Gertrude Bell died peacefully in the morning hours of Monday 12th July 1926, two days before her 58th birthday. Fifty years later we recall her devotion to a country in which she had dedicated the last years of her life. Her bones rest where she had wished them to rest, in the soil of Iraq.

I saw her for the last time, three months before she died, together with A. H. Whitburn, the architect at Ur, towards the end of March 1926, in her little house behind what was then named New Street Baghdad. We reached, as Victoria Sackville West has described it, “a door in the blank wall, … a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden-path edged with carnations in pots, a little veranda and a little low house at the end of the garden path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell”. She received us courteously—“Ah you two”, she said, “I am glad you have come”, for she was tired and dispirited, long overdue for the leave that she never took, and now that she had discarded her activities in politics, archaeology had become the ruling passion of what was left of her life.

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.

When, in their contributions to the revised Cambridge Ancient History, two eminent archaeologists independently thought it best to refer only in passing to the enigmatic structure at Jamdat Nasr in central Iraq excavated by Langdon in 1925–6, further discussion of it needs more than usually precise justification. Frankfort put the matter explicitly: “Its plan has not been sufficiently elucidated for guesses regarding its function to be profitable.” The charge is indeed accurate; but is the implied sentence of complete and continuing obscurity fair? May not contents be as revealing of function as plan? This building was indeed not only badly excavated, but also inadequately and obscurely published. Its contents, however, were adequately published, and have since been widely recognized as a distinctive component of Mesopotamian culture in the last quarter of the fourth millennium B.C. Outstanding among them was a collection of archaic tablets which constitute very nearly the oldest, and most coherent, administrative archive yet retrieved from antiquity. These tablets alone will continue to send scholars from time to time back to the building whence they came. My purpose here is simple and threefold: to make Langdon's plan more easily accessible and as complete as possible on the basis of the surviving original draft; to set out concisely what further information there is on these excavations and those of 1928; and finally to attempt not so much to resolve the “temple-palace” dilemma as to set discussion of this building on as firm and broad a basis of evidence as is now possible. For the purposes of this paper I accept the opinion of Delougaz that the pottery found at Jamdat Nasr, though not necessarily a homogeneous group, belongs largely to Diyala Protoliterate “d”.

The fragment published here is of black stone, from Mosul Museum, registered IM 55640, where the writer saw it on display in 1967. It comes from a stela that was probably similar in shape to most other neo-Assyrian stelae, and it records not only a military event and the king's name, but also a royal grant of land.

In 1912 Macalister published the 100-foot long line of enormous, rough uninscribed standing stones at Gezer in Palestine. The next year, Andrae published the strange, double row of stelae, some rough, some uninscribed, mostly very large, which he had found at Assur. The similarity between the two installations was immediately noted and for over sixty years the Stelenreihen at Assur have been cited in the many discussions of the maṣṣēbôt of Palestine. The singular importance of the Assur stelae lies in the fact that some of them were inscribed, whereas the Palestinian stones were not. The Assur inscriptions tell us that the stones represented people, and Eduard Meyer and others believed that the Gezer stones probably had the same meaning. Obviously, in order to project the meaning of the Assur stelae on the Gezer stones, one assumption had to be made: that the people in the two areas were practising identical customs. Curiously enough, this basic assumption has yet to be proved. In fact, many later scholars have taken the Assur stones to be merely one example of a wide-spread custom of setting up plain stones. The Assur stelae have been lumped together with the ever increasing number of plain stones, those found singly as well as those discovered in clusters, with Biblical evidence for maṣṣēbôt, with Punic stelae, and even with Greek hero cults. Far from considering the Assur inscriptions as the determining factor in interpreting uninscribed stones elsewhere, meanings drawn from this wide body of comparative material have been imposed on the Stelenreihen.

In his study on Mesopotamian inheritance F. R. Kraus remarked that greater clarification on inheritance rights might be achieved from the demographic, economic and sociological statistics yielded by specialized study of the texts. I shall here deal with the data emerging from the Old Babylonian Sippar material and my interpretation of these data, focusing solely on the question of kinship and the rights of inheritance and approaching the problem more from an anthropological perspective than a legal one.

As Robin Fox in his Kinship and Marriage states, “every society makes some provision for the transfer of property on death and the transfer is usually to a kinsman … If ‘next of kin’ are to inherit, then nearness of kinship has to be defined; and among these near kin some order of preference has to be set up”.

With the generous consent of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavations at the site of Abu Salabikh were re-opened in September-December 1975 by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, under the writer's direction. It is a pleasure to record here our profound gratitude to Dr. Isa Salman, Director-General of Antiquities, and to all those members of his directorate who made our work possible and assisted us in every way. Special mention must be made of our representatives, Ghassan Azzawi, Ali Hashim, and Abdul-Mejid Muhammad, who never failed to give us all possible help, and of Dr. Abdul-Hadi al-Fouadi, whose assistance as director of excavations in Baghdad was indispensable. The members of the team were Niels Christian Andersen, M.A.A., architect, Dr. P. R. S. Moorey, cataloguer, R. M. C. Shirley, archaeologist, Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan and Kathryn Tubb, photographer and conservator respectively, and Mr. and Mrs. Philip and Adrienne Watson, archaeologists. Mrs. Carolyn Postgate was in charge of the pottery, and Miss Martha Patrick nobly doubled up as child-minder and draughtswoman. All members earned our sincere gratitude for their conscientiousness, and invariably did more than the mere recital of their assigned functions would imply. Grants towards the costs of the excavations were made by the British Academy, the British Museum, Trinity College Cambridge, and the C. H. W. Johns Fund, Cambridge, and to all these institutions we are greatly indebted for their support.

A recent article in this journal shows a most welcome interest in Berossus, who has suffered a most undeserved neglect, especially in the English language, over the last century. Further, the writer of this article has for the first time tackled the problem of Pseudo-Berossus which Felix Jacoby posed in his text in FGrH by assigning certain fragments to “(Pseudo-)Berossos”. Jacoby's death before the commentary on this section was written has deprived us of knowledge of the grounds for this editorial procedure. The matters involved are highly important for the history of Babylonian ideas and the recent treatment of the problem merits critical scrutiny.

The agreed facts are that Berossus wrote his Babyloniaca in three books, and that genuine excerpts are quoted in Josephus and Eusebius, though these may not be the ipsissima verba of the author, having perhaps been taken from some sort of digest made by Alexander Polyhistor. The original work seems to have had a remarkably limited circulation in antiquity. These excerpts deal with mythology, legend and history relevant to the Old Testament. Of course Berossus may have written other works which are not quoted by Josephus and Eusebius because they lacked any Biblical interest. Some Greek and Latin authors, especially Vitruvius, Seneca, Pliny the Elder and Censorinus, cite Berossus on astrological matters, and it is these which Jacoby assigned to “(Pseudo-)Berossos”. Drews is entirely correct when he refuses to reject Josephus’ testimonium about Berossus’ reputation for astronomy, and since Berossus had no knowledge of the best contemporary Babylonian mathematical astronomy, as Neugebauer has remarked, the older traditional astronomy cum astrology must be meant. So far so good. No doubt Berossus did write on this subject, either in his Babyloniaca or elsewhere. But some statements in the Latin writers are so erroneous as to raise serious doubts whether they had themselves read Berossus.