In Iraq, Vol. XVI, Pt. I, pp. 98–107, Professor Mallowan described the unique discovery of Assyrian writing-boards made of ivory and wood at Nimrud in 1953. They had been preserved in silt below water-level in a well in Room A B of the “North-West” Palace of Aššur-naṣir-pal. It is claimed that these boards, which originally formed a polyptych, are the earliest form of ancient book and as such warrant a more detailed study. In the article which follows, on pages 14 ff., Miss Howard describes the ivory boards and discusses the technique employed in their manufacture. It therefore remains to add such further evidence for the use of writing-boards in the Neo-Assyrian period as is available from contemporary literature. Scholars have long suspected that the Assyrians must have used wax-covered boards as a writing-material, but no example had hitherto been found.

The tablets are approximately 33·8 cms. in length and 15·6 cms. in width, including the margins which are raised 3 mm. to allow for some clearance of the waxed surface, which was thus protected from abrasion when the boards were closed. Both faces of the boards within the margins were hatched with criss-cross lines to make a gripping surface for the wax on which the inscription would be written. The bees-wax with which the boards were coated was mixed with sulphide of arsenic, or orpiment, which rendered it sufficiently fluid to spread easily over the surface and more plastic for writing.

In 1952 the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in the course of its excavations at Nimrud, found, in the chamber known as ZT 4, a collection of over three hundred Assyrian clay tablets. Dr. C. J. Gadd at once recognized that the greater part of the collection consisted of letters from a royal archive, and that they were closely similar in nature to those in the British Museum collection published by Harper. The tablets as found were unbaked and heavily impregnated with salts from the soil, and in order to preserve them it was decided to bake them in a furnace made from local materials and designed for the purpose by J. H. Reid, A.R.I.B.A. At that time there existed at Nimrud no apparatus for measuring furnace temperatures (a lack which has since been rectified), so that almost inevitably a few tablets were baked rather more than the ideal demanded. Whilst these few have taken on a coarse bricklike texture, their legibility is not substantially impaired by this, whereas about a dozen tablets which, probably by being placed in the coolest part of the furnace during the shortest firing, received insufficient baking, are now, as a result of the crystallizing-out of salts, crumbling in their boxes and liable to fall to fragments at a touch. The contrast fully vindicates the employment of this emergency treatment in the field.

Professor M. E. L. Mallowan, in his account of The Excavations at Nimrud (Kalḫu), 1951 makes four references to glass (two on p. 15, one each on pp. 18 and 19), three of them concerning glass fragments and one to the use of glass as an overlay. Two groups of these fragments were sent by him to Mr. D. B. Harden at the Ashmolean Museum, and Mr. Harden in turn passed them on to me for examination. Subsequently Professor Mallowan handed to me several other fragments. For the purpose of this account the material has been classified in six groups and labelled as specimens A to F. Each specimen may consist of a single fragment or of two or more closely related. Their character, their location when found, and the approximate date when they were deposited are summarised in Table I from information supplied by Professor Mallowan.

No inference should be drawn that the glass objects found were themselves of the dates quoted. They may have been contemporary or older.

In the season 1950–51, the Joint Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and of the Babylonian Museum of the University of Pennsylvania excavated in Nippur a cache of twenty-eight Neo-Babylonian tablets. They were found in the location TA/52, 30 cm. above level III/1 floor, and they now carry the numbers 2 NT 280 to 2 NT 307.

All but three of these texts are legal documents, the exceptions being 2 NT 306, a private letter, and 2 NT 283 and 307, the contents and paleographic features of which mark them as administrative tablets. They had been included in the cache for reasons which remain unknown. In the location TA/34 (level III/1) a tablet, 2 NT 165, was found which, because of the personal names it mentions, must be added to the present group. There is, of course, a definite possibility that the inhabitant of the house in which 2 NT 165 was found had hidden a group of valuable documents in a cache in an empty lot behind his backyard (cf. p. 70 for further discussion).

The graffiti from the tilery and pottery which the Twentieth Legion maintained at Holt, Denbighshire, included one which Professor A. Guillaume acutely recognised as written in neo-Punic script. He rendered the text as M‘QR YTN (or M‘QR YNA) that is “Ma‘qar, (son of) Yathanbaal (or Yathanmilk)”. But a close study of the graffito, undertaken by the first-named writer of this note in conjunction with Professor H. F. D. Sparks, has shown that Professor Guillaume's alternative reading is to be preferred, and may be expressed as M‘QRYN’. The second and seventh letters, here transcribed as rough and smooth breathing respectively, represent the vowels, in this case, of a Latin word. The third letter will represent hard c, as Q (qoph) is often used to transcribe this sound in non-Semitic words. The fifth letter (yodh) would stand for long i. From the photograph the exact form of the final letter (aleph) is not clear, but can be seen by close inspection. The evidence, however, of the drawing (here given as Figure 1) was confirmed by a squeeze and shows how the straight stroke not only touches but actually intersects the other stroke and thus forms a cross with terminal hook, which was a common neo-Punic form of aleph.