Members of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq first visited Tell al-Hawa in January 1986 from the Saddam Dam. The site appears as a massive, solitary giant, dominating the landscape and dwarfing all other sites in the region (Plate Ia). From the summit, 30 m high, there is an impressive view over a vast plain covered with mounds in all directions. A walk over the main mound revealed a particularly wide range of pottery types representing most known periods. The size, scope and archaeological potential of Tell al-Hawa and the surrounding plain led us to decide on further investigation.

A first season of survey and excavations was conducted from October 1986 to April 1987 inclusive. The aim of the project was to carry out a single, integrated study of a major site in its context.

We would like to thank specially Dr Mu'ayyad Sa'id Damerji, the Director-General of Antiquities and Heritage, and Dr Abd as-Sittar Azzawi, then Director of the Antiquities Office in the North, without whose help the Hawa Project would not have been possible. For the duration of the 1987 season we were allowed use of Antiquities Office housing and working facilities in the citadel at Tel'afar, for which we are very grateful. Mr Salem Yunis, then Inspector at Tel'afar, was of considerable assistance to us at all times, as were our representatives in the field, Mr Mohammed Zaki Abdul Kerim and Mr Meti Barbar al-Tumm.

The so-called “Iltani archive” is not only one of the few cuneiform archives we know which belonged to a woman, but also so far the only larger group of Old Babylonian texts from northern Mesopotamia which may essentially date to a period after the sack of Mari, when Babylon gained ascendancy in the north, and is therefore of considerable interest. In spite of the excellent editio princeps of the archive and admirable efforts of its reviewers, many difficulties of interpretation, even with regard to quite basic issues, persist, mainly because the letters in Iltani's archive are too short and cursive to permit a coherent reconstruction of its historical context. Building on previous analyses this paper discusses possible solutions to some of these difficulties, and although necessarily of a tentative character, the following brief remarks may hopefully further the understanding of this interesting archive and its setting.

With its more than 200 texts the Iltani archive is by far the largest group among the Old Babylonian texts found at Rimah. The archive consists of 151 letters, 50 administrative texts, 1 school text and a few fragments found in two rooms, VI and XIV, of the phase 3b palace.

As shown by her seal inscription Iltani was a daughter of Samu-Addu, king of Karana in the time of the “Assyrian interregnum” at Mari, and married to the diviner Aqba-Hammu, known from the Mari texts to have been a highly placed official under Aškur-Addu, king of Karana during the latter part of Zimri-Lim's reign, and presumably Iltani's brother. It is generally agreed that her archive must date mainly after the fall of Mari, at a time when Hammurapi of Babylon had extended his power over much of Upper Mesopotamia, and Aqba-Hammu ruled Karana as a vassal of Babylon. Zimri-Lim and Aškur-Addu are never mentioned in the texts, Aqba-Hammu, in one of his two extant seal inscriptions declared himself “servant of Hammurapi” and brought tribute to Babylon, local scribes in the Karana area used “southern” styles, and finally many of the letters in the archive generally show quite clearly that the Sinjar area now was linked with Southern Mesopotamia.

When Aššurnaṣirpal II commissioned his artists to carve scenes of battle on stone, an artistic tradition was created which was to last for two hundred years of Assyrian history—a tradition which perfectly reflected the ideology and served the propaganda purposes of empire. Narrative was ideally suited to express such concepts as the insurmountable power of Assyria, the inevitability of its victory over its enemies, and the empire's wide extent embracing varied peoples and lands under one mighty and invincible king. These concepts underlie all the manifestations of the narrative art of the Assyrian palaces. The basic elements and subjects remain the same—foreign peoples dressed in their native clothes, enemy cities under siege, victorious Assyrian soldiers killing enemies, and, of course, the king, sometimes seated on his throne, sometimes standing in his chariot or hunting lions. However, the means by which these elements were deployed to express these concepts changed perceptibly over time—from the vigorous introduction of the genre under Aššurnasirpal through the imaginative inventiveness of Sennacherib to the finesse of Aššurbanipal. With this in mind, it would be instructive to examine a few examples of the narrative technique used under one king, Tiglath-Pileser III who reigned from 745 to 727 B.C., both to determine in what way stylistic devices were employed to express this ideology and as a means of further defining what that ideology was.

The volume of ivories found at Nimrud is overwhelming. Nevertheless, this very quantity presents us with unique opportunities to investigate the ivory trade in the early first millennium B.C. It allows us to gather together groups of similar styles and thus, if it can be accepted that a coherent style-group was probably the output of a specific “school” of carving, to define the production of different schools. The principal purpose of this article is to try to reconstruct the output of one of these schools, the flame and frond school, which belongs to the North Syrian tradition of ivory-carving. After bringing together some of its products, another aim is to suggest the school's original location and the time of its floruit.

Only a minority of the ivories found at Nimrud were in the easily recognizable Assyrian style, best known from the wall reliefs. The remainder were carved in a variety of styles and techniques and were almost certainly brought to Nimrud as booty or tribute. As early as 1912 Poulsen suggested that these ivories could be divided into two groups, the Phoenician and the North Syrian. The criteria he used to distinguish them were the absence of Egyptian elements on North Syrian ivories and the relationship between North Syrian ivories and reliefs found at Syrian sites such as Carchemish, Zincirli, Maras and Tell Halaf.

The Babylonian poem šar gimir dadmē (perhaps best entitled in English “Išum and Erra”) has been available to scholars in its hitherto most complete form since 1969 in the admirable edition of L. Cagni. Now excavations conducted by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage at Me-Turnat (modern Tell Haddad) have produced a first-millennium tablet in Babylonian script from the Neo-Assyrian Period occupation of the site, giving the text of tablet II of the composition. Previously the second tablet could be reconstructed as three separate broken passages (totalling 112 lines) with two lacunae. The new tablet, IM 121299 (TH 319), restores the first lacuna (four lines in length), completes some broken lines and restores part of the second lacuna (at least 29 lines), establishing altogether about 45 new lines of the text, some admittedly only to a very fragmentary degree. The whole tablet must be at least 159 lines long. Unfortunately the Me-Turnat tablet is damaged, and is rather poorly written by an apprentice scribe who has made a number of evident mistakes and incorrectly formed signs. Nonetheless the text of the poem is substantially increased by it. For a photograph, see Plate XX.

It has long been realized that much of the stonework recovered from sites in southern Mesopotamia must have been imported, either as finished artefacts or as raw lumps which were then fashioned locally. The rare outcrops of stone which occur in the alluvium, principally around Uruk and Ur, are restricted to limestone and its light-coloured derivatives (calcite, gypsum, etc.). These were exploited extensively for sculpture, vessels and other relatively small objects throughout the third millennium and beyond, forming the staple medium for the bulk of the Mesopotamian stoneworking industry. Along with these materials, however, a not insignificant proportion of the stonework found on early Babylonian sites consists of dark igneous and metamorphic stones, of which the nearest sources are the mountains and plateaux which border Mesopotamia to the north-west, north and east, extending across the Gulf into Oman. Notable categories which illustrate this phenomenon are the numerous vessels deposited in private graves of the Jemdet Nasr to Early Dynastic II periods, the elaborately decorated “steatite” vessels of the mid-third millennium, and the royal statuary of the Sargonids and their successors.

The major obstacle facing the student of Mesopotamian post-Assyrian ceramics is the lack of reliably dated pottery earlier than the Seleucian-Parthian material from Seleucia and Ctesiphon. The condition of the sites from which this pottery was recovered precluded stratigraphic recovery, even when this was attempted. Gibson's work at Nippur led him to suggest (1975: 76) that many ceramics classified as late Neo-Babylonian pottery are actually Achaemenid and some considered Achaemenid are Seleucid. The extensive excavations conducted at Babylon in the 1890's yielded material from the period of Achaemenid control, but the relevant sections have not been fully published. These ceramics were excavated on a palace site and are not “common ware”, or pottery in ordinary daily use.

Pottery from sites in southern Mesopotamia varies in its value for the study of mid-first millennium B.C. regional ceramics. This variability results from its manner of recovery and its context. The late pottery excavated at Ur by Woolley and his predecessors was almost entirely from graves (see Taylor 1855a and 1855b; Hall 1919) and included a large number of shapes with imprecise stratigraphic attributions. However, the corpus recovered was of great value for its typological variety. In one sense, the Ur pottery is a “perfect” collection of its period, because it is the result of intentional rather than accidental deposition and is therefore likely to show one form of contemporaneous usage. Once the large Ur corpus has been checked, it may be used to illuminate material from smaller sites, or from surveys.

In the course of research undertaken with M. Louise Scott in Mosul and Baghdad in early 1987 I had the great privilege of making the acquaintance of Sd. Mohammed Ali Mustafa, who went out of his way to help us in all that he could, and whose wonderful knowledge and generosity we shall always remember. Among the material which he unearthed for us were photographs of inscribed stone troughs from Nineveh and his own copies of their inscriptions.

These troughs came to light in 1954, when a section of the ancient city walls of Nineveh just North of the mound of Nebi Yunus was destroyed. At that time Mohammed Ali Mustafa was already involved in work at Nineveh and was able to carry out an emergency investigation. Unfortunately, there is no map surviving which shows the exact location of the troughs, but an examination of photographs taken at the time (Plate XXI, in which latter note especially the “pagoda” roof in the background to the left: this still stands) and of the area as it now appears, along with consideration of details provided by Mohammed Ali Mustafa, allows us to fix the position of the troughs just within the walls at the place marked on Fig. 1. The error is not likely to be more than 15 metres up or down the length of the walls.

Our work at Tell Brak in 1987 and 1988 included investigations in all three periods of major interest on the site, the fourth, third and second millennia B.C., but this brief article is not intended as the regular biennial report on all our discoveries, for two reasons. There is unusual pressure of space in this volume of Iraq, and we have also called a temporary halt to excavation in 1989 in order to prepare Volume I of a series of final reports on the excavations, which will deal with the Mitanni and Old Babylonian periods and will, we hope, be in press when Iraq 51 appears. We must, nonetheless, express our gratitude for generous financial support to the British Academy, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (H. Dunscombe Colt Archaeological Institute Gift and Armida Colt Gift), and the Crowther-Beynon and C. H. W.Johns Funds of Cambridge University. We also offer our sincere thanks to all our friends and colleagues in the Directorate General of Antiquities in Damascus, Aleppo, Deir ez Zor and Hasake for their invaluable cooperation, and particularly to Dr. Afif Bahnassi, then Director General, and to Dr. Adnan Bounni, who has always taken a close and encouraging interest in our work, and to H.E. the Governor of Hasake province, who generously arranged for the loan of a mechanical shovel to remove our dumps in preparation for extended excavation in the next season. Our thanks are also due to Sayid Ibrahim, our Representative in 1987 who has always been most helpful in administrative matters, and Sayid Mohammed Muslim, Representative in 1988, who was an invaluable member of the expedition and, in particular, a most effective site supervisor on part of the building with which this article is primarily concerned. We must record our personal appreciation of the great contribution made by our colleagues, J.-M. Meunier, who was Assistant Director of the excavations in 1987 but was unfortunately unable to join us in 1988, and Jesper Eidem (epigraphist and site supervisor) and Helen McDonald (registrar and draftsman) who were with us in both seasons. In 1987 Mrs. Risë Taylor Andreasen was our very skilled conservator, John MacGinnis and Timothy Matney served as site supervisors, and Miss Susan Oates as archaeological assistant; Dr. Önhan Tunca also joined us for a month as site supervisor. In 1988 we were fortunate to have the assistance of David Warburton and Miss Wendy Horton as site supervisors, and Miss Fiona Burtt as finds assistant. We are extremely grateful to them all for their hard work and good company.

Four samples from Tell Brak were analysed for radiocarbon content at the British Museum Research Laboratory in 1987, with the results given below (Ambers et al., 1989). All results are quoted in the form recommended by Stuiver and Polach (1977) in uncalibrated years BP (before 1950) and corrected for measured δ13C variation. Calibrations are given based on 1σ error terms, following the curves of Pearson and Stuiver (1986) and Pearson et al. (1986), using Method A of revision 2.0 of the University of Washington Quaternary Laboratory Radiocarbon Calibration Program (Stuiver and Reimer 1986), and are quoted in the form recommended in Mook (1986); the end points of the calibrated date ranges have been rounded to the nearest five years.

Three of the samples (BM-2554, -2555, -2556), all of charcoal, were treated with dilute acid and alkali to remove contamination. A single grain sample from context CH 450 was separated into humic and humin fractions, which were measured independently. All samples were analysed by conventional liquid scintillation counting. Errors quoted are the counting error for the sample combined with an estimate of the errors contributed by the modern and background samples. This estimate includes both counting and non-counting errors, the latter being computed from differences in the overall count-rates observed among the individual backgrounds and moderns.

During the 1987 season of excavations at Tell Brak under the direction of David and Joan Oates, the skeleton of a small equid was revealed on the floor of what was probably the courtyard of a large public building believed to date to the Akkadian period (locus FS 565). Poplar beams from an adjacent courtyard have provided radiocarbon dates of 3990 ± 50 and 3960 ± 50 BP (BM-2554 and -2556, see p. 213), 2580–2455 cal B.C.

Associated with the equid skeleton was a small number of bones of domestic pig, cattle, sheep/goat, and a Demoiselle crane (Anthropoides virgo; identified by G. Cowles, Bird Section, BM(NH)).

Excavation of the bones showed that not only was the skeleton exceptionally well preserved but that the soft parts of the body were moulded in the earth (Plates XXIX a-b). The lungs and stomach could be easily discerned and the coiled intestines were represented by strings of coprolites. The “soft parts” were covered with what appeared to be a surface film of orange-green material. Everything was lifted with as much care as possible by the excavation conservator, Mrs. Risë Taylor-Andreasen, using Paraloid B72 (methyl methacrylate/ethyl acrylate) and UHU (cellulose nitrate) as consolidants where essential.

Under the auspices of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq a first season of renewed excavations at Jemdet Nasr took place from 19th October to 31st December 1988. In the first place we record our gratitude to the people and institutions who enabled the excavations to take place. To Dr. Mu'ayyad Said Damerji, Director-General of the Department of Antiquities and Heritage, and the staff of the External Relations section, go our sincere thanks for their cooperation throughout the excavations. The assistance of Dr. Behija Khalil Ismail, Director of the Iraq Museum, is also gratefully acknowledged. The personal thanks of all the team go to our representative, Sd. Borhan Shakir Sulayman, whose much-appreciated assistance in all aspects of the work contributed in no small measure to the achievements of the season. For encouragement and assistance at various stages of the project gratitude is due to Dr. J. A. Black, Dr. P. R. S. Moorey, Prof. D. and Dr. J. Oates and Mr. J. N. Postgate. Financial assistance was received from the British Academy and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, for which the writer is sincerely grateful.

Apart from the writer, as Director, the team consisted of: R. K. Englund (epigraphist), W. Matthews (micromorphologist), M. A. Woodburn (photographer), H. D. Baker, A. Lupton and M. Sarley (archaeologists). Their enthusiasm and diligence at the initiation of a new research project in Iraq made the season extremely pleasurable and rewarding. Among the many visits to the excavations we may mention those of Dr. Walid al-Jadir of the University of Baghdad, and Mr. P. Elborn and colleagues from the British Council, Baghdad.

A shift in the emphasis of archaeological field-work has taken place during 1987 and 1988. With the completion of much of the rescue work which has played such an important part over recent years, energies have been largely re-channelled into research projects, many with long-term designs. Thus, the past two years have seen the initiation of new research work at Abu Duwari, Ashur, Dlihim, Harba, Jemdet Nasr, Kar Tukulti Ninurta, Kish, Nimrud, Nineveh, and Tell es-Sawwan, while work has continued at about a dozen other research sites. At the same time, rescue work has commenced within the North and East Jezira irrigation areas.

The most significant factor in this flourishing of research work in Iraq has been the unstinting co-operation of the Iraqi Office of Antiquities and Heritage, and it is to its Director-General, Dr. Mu‘ayyad Said Damerji, that our greatest debt of gratitude is due, not least for permission to publish these short reports. We thank also Dr. Munir Taha and Dr. Sabah Jasim of the Office's staff for their considerable assistance. As always, this survey would not have been feasible without the gracious co-operation of all the excavators involved. To them go our thanks and the hope that they will look forgivingly on any errors of fact or interpretation that may have been made herein.