Excavation at Tell Brak during 2001 and 2002, the twenty-first and twenty-second seasons of work at the site, continued research on occupation of the fourth and third millennia BC, periods in which Brak is known to have been particularly important in regional and interregional political and economic interactions. Work on the fourth millennium BC focused on two interrelated questions: the size and complexity of the local Late Chalcolithic (Northern Middle Uruk) city and the effects of the arrival of settlers from southern Mesopotamia as a part of the “Uruk expansion”. In addressing the second of these questions, we opened two new areas (TX and UA, Fig. 1) that appeared from surface finds to preserve in situ Late Uruk occupation. Our work on the mid- to late third-millennium occupation has focused on Area TC, which centres on a large building complex of the late Early Dynastic period and overlying levels. The curving southern wall of the building led us to term it the “Brak Oval”; the excavated portion of the building is a large-scale bakery with facilities for storing and grinding grain and a series of rooms arranged around an interior courtyard, although it so far appears to be a few curves short of a full oval. We have now recovered around 250 seal impressions from a variety of contexts in the building itself. The size of the building and the use of seals within it suggested that it might be part of a larger architectural complex, such as a palace or temple, and in the past two seasons we looked for a continuation of the building to the north and west. We also investigated earlier stages of the Oval's construction and excavated overlying buildings, the latest of which is a domestic structure made of pisé that dates to the end or just after the end of the Akkadian period.

The fourth season of excavations at H3 at the north end of Kuwait bay took place in the spring of 2002. It is a great pleasure to express again our thanks to all those people who made it possible to continue our work at this important sixth/fifth millennium site with its mix of Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamian traits. Major financial support again came from the National Council for Culture Arts and Letters, together with Kuwait Shell without whose continuing support we would be unable to work. We are equally indebted to our colleagues at the National Museum of Kuwait and especially to Mr Shehab Abdul Hamid Shehab, Director of the Department of Antiquities and Museums, and to Mr Sultan al Darwish and his field team. Our own staff worked magnificently under conditions which were sometimes far from ideal. Without the hard work and skill of members of both the teams we would have achieved little and we thank them all. The major objectives for the 2002 season were as follows:

– to complete the plan of the major complex of rooms in Area A

– to establish the stratigraphic relationship between Areas A and C

– to establish the relationship between the buildings in Area A and the fire pit horizon in Area F (the Foxhole)

– to explore a new area, Area G, to the north of the main complex.

The stratigraphic relationships were successfully established and the plan of an additional building in Area G can now be added to the map of the site. Once again, however, it was found that the limits of the Area A complex in the east lie outside the excavated area, although the development of the structure (s) through time is now much clearer.

A new study of the human skeletal material from Ur, Iraq, has drawn attention to exceptional morphologies of shape, robusticity and muscle development displayed by the bones. It is proposed that these changes result from the intensive performance of restricted activities from an early age, since it is mainly whilst the skeleton is still growing that bones can be so modelled by forces imposed upon them. Some possible activities are suggested. The presence of such tasks in a population implies a role specialisation that amounts to child labour, even slavery. These extreme changes have rarely been observed in other collections.

Les fouilles d'Y. Calvet, membre de la mission française à Larsa dirigée par J.-L. Huot, ont mis en évidence entre 1987 et 1989 trois grandes maisons d'un quartier situé dans la partie nord-est du tell, occupé au début du 2e millénaire avant J.-C. Bien que seule la poursuite des fouilles puisse le vérifier, il s'agit d'un quartier qui se différencie des quartiers contemporains d'Ur, de Nippur, de Sippar, de Tell Halawa et de Tell Harmal. L'une des trois maisons fouillées confirme le caractère exceptionnel de ce quartier, en offrant des aspects qui la distinguent de toutes les autres demeures fouillées, non seulement sur ce site, mais également ailleurs. Ces particularités partent du plan et de l'organisation de la maison; l'analyse volumétrique a déjà fait l'objet d'une étude détaillée.

If we conduct today a survey of early scientific studies on the archaeology of the Near East, most of them seem to be only of historic interest. Only a few of the results published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century remain valid. Nevertheless the first three decades of the twentieth century were a very important period for setting the agenda in methods and aims of Near Eastern archaeology. Moreover, many of these early theories and propositions still have an effect on current research, even when in the present state of knowledge they are out of date or no longer of relevance.

Among the seal impressions on the British Museum tablets from Abu Habbah/Sippar dating from the reign of Hammurabi (Teissier 1998), one impression seems of particular importance for the cultural and religious aspects connected with it (Fig. 1). A so-called suppliant goddess is the last figure in a scene at the other end of which (the central part is not preserved) there appear, framed by two guilloches, a kneeling nude male figure, a sort of stylized altar, and a bird with outstretched wings over a standard with two human heads (the upper one long-haired and thus female), apparently standing on a crouching lion. Beatrice Teissier (1998: 119) thinks that it “is probably a recut Old Syrian/Syro-Cappadocian seal: the small motifs are characteristic of these styles, whereas the suppliant goddess is not”. Although this remains a possibility, several considerations call for a different and more detailed historical framework for this impression.

The seal was impressed on the case of a house rental contract, together with two other Old Babylonian seals, respectively with a presentation and a contest scene, the latter one belonging to the typical Sippar style. On the tablet (in which all the individuals cited bear Akkadian names) only the month and the day of the contract are indicated, but on the case there also appears a dating formula from year 43 of Hammurabi.

It was a pleasure to accept the Buccellatis' invitation to publish the upper half of a flat, lead figure of a woman found at Urkesh and return to an old interest of mine. I once surmised that such objects were used by merchants in the metals trade as “cash” when travelling from Mesopotamia to Anatolia.

The Urkesh piece is defectively cast, and the ridge above the eyeballs and the edge of the chin give the face a misleading, cheerful expression. From other examples we know that the ridge would probably have surrounded the eyes and that, above the remnant of a protruding chin, the mouth would have been straight. The long thin nose is still preserved. Curls over the forehead are represented by round knobs, as are the tresses falling on either side of the face. The woman is nude except for four ridges of a high collar necklace. The breasts, represented as small knobs, are placed very high on the chest and the fingers of the upraised hands are spread as if supporting them. A prominent knob, surrounded by a wide ridge, emphasizes the navel.

The Urkesh piece is very welcome as an excavated example of a familiar but rare type of lead figurine. The first example was found in third-millennium levels at Troy on the west coast of Turkey in the nineteenth century. Four moulds for casting such a figurine are also known. These are peculiar in having so many dies tightly crowded onto a single surface. They are for amulets, jewellery and stamp seals, as well as the figurines, and each object has its own pour hole for casting it separately.

During his second expedition to Assyria, October 1849 to April 1851, Layard excavated extensively at both Nimrud and Nineveh, as in his first campaign of November 1845 to June 1847, but now principally in Sennacherib's palace on Kuyunjik. The two London institutions, the British Museum and the British Library, house a rich corpus of primary material, in the form of drawings, sketches, plans, notebooks, diaries and journals, letters and other manuscript documents, which not only add much information and detail to our knowledge of Layard's achievements, as published in his second book, Nineveh and Babylon (1853), but also give a vivid and colourful picture and almost day-by-day account of his excavations. These sources are here described and discussed, and in a subsequent article will be used to trace the course of Layard's second campaign at Sennacherib's palace on Kuyunjik.

Since this article deals for the most part with the primary sources and only secondarily with Layard's published account, Nineveh and Babylon, the rooms and courtyards of Sennacherib's palace are here referred to as Chamber A, etc., as found in these sources and also in Nineveh and its Remains (1849). It was only in Nineveh and Babylon that Layard changed to the system of designating rooms by Roman numerals (Fig. 1). Concordances for converting the chamber or room letters to numbers and vice versa will be found on p. 213.

It has been noted with some regret, although with little surprise, that most of the tablets belonging to the Neo-Babylonian library discovered within the temple of Šamaš at Sippar duplicate texts already known to us. The medical tablet presented here, apart from being a welcome addition to the scarce number — compared to the Assyrian medical tablets — of medical texts from Babylonia, is therefore especially interesting as it contains an excerpt text for which no duplicate has been hitherto identified.

The tablet IM 132670 (Sippar 8/352, which measures 215 × 133 mm) contains four columns of text and is almost completely preserved; only the upper right and the lower left corner are broken and a crack and some rubbing impede the understanding of column iii. The text is a collection of thirty-eight prescriptions that treat diseases affecting the head, temples, ears, eyes, nose, teeth and lungs. Their arrangement follows the scheme known in Akkadian as ištu muḫḫi adi šēpē “from head to foot” (literally: “from the cranium to the feet”). All major text collections that treat parts of the body are thus arranged, like the therapeutic, diagnostic and physiognomic series and the lexical list Ugu-mu. Numerous prescriptions of the new text have parallels in other medical texts. In most cases these parallels encompass only one or two entries. In two Assyrian texts, however, several consecutive prescriptions are paralleled. The text AO 11447 parallels §§3–12 while in BAM 44 §§ 33–8 are noted. BAM 44 lists the prescriptions in the same order, only inserting two additional prescriptions at one point. AO 11447, on the contrary, not only adds several other prescriptions but lists them in a different order to the effect that the same prescriptions are used for different symptoms.