The silver bowl which is illustrated in Plate I was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum in 1964. It was said to have been formerly in the possession of a dealer in Teheran, who bought it in Hamadan. The story is too stereotyped to have much archaeological significance. Nevertheless it may be true; for there is nothing surprising, as we shall see, in a vessel of this form and character being found in the ancient capital of the Medes.

The bowl was described as “Achaemenian”; and so, at first sight, it might seem to be. But closer inspection reveals some particulars of form and decoration which are not quite characteristic of attested Achaemenian works, but suggest a different history. Since no real reliance can be placed on the only statements of provenance which we have, it is from form and decoration alone that the origins of the bowl may be inferred.

The bowl is somewhat abruptly articulated into a shallow container, almost flat below, and a broad flaring rim which springs from a sharply incurved shoulder (Fig. I, a). Of the total depth of about 34 mm. the container accounts for a little more than half, with a capacity of about seven fluid ounces, or one third of a pint. The bowl was thus designed to hold about as much liquid as could easily be drained at a draught. A residue would always have been trapped by the shoulder.

It is now over thirty years since the Oxford (Weld)—Field Museum Expedition to Mesopotamia closed its excavations, after ten seasons' work (1923–33), at Tells Ingharra and 'Uhaimir: the site of ancient Kish. Throughout these excavations Professor S. Langdon acted as director of the expedition, rarely appearing in the field, but maintaining a constant interest in the progress of excavation and publishing all epigraphic material and a number of interim reports on the archaeological results. From 1923–6 E. Mackay was director in the field, from 1926–33 L. Ch. Watelin. Mackay's transfer to India and subsequent preoccupation with work there, Watelin's premature death, in January 1934, and Langdon's primary concern with epigraphy have meant that the archaeological discoveries of this expedition were very unevenly published. This is particularly true of the work on Tell Ingharra, the primary area of excavation, where a very important archaeological sequence was revealed between 1925 and 1932. Watelin's reports on this work were published in Excavations at Kish III, 1930; the temple, and Excavations at Kish, IV, 1934: the ‘Z’ area and the ‘Y’ soundings. As he made clear, even these reports were only intended as an interim record of work still proceeding.

In a recent issue of this journal Prof. Mallowan reviewed the historical evidence for the flood described in the biblical story of Noah. In the table that he prepared three floods are noted at Kish. Two of them occurred in c. 2900 B.C. and rely for their identification on evidence of water-deposited material in the streets and damage to mud-brick walls: the third, the latest and most violent, dated to c. 2600 B.C. was again identified by evidence from the streets and deposited an average of 40 cm. of water-borne material—that is about sixteen inches. The same table read in conjunction with the text (p. 80), indicated for Shurrupak (Fara) a deposit of clay and sand of about 60 cm. thickness over an “ordinary patch of charcoal and ashes” above the Jamdat Nasr level and below the Early Dynastic: it is dated to c. 2850 B.C. AS these levels are dated c. 3000 B.C. and c. 2850 respectively, I suppose that the flood deposit could have occurred at any intervening date, but that specific evidence suggests 2850 B.C.

For Ur the table records flood deposits from 3·72 to 0·72 metres thick in c. 3500 B.C. at the end of the ‘Ubaid period (the text records greater depths) and deposits of unknown depth dated to c. 2700 B.C.

The purpose of this article is to make available to specialists and others interested the resources of Birmingham in the matter of ancient Near Eastern Seals. As would be expected, the lion's share comes from the City Museum, and I am indebted to Nicholas Thomas, Keeper of the Department of Archaeology, for permission to study and publish this material. His assistant, John Ruffle, has helped me by gathering the material together and in every other way. Miss Tess Martin, also of the City Museum, has kindly made impressions of all the seals published here.

Of the 56 seals in the City Museum, 42, numbered 541’65–582’65, were received quite recently as a bequest from Air Commodore E. St. Clair Harnett. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force in Iraq shortly after the First World War, and assisted the late Miss Gertrude Bell in her founding of the Baghdad Museum. He is mentioned in her letters as “Squadron Leader Harnett”, and it is appropriate that his collection should be published in Iraq, the Gertrude Bell Memorial. A notebook accompanying the seals records that they were collected in Baghdad between 1922 and 1927. Only in one case, now numbered 566’65, does it record the source of a seal, as Kish. Of the other 14 seals (all received from other donors), five, 552’62–556’62, were given by Woolley, and need not have come from Ur, since they are not included in the official publications.

At the foot of, and roughly south-south-east of, the ziggurrat at Nimrud stood the temple of Ninurta, on the floor of room 1 of which, excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in 1956, were found “a number of fragments, some of them inscribed, of a burnt white limestone statue of Shalmaneser III, in the round.” These fragments, now in the Iraq Museum, were numbered as a group by the excavator ND 5571, and by the Iraq Museum IM 60497. They comprised the right elbow and a small part of adjacent body behind and below (IM 60497A), two subsequently joined inscribed fragments (IM 60497B), a fragment of clasped hands (IM 60497C), and some other fragments including one bearing traces of seven lines of inscription so very slight as to be, for the present writer, beyond consecutive comprehension.

The right elbow of the statue of Shalmaneser III “found in fragments by a ploughman in fields in the outer town near the foot of the south-east corner of the akropolis” is missing; but not only is the thickness (13 cm.) of the forearm at the lower end of the elbow-fragment IM 60497A considerably too small to fit the upper end of the right forearm of the statue found by the ploughman, but it also extends too far above the elbow (that is, it extends upwards beyond the point above the elbow down to which the statue's upper arm is preserved) to allow any possibility of regarding it as having belonged to the ploughman's statue.

Moortgat here gives an account of the fourth campaign at Tell Chuēra, an important site situated on the frontier of North Central Syria, between the Ḫabur and the Balikh, about equidistant from Ras el ‘Ain and Tell Abiadh, in steppe country studded with ancient settlements. The work was conducted under the auspices of the Max-Freiherr-von-Oppenheim Institute and the Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, and is a pendant to the campaign instituted at Tell Halaf on the Upper Ḫabur by Oppenheim in 1911–1912. The results obtained at Chuēra also have a significant relation to the discoveries made by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in 1934–1938, at Chazar Bazar, Brak and elsewhere in the eastern Habur-Jaghjagha District, and are therefore peculiarly appropriate to discussion in this Journal which published accounts of these excavations about thirty years ago. Thus investigations spread over a period of more than 50 years are gradually placing this part of Northern Syria in a perspective which has become more clearly intelligible through the foreground of Babylonia.

The main mound of Chuēra is of large dimensions and spans a distance of over 1,000 metres from north to south. Winter rains are apt to be heavy, and water is available from a wadi of the same name. Buildings have appeared in several sectors of the mound, both of undressed stone, Steinbau I & III, and of mud-brick.