The eleventh season of excavations at Nimrud opened on March 2nd, 1961; full-scale operations ended on May 5th, but a small party continued the extraction and conservation of the ivories for a further two weeks. The expedition was generously supported by contributions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, the University of Pennsylvania, the British Museum, Les Musées Royales d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the University of Sydney, the University of Cambridge, and the Iraq Petroleum Company. I must once again express my gratitude to all the members of the staff. Miss Barbara Parker, in her tenth season as epigraphist and photographer, shared the epigraphic work with Mr. James Kinnier Wilson, Lecturer in Assyriology at Cambridge University, and Mr. Alan Millard; Mr. Jeffery Orchard catalogued the ivories and other finds, Mr. Nicholas Kindersley was in charge of the pottery, and Miss Charmian Reed and Mr. Eric von Gericke undertook the cleaning and treatment of the ivories. In addition, we were fortunate to have the experienced help of Dr. Vaughn E. Crawford of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the latter part of the season, both in the field work and the photography. The quantity of ivories found was as great, and the body of inscribed material greater and more complex, than in previous seasons; that we were able at the same time to plan and record a large area of Fort Shalmaneser, yielding important historical evidence, reflects the ability and industry of my colleagues in their special fields, and their versatility in sharing the varied general duties of the dig. We must also record our thanks, for their constant and cordial cooperation, to the Director General of Antiquities, Sayid Taha Baqir, and his staff, to the Inspector General of Excavations, Sayid Fuad Safar, and to Sayid Selim al Jelili, now Inspector of Antiquities in Mosul Province, who spent his third season with us as representative of the Directorate General and as a valued member of the expedition.

This is the second catalogue of seals and seal impressions found during the excavations of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq at Nimrud. The first instalment was published in Iraq XVII, Pt. 2, pp. 1955.

In the last catalogue some seals were dated according to certain preliminary archaeological conclusions, which have since required modification. It is now clear that the destruction level in the North West Palace, the Town Wall Houses, Ezida, and the Burnt Palace was that of the final destruction of 614–612 B.C. (Mallowan, Iraq XIX, Pt. 1 p. 20 and XVIII, Pt. 1, p. 17). Fort Shalmaneser has provided evidence of two destructions within a year or so of each other (Iraq XXIII, Pt. 1, p. 9 ff.). Thus the context of ND. 2151 (Iraq XVII, Pt. 1, p. 100) and ND. 807 (op. cit., p. 111) is not the reign of Sargon, but that of Sin-šar-iškun; however that may be, the objects themselves may be much older than the destruction level in which they were found. It is clear that seals were preserved a long time. The seal of the god Aššur on the Esarhaddon Vassal Treaties (Wiseman, Iraq XX, Pt. 1, pp. 17 ff.) dates to the Old Assyrian period, a thousand years earlier.

Among the carved ivories found by Layard and Loftus at Nimrud in the nineteenth century a few bear alphabetic inscriptions or single letters which may be fitters' marks. Similar pieces have been found subsequently at other sites of the first millennium B.C. and it was to be expected, therefore, that further examples might be discovered in the large collections of ivories unearthed during the current series of excavations at Nimrud by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Several inscribed pieces were found during the 1961 season and they are published here together with those from earlier seasons.

Four alphabetic inscriptions on ivories are already known. The ivory strip from Arslan Tash is of particular value as it enables a date to be given to the bedstead of which it was a part and to associated ivories. On it is a dedication, in Aramaic, “to our lord Hazael.” Hazael, king of Damascus c. 843–796 B.C. is the only known historical figure to whom such reference might apply. If, then, it is correct to attribute this ivory to the late ninth century B.C., it may be that it formed an item of the tribute taken from Damascus by Adad-nirari. III c. 804 B.C. which included ivory furniture. There are two inscribed pieces from the Loftus collection of Nimrud ivories: a knob inscribed “property of Milki-ram” (l m l k r m) and a text too damaged to be deciphered. At Ur an ivory box-lid was found, beneath a pavement laid in the reign of Nebuchadrezzar II (605–561 B.C.) which carries a two line dedication in Phoenician: “This box Amat-Ba‘al, daughter of Pat-isi, slave-girl of [the master?] presents to Ashtart. For this may she bless me during the life of the master […..] son of Yasod.

In the issue of this journal for Autumn, 1956, I published under the title ‘Two medical texts from Nimrud’ a fragment from the Nābû temple library which had been excavated the previous year. The piece is numbered ND. 4358, and in the issue referred to it was described as follows: ‘This text is a catalogue, perhaps sufficiently important to be called the “Nimrud Catalogue”, of a series “sa-gig”. The series in question we have not yet learnt to call by this name, but it is otherwise well known as enūma ana bīt mar marṣi āšīpu illaku.’ As to its physical description, it was stated that the fragment was ‘the lower half of a single-column tablet, obverse and reverse thus providing a continuous text which must represent about half the original.’

It is the purpose of the present communication to announce that the missing portion of the tablet has been identified.

The new piece is ND. 4366. It came to my notice through a copy made by D. J. Wiseman at Baghdad towards the end of 1959, and I am grateful for Wiseman's generous consent that I should edit the text in this publication. The text was collated by me in the course of a personal visit to Baghdad in the Spring of 1961, and I was then able to confirm my suspicion that it in fact physically joined ND. 4358. There is some loss of material at the join and down the left edge, and the quality of the surface rapidly deteriorates as the end of the reverse is reached, but every line of the tablet is now represented in some part at least. The copy will be included in Wiseman's forthcoming volume of texts from the Nābû temple library, and thus in the present edition the text is conveyed in transliteration only.

Exactly sixty years ago, the great cuneiformist Th. G. Pinches, whose immense services to Assyriology are not always fully realized, published in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology five fragments of tablets of an entirely new type: Sumerian and Akkadian texts written in the Greek alphabet. Commenting on some of these texts in the same issue of the Proceedings, A. H. Sayce added a sixth fragment. A further text, in two fragments, was published in 1928 by W. G. Schileico.

The corpus of these most interesting texts can now be doubled by eight new fragments from the British Museum collections published here. Credit for this substantial addition must, however, be given to Pinches, for it is among the unpublished British Museum texts which he copied in the late nineties that I had the good fortune to find either copies of, or references to, the new fragments.

In the following pages, I have attempted to give a catalogue of the extant texts arranged according to their subject-matter. They may be divided into two main groups—(A) Lexical, and (B) Literary texts, the word ‘literary’ being taken in its broadest sense. To these groups it has been thought preferable to add a third one, namely (C) Unclassified texts, rather than withhold those texts which I could not understand; it is thus hoped that other scholars might succeed where I have failed.