The 1972 season at Umm Dabaghiyah took place under vastly different conditions from the first year. An exceptionally good Spring turned the countryside into a comparatively green and flowery land. Without a single dust storm and with thunder and rain only during the evenings and nights, we were able to work without interruption. These climatic changes are important to record, as within two consecutive years we have experienced two extremes which must also have been regular occurrences when the site was occupied.

The field work lasted for nine weeks, from mid-March until late May, and was followed by a further month at Baghdad when all the final drawings were prepared, a task impossible to undertake in damp tents.

The excavations took place under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and with the aid of a grant from the British Academy. Directed by the writer, the following team took part; Miss Deidre Bowden, Messrs. Stuart Munro-Hay, John McDonald and Peter Farries, site supervisors; Mr. Neville Akroyd, draughts-man and surveyor, and Mrs. Barbara Akroyd, conservator. Sayid Ismail al-Hajara, representing the Directorate General of Antiquities, was an invaluable member of the team and a first class site supervisor. We are grateful for his hard work and genuine interest in the site.

During the season we were most pleased to welcome the Director General of Antiquities, Dr. Isa Salman, when he visited the excavations together with members of his staff. Once again we express our deep gratitude to the Director General of Antiquities, to the Inspector General of Excavations, Dr. Fuad Safar and to the staff of the Directorate General for their helpful co-operation and interest. We also thank the Government officers at Hatra for their friendly help.

The excavations at Umm Dabaghiyah yielded a considerable amount of animal remains. From the rich sample 6,580 specimens could be identified, all from well-dated archaeological contexts.

The species found in the site and their frequencies are shown in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, the fauna of Umm Dabaghiyah has the following main characteristics:

(1) The fauna is not very rich in species; besides the five domestic species it contains only ten wild ones. Even if we add the wild bird species to them, the number of wild species will increase only to twelve.

(2) Although all five neolithic domestic species occur in the sample, animal-keeping itself is of insignificantly small importance compared with hunting; the domestic animals represent only 9·77–13·23% of the whole sample in the different levels. (In fact the domestic ratio is probably a little lower because in all probability also bones of wild sheep and goats occur in the caprovine sample). The overwhelming majority of the domestic sample belongs to the caprovines; the other species are far behind them with alternating frequencies. The domestic animals show well-marked anatomical differences from their wild forms. Local domestication seems to have existed only in the case of cattle.

The John Rylands Library, Manchester (No. P 28, Box 22).

Dimensions: 5·5 × 6·4 × 2·3 cm.

Copy and photographs: Plates XIII, XIVa, b (the copy is traced off the photographs and corrected after collation).

Although our perception of what happened in Mesopotamian prehistory is very incomplete, our knowledge has been extended considerably by recent excavations and archaeological studies. Much of this research has been more or less specifically devoted to various aspects of the early development of villages and village economy. From this one fact seems to emerge: in the Hassuna Period at least two clearly different cultural traditions can be distinguished. In northern Iraq villages with houses built in the tauf technique were dominant. They had an economy based on herding, hunting and dry-farming, and a specific series of painted, incised and plain types of pottery. By the middle of the 6th. millennium B.C. a different cultural tradition can be recognized in central Iraq. Its main characteristics are that the economy seems to be based primarily on experimental irrigation agriculture, and that the villages consist of houses built of mud-brick, some of them large and complex with buttressed walls. A distinctive type of painted pottery, the Samarran, is prevalent in villages of this tradition, for example Tell es-Sawwan, Choga Mami and Baghouz.

Samarran pottery has now been found at a great number of Mesopotamian sites. But in spite of this, little is still known of the origin and of the temporal and spatial development of the Samarran culture and its characteristic ceramics in central and southern Iraq.

In May 1879 Hormuzd Rassam left Mosul to explore the country around the Khabur river, rich in ancient sites. Among the places he visited was “the mound of Sheikh Hammad” where an Assyrian sculpture was said to lie. Rassam reported “I found the monument to be a representation of an Assyrian king on a black basalt tablet (supposed to be Shalmaneser II), but, unfortunately, the bas-relief had been broken, and only the head and shoulders of the figure were visible. This part of the monolith was covered with arrow-headed characters, which were very much defaced. It had been hurled down the mound by the Arabs … It is believed that the remainder of the tablet is buried on the top of the mound, and I intended, when I went back there on a future occasion, to search for it.” No particular monument in the British Museum's collections is known to be the piece Rassam secured, but it was suggested in a marginal note by the late C. J. Gadd in the copy of Rassam's book owned by the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum that BM 131124 might be one Rassam recovered from another mound not far away, mentioned in the succeeding part of his account, “a fragment of black basalt, whereon there were engraved a few hieroglyphic figures”. The description of the stone from Sheikh Hammad fits the fragment BM 131124 so much better that there can be little doubt of its identity and consequently it may be referred to by the name “Sheikh Hammad stele”.

In the summer of 1971, a most interesting and important over life-size statue of Hercules was uncovered at the North Gate, one of the four main gates of Hatra. The work, which was conducted by a staff from the Directorate General of Antiquities, started at the beginning of July 1971 and continued until the end of March 1972. The excavations which were concentrated on the gate, revealed several important historical and architectural aspects of Hatra.

During the excavations, numerous statues were found. They represent kings, nobles and divinities of Hatra, and among them is the statue of Hercules. It was found in a rectangular arched niche-cella set against the mud-brick wall that extends from the right tower-like structure of the gate and turns at a right angle to face the only entrance of the gate. The niche-cella, made of regular local limestone, is constructed so that it faces the entrance. A person leaving Hatr a through the North Gate would have to face the niche-cella which contained the standing statue of Hercules.

The statue of Hercules was found standing in situ in the arched niche-cella (Plate XXXa). His forearm was found behind the right feet on the floor of the niche-cella. His club was discovered in two pieces on the floor level of the area before the nichecella. The upper part of the club with the attached right hand were found immediately in front of the niche-cella (Plate XXXb) and the lower part lay not far from it (Plate XXXc). Pieces of the fingers of his right hand were found scattered on the pavement of the niche-cella.

The small collection of ancient Near Eastern seals in the school museum at Charterhouse was called to our attention by the kindness of Mr. Ian Blake. It was assembled in the nineteenth century through two gifts, that of D. G. Prinsep in 1876 (eight cylinders) and that of Leonard Marshall in 1896 (sixteen cylinders and five Sassanian stamp seals). No information has survived about the exact source of these seals, though, as will be seen, they might well all come from sites in southern Iraq. We are most grateful to the Governors and Headmaster of Charterhouse for allowing these seals to be taken to Oxford for study and photography. The School authorities also subsidized the cost of photography, which was done by Mr. R. L. Wilkins of the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. In the following concise catalogue Professor O. R. Gurney is responsible for the seal inscriptions (save for a single Sassanian one kindly read by Dr. A. D. H. Bivar), and Dr. P. R. S. Moorey for the classification, description and discussion of the designs. We gratefully acknowledge advice on various points from Mr. Briggs Buchanan and Professor W. Lambert, who bear no responsibility for any persisting errors. For the abbreviations used in the catalogue see pp. 80–1. Measurements given are in millimetres (height × width); figures such as 1–1956–2 are the Charterhouse registry numbers.

In 1965 Roman Ghirshman drew attention to a particular element of Elamite architecture which he called the “salle à quatre saillants”: this is a rectangular room with four pilasters placed near the short walls and a large doorway in the middle of its long side, opening on to a courtyard. It must have served as the reception, audience and throne hall. Ghirshman identified this architectural form in successive Middle Elamite levels on the Royal City mound at Susa in houses belonging to officials of the Sukkalmahhu, and so it may reflect Royal Palace designs, as do the Neo-Assyrian Residences at Khorsabad. He has dated these levels from c. 1800 to c. 1300 B.C. He also noted its reappearance at Susa in the Palace of Darius. Here it is slightly modified: there are two “salles à quatre saillants” placed side by side with doorways piercing through them both (see also fig. 11). It would be possible to maintain that the double and single “salles à quatre saillants” are distinct but this has neither chronological nor geographical significance.

The eight centuries between these buildings cannot yet be filled with more Elamite examples of the “salle à quatre saillants” because very little Elamite architecture has been discovered. It does not appear in the funerary palaces at Choga Zanbil and has not been found on the Iranian plateau at this period. The Kassite palace at Dur-Kurigalzu shows no trace of it, and Geoffrey Turner in his recent study of Late Assyrian palace plans did not draw attention to this feature.