An expedition under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq completed its ninth season at Nimrud, ancient Calah, during the first week in May, 1958, after a two months' campaign which began early in March. The season marked a decade of activity on this site by the School, for the first campaign was begun in March, 1949, and the records of that and the following one were first published in 1950. Subsequently expeditions were sent out in the spring of every year with the exception of 1954 which was entirely devoted to publication. The accounts of our most recent operations here recorded in 1959 once again realise an objective which the School has always considered to be of primary importance, namely to give an account in this journal of its activities in the field within a lapse of not more than two years after each campaign. This year we are primarily indebted to Mr. David Oates for carrying this burden, thus fulfilling his obligations as Field Director, an office which he assumed with distinction in 1958. In the article following on this one he has given a detailed account of the field-work at Fort Shalmaneser together with the historical problems involved. Articles with many photographs (including some in colour) of the ivories, describing the discoveries in this building have in the meantime been published in the Illustrated London News of November 23 rd, 27th, and December 7th, 1957 and January 17th, 1959. A very brief account of the initial work in the fortress during 1957 was also included in the general report on the 1957 campaign in Iraq XX, Pt. 2, 1958, pp. 106–108, and the extensions and modifications made to the plan of the building during our 1958 season may be seen by comparing Plate XIV of that issue with Plate XXIII of this one.

The outer defences of the city of Calah form a rough rectangle nearly five miles in circumference. They appear to have consisted of a massive single wall, with projecting towers at intervals, supplemented on the north and east sides by a ditch, of which traces can be seen on air photographs (Iraq XVI, Pt. 1, Pl. X). On the west and south-west natural and artificial watercourses took the place of the ditch; the Tigris skirted the conglomerate terrace on which the west wall and the citadel were founded, while the Zab canal, dug by Aššurnaṣir-pal II to water the plain below the city, probably approached the south wall some distance east of the citadel and followed it westwards to an outfall on the Tigris. At the south-east corner a more complex system was developed to frustrate, or over-awe, potential enemies approaching along the great highway from Erbil, Kirkuk and the Kurdish highlands, which crossed the Upper Zab near Tell Abu Sheetha and thence probably followed the modern motor track through Abbas Rejeib to the citadel. This track now passes the bitumen wells in the valley east of the city, and crosses the city wall in the angle of a great reentrant which clearly marks the site of the heavily defended Erbil Gate (Iraq XX, Pt. 2, Pl. XIV). Some 350 m. south of this gate stands the corner tower, represented by the eastern mound of a pair now known as Tulul al Azar, which measures about 100 by 80 m. overall and stands 20 m. above the level of the plain.

The pottery from Fort Shalmaneser is a homogeneous collection that spans the period from the fall of Nimrud and the sack of the fortress in 612 B.C. to the last squatter occupation of the ruined building, perhaps some fifty years later. The time interval cannot have been long, as there is absolutely no difference between the pottery that was in use at the time of the sack and that of the latest squatter settlement. This pottery is, of course, identical with that from the citadel which we have come to associate with the 612 B.C. destruction, and it is hoped to publish soon a second article giving additional late seventh century types not as yet recovered from Fort Shalmaneser and thus not included here. The present account is restricted to the latter site, both because it is intended to supplement the preceding report on the excavations and because the Fort Shalmaneser material is a large and representative collection of well-dated Assyrian pottery from a single building.

It will be clear from the excavation report that work at Fort Shalmaneser is far from complete and that many questions will remain unanswered until the resumption of digging brings us fresh evidence. In a few cases, for instance, where pottery has been found on or just above the Assyrian floor level, it is impossible on the basis of our present knowledge of the building to determine whether it should be assigned to the period immediately before or immediately after the sack. But as pottery from such levels is identical both with groups from deposits that can confidently be dated to the 612 destruction, and with other groups found at a higher level that can equally confidently be attributed to reoccupation by squatters, any further stratigraphical evidence we may uncover will in no way affect the general dating of the pottery presented here.

In the early spring of 1956, a peasant working in the fields enclosed by the town wall of Nimrud, at the foot of the akropolis, on its south-east side, came upon several fragments of a large block of white limestone. The shape of the larger fragments and the circumstance that several fragments were inscribed in cuneiform writing at once made it clear that they formed part of an Assyrian statue. Under the supervision of the guard who looks after the interests of the Iraq Department of Antiquities and the Nimrud Expedition, the fragments were brought to the Expedition House on the tell, where they awaited the arrival of the team of archaeologists who were to conduct the seventh expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

The expedition took the field on March 4th, 1956; and Professor M. E. L. Mallowan, its Director, entrusted me with the publication of the statue inscription. For this permission I acknowledge my sincere appreciation. Publication has been postponed until the present time owing to the circumstance that photographs of the restored statue, now on display in the Iraq Museum, have only recently been made available through the good offices of the Directorate General of Antiquities of the Republic of Iraq. I express my gratitude to the Directorate General for providing me with these photographs.

The principle governing the selection of the sixteen letters here published is that all illustrate some aspect of Assyrian administrative practice. Unfortunately the tablets represented in this group are, generally speaking, amongst the worst-preserved of the whole collection; this is an almost inevitable result of the method of publication so far followed, since, at least in the case of the longer letters, any better-preserved specimen is likely to have yielded details betraying it as arising from some specific historio-geographical setting, and so to have been included, or saved for inclusion, in another group. Only those letters which cannot usefully be treated in the context of some particular area or event are included here.

In some of these letters the main point at issue has, I am aware, escaped me. I have, however, despite this, ventured to offer full translations throughout, except where prevented by the fragmentary nature of the text, in the hope that they may serve as a starting-point for others. In doubtful passages I have attempted to bear in mind a maxim of my revered teacher, Professor Sidney Smith: “If it makes sense, it may well be wrong; if it makes nonsense, it is wrong.”

Despite the large numbers of fibulae or safety pins that have been found all over the Near East remarkably little attention has been paid to the complete historical development of the fibula throughout the area. Accordingly the present article attempts to follow the main lines of the local development from the time when the first Mycenaean forms reached the area, down to the time when Roman ones finally replaced the last indigenous types.

As can be seen from the map opposite, the fibulae found in the Near East have an extremely wide distribution which, at least by the seventh century B.C. roughly coincided with the limits of the Assyrian Empire. In addition, the discovery of a number of related forms in the Caucasus would seem to indicate that various Near Eastern examples must have passed through Urartu as well.

From a historical point of view, the appearance of the fibula in the Near East can be directly related to the expansion of Mycenaean trade in the thirteenth century, which seems to have brought the new form to Cyprus and the adjoining Asiatic coast some time before 1200 B.C. Thereafter the type seems to have remained a predominantly local form in Syro-Palestine until increasing political and commercial ties between Phoenicia and Assyria finally brought the type further east about the middle of the eighth century B.C.

The Roman occupation of Northern Iraq lasted less than a hundred and seventy years, from A.D. 197 to 364, and was little more than a turbulent episode in the long struggle between Rome on the west and Persia, under her successive Parthian and Sassanian rulers, on the east. The purely military character of this frontier extension is the first of the factors controlling the nature and distribution of its material remains; the second is the high degree of civilisation which the area had attained long before the Romans came, and was to maintain with little change long after their withdrawal. The process of Romanisation, if it was ever attempted, has left no mark. New towns would hardly have been built on sites already occupied by cities far older than Rome itself, and new roads were only constructed for particular military purposes which did not coincide with the requirements of commercial traffic and were not served by the existing highways. Few western imports have been found, and only five Latin inscriptions, three dedications by Roman soldiers and two milestones, have come to light in Iraq; it is significant that there is no known inscription of this period in Greek, the koinē of civilian life in the other provinces of the Roman East. Roman historians usually refer to Mesopotamia only as the scene of eastern campaigns of which they had, with the exception of Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century, no personal or detailed knowledge.