It was in 1937 that we heard in Kuwait that a large stone bearing a curious inscription had been brought by a Badawi from Hasa. After it had passed through several hands I eventually acquired the stone, and sent a description of it and a copy of the inscription to Mr. Sidney Smith at the British Museum (see Plate I No. 1). The inscription, which is in a South Arabian script, was translated as follows1 by Professor G. Ryckmans of Louvain:

“Monument et sepulture de ‘Aws-hani-’lat, fils de Sa'id, fils de Ghassanat, du clan de Yad'ub de la tribu de Šawdab (ŠWDB).”

The Badawi who brought the stone to Kuwait said that he had found it at Thaj, a small village twenty-five miles S.W. of Sarrar in central Hasa.

The gate of Nergal in the northern wall of Nineveh has given rise to a curious archaeological puzzle. The best start for an exposition of its elements is to record the statements made by the various archæologists and writers who in the past have made mention of this gateway in Sennacherib's walled city, and then to compare them with each other, and with a recent examination of the actual remaining monuments that, during a residence in Mosul, I have had the opportunity to make, since the chance of a landslide in the spring of 1941, followed by excavation by the Antiquities department of the Iraq Government, has restored them to the light of day.

Through the recent publication (1942) of the excellent official Guide to the Iraq Museum there has come to notice a fragment of Assyrian bas-relief which is of interest in several points. This is numbered IM.31065, and is illustrated in the aforesaid Guide by Fig. 105, p. 125. The re-publication offered here (Plate V) is from a good photograph very kindly furnished by the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, together with permission to make this use of it. For both of these favours I wish to express sincere gratitude.

Hardly more than the first glance is needed to suggest a context for the fragment; it recalls at once the tents and domestic activities in the Assyrian camp shown upon the well-known scene now (or formerly) in the National Museums, Berlin, numbered VA. 965. The connexion is very close—the curved defensive wall and bastions which surround the camp have only to be continued on VA (the Berlin fragment) in the downward direction in order to coincide with the upturned line which continues in IM (the Baghdad fragment) up to a horizontal fillet dividing the registers of the slab.

To all who are interested in archaeology the discovery of an ancient writing or of a hitherto undiscovered ancient material must, in itself, be an event of major interest. The study of the writing, coupled with the pleasurable anticipation, not unmixed with hope, that it will present something new in the history of mankind is, however, an adventure to be enjoyed by only the select few who are learned in these matters. Similarly, the study of a previously unknown type of material, with all the conjectures regarding its nature and use, and the way it was made, can bring its full meed of pleasure only to those who combine specialist knowledge of such materials with a general interest in the history of their development and use.

To one with strong historical interests, albeit unversed in ancient writings, and with little opportunity to study ancient materials even from their descriptions, the opportunity to assist in the verification of an ancient writing or in the identification of an ancient material must have a strong appeal, and the writer regards himself as having been unusually fortunate in having had an opportunity to make glazed earthenware articles successfully by following out instructions written some thirty-six centuries earlier.

This paper is solely concerned with that group of burnished and incised Neolithic wares which occur in various sites in the Near East, chiefly in North Syria, Iraq and South Turkey. Sufficient excavation has now taken place to make some comparison between the wares found on these sites possible. There is still, however, much to be done and there remains an unfortunate lack of agreement among archæologists as to what shall be termed Neolithic. In Europe Burkitt1 defines what he calls ‘the most notable addition to human experience” in the Neolithic as

(1) The practice of agriculture;

(2) The domestication of animals;

(3) The manufacture of pottery;

(4) The grinding and polishing of stone tools instead of chipping only.

The first three do hold good to a large extent in Asia Minor and Northern Syria, but with regard to (4), the sickle blade and the point are more the type tools of the Neolithic than the ground and polished axes or hoes of Western Europe, although polished hoes have been found in increasing numbers on Near Eastern sites of the transitional Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Period.

The copper rein-ring illustrated in this article is at present privately owned, and was shown to me in London in 1947: it is published here by kind permission of the owner. It is said to have been acquired in Nasiriyah in 1922, and to have come from the Samawa district. There is little doubt that this object must have been found at some Sumerian site such as Kish or Ur; it may be dated to the end of the second or the beginning of the third Early Dynastic period, c. 2500 B.C.

Electrum, silver and copper rein rings of this type, surmounted by a model animal, have been found at Kish and at Ur, and a variant form was discovered in a tomb at Til-Barsib, near Carchemish, on the upper Euphrates. This specimen is of particular interest because the animal appears to be an onager, or wild ass, which was evidently known to the Sumerians not later than the middle of the third millenium B.C.

In 1946 Professor Helmuth Bossert, a distinguished scholar who had already made several remarkable contributions to Anatolian studies and had taken an outstanding part in the decipherment of the Hittite hieroglyphs, in collaboration with an able Turkish colleague, Dr. Bahadir Alkim, published the first account of their discovery of fragments of Old Semitic inscriptions at Karatepe (Aslantaş), in Cilicia. The site is marked by the remains of a small walled enclosure at the top of a hill in the most inaccessible recesses of the Upper Ceyhan River, on its West bank. Opposite Karatepe on the East bank of the river on a hill called Domuztepe, they found remains of a little township, evidently of the late Hittite period. But to return to Karatepe, about which the discoverers furnish further welcome information in their second report; it appears that inside the walled enclosure, there was a series of carved basalt slabs facing East, and forming either the façade of a small temple-palace such as was discovered at Tell Halaf or Sakca-gözü, or the decoration of a gateway, as at Zincirli or Carchemish. Near by, to the South, was a broken gateway-lion, inscribed.