible to connect physically. In the course of fourteen seasons initial interpretations have inevitably changed; a major purpose of the article, therefore, is to provide an up-to-date framework within which the detail of the earlier reports can be read. Three final volumes are envisaged. The first, on the second millennium materials, is nearing completion and will be followed by one on the Akkadian and later third millennium occupation of Brak, with a third volume devoted to the prehistory of the site. This article thus constitutes an interim measure, to clarify the contexts of already published material; views presented here supersede those in all previous reports, including the previously published summary articles in Hamidiya 2 (1990). A full bibliography of preliminary reports is appended.

Under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq a new series of excavations at Tell Brak, northeastern Syria, commenced with a first season from mid March to late May 1994. Our gratitude for support goes especially to the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, in particular in Damascus to the Director-General, Dr Sultan Muhesen, and the Director of Excavations, Dr Adnan Bounni, in Hasake to Sd Jean Lazare and in Der ez-Zor to Sd Ass'ad Mahmud, and to our representative Sd Hussein Yusuf for his good-humoured assistance throughout the season. Funding was most generously provided by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, and the British Academy, to all of whom sincere thanks are expressed. For first-class mechanical support we thank Mr T. Falzani of Cambridge.

The team in 1994 comprised Dr Roger Matthews (excavations director), Dr Wendy Matthews (micromorphologist and pottery specialist), Ms Helen McDonald (registrar and pottery specialist), Professor Farouk al-Rawi (epigraphist and site supervisor), Ms Fiona Macalister (conservator), Mr James Conolly (lithics specialist), Ms Lisa Cooper, Mr Geoffery Emberling, Ms Candida Felli and Mr Nicholas Jackson (site supervisors). Ms Amy Emberling and Mr Jake Emberling joined us for part of the season, and we were visited in May by Professor D. Oates and Dr J. Oates.