The first account of the discovery of the Treasure of Ziwiye was published in two places by the then Director of Antiquities of the Persian Government, M. André Godard. The first, Le Trésor de Ziwiyè: (Editions de l'Institut Franco-Iranien) gave the text of his lecture to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The other was Le Trésor de Ziwiyè, a beautifully illustrated book published at Haarlem in 1950 by the Iranian Archaeological Service. For these publications we are deeply grateful to M. Godard. I need not describe this collection in detail, only mention that it consists of objects of gold, ivory and bronze of great beauty, variety and interest which were discovered, unfortunately in the course of clandestine excavations, at Ziwiye near Sakkez in Azerbaijan 120 km. south east of Lake Urmia. It is now dispersed, some pieces being in Teheran, others in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, others elsewhere. According to M. Godard, some of the pieces, e.g., those of ivory, are Assyrian work of the ninth-eighth century B.C., and were exported from Assyria to Sakkez. The other objects, in M. Godard's view, belong to the ninth century, or in some cases to the seventh century B.C. The fact that some of these pieces contain motifs and features hitherto regarded as characteristic of Phoenician, or in other cases of Scythian art of the sixth century B.C., is explained by M. Godard by means of a new and striking theory: that we have (except in the case of the ivories, which he considers Assyrian) in these mixed works of art examples of the native art of the kingdom of Mannai, an art which later was appropriated or copied by the immigrating Scythian tribes, who afterwards dispersed it widely, and thereby caused it to be known to the modern world as Scythian. I shall not discuss this theory here, I shall offer only some notes about the dating.

Most of the inscriptions relating the events of the reign of Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria 745–727 B.C., have been found in the ruins of Nimrud (Kalḫu). The latest of these finds are two fragments, which have been subsequently joined to form the lower left part, or about a fifth, of one large baked clay tablet (see Pl. XXIII). The first of these fragments (ND 4301) was found during the 1955 excavation of the Nabu Temple. It lay in the rubbish 80 cm. above the centre of the stone floor of the Tašmetum cella, not far from the cylinder seal ND. 4179 which was in the S.W. corner (Sq. C4. NTV). The other fragment, ND. 4305, was found in surface soil cleared from the west end of a trench (E-W at H.6). Even when joined these fragments do not afford a single complete line and the broken nature of all fifty-eight lines precludes the full understanding of the text and prevents more than a tentative treatment especially in the translation and comment.

The texts presented in this study are two which were discovered by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq during the 1955 season at Nimrud. The field records of the Expedition show that both tablets came from a rubbish pit H 2 within the precincts of the Nabu Temple. They formed part of a large collection which was disturbed and partly destroyed by persons searching for loot and burnt-bricks after the destruction of Calah in 612 B.C. Some time in the sixth century there was an attempt to repair and renovate the city by the impoverished inhabitants of the district, who found in the old Assyrian pavements invaluable building material. Much excavation of the Temple area was then undertaken, and the site was studded with pits which were subsequently refilled with unwanted debris including the remains of the Temple library.

The lump of blue glass found by H. R. Hall at Eridu in 1919 is well known to students of early glass. From the circumstances of the excavation Hall deduced that the piece was made at least as early as 2000 B.C. and this view is generally accepted.

The piece has been fully discussed, with other pieces of glass made before 1500 B.C., by H. C. Beck. He considers that the piece was a manufacturer's piece of material made very near to where it was found, and so is evidence of a glass factory in Mesopotamia much earlier than any previously known, the earliest factory in Egypt being about 1000 years later. The Eridu glass supports the view, held by some authorities, that glass making was introduced into Egypt from Mesopotamia.

The cause of the blue colour of early Egyptian glass was the subject of controversy for many years and it was not until a systematic series of tests were made by Farnsworth and Ritchie in 1937 that the question was finally cleared up. They examined 58 pieces of blue glass of the XVIII Dynasty and showed that the pieces of bluish green colour were invariably coloured by copper and those of a pure blue or violet blue were invariably coloured by cobalt. The amount of cobalt required to give a deep colour is very small, less than 0.2 per cent.

Objects showing strong oriental influence in the large Etruscan tombs have been studied by many distinguished scholars writing over a long period of years and from many different standpoints—by Karo as a classical archaeologist and Lehmann-Haupt as an authority on Armenia, followed by Randall MacIver, Poulsen, Kunze, Schachermeyr, Herzfeld, Pareti, Curtis and Hanfmann. Nor must the pioneer work of Herzfeld on Urartu and Etruria be forgotten. Among the many Italian scholars working in the wider field of Etruscan studies we are especially indebted to the work of Giglioli, Minto and Pallotino. But certain basic problems still remain to be solved and in the light of the recent invaluable studies by Barnett on Urartian metalwork we can hope that an approach from a purely oriental angle may be able to make a new contribution to answering these questions, and may possibly supplement the suggestions concerning the chronology of these tombs recently published by Professor Hawkes.