The latest volume of cuneiform texts published by the British Museum contains one piece of exceptional interest as nothing exactly like it has been discovered before. It is part of a tablet with three columns of writing on each side. The upper part of the tablet is missing, and since the Babylonians and Assyrians turned their tablets from top to bottom, and not from side to side, this means that the beginnings of the first three, and the ends of the last three columns are missing, which includes of course the beginning and end of the text. A substantial portion of each column is missing, though just how many lines are involved cannot be estimated. The left edge of the tablet is also missing, so much so that only the extreme right-hand ends of the lines are preserved in columns I and VI. While some disconnected words can be made out in these two columns, no sense results and they will not be referred to again. We have, then, three portions of the text left: parts of column II, columns III and IV (which are consecutive because they are on different sides of the tablet), and column V.

The first of these surviving sections begins as though it were prophecies of social disorder. Texts of this kind do indeed exist, and up to line 21 no objection could be taken to this interpretation. The rich and powerful are to oppress the poor. The judges will pay no heed to justice and will not lecture the oppressors on the error of their ways. (A specimen of such sermonising is actually given in 11. 9–13.) However, suddenly in line 22 we are abruptly introduced to the opposite, both in tense and spirit: a king devoted to justice and burning midnight oil to write down a just code of laws for his land and regulations for his city and his own royal office. The change is so abrupt that one must assume textual corruption, and indeed at a number of points there are erasures, badly written signs, and passages which simply do not hang together. In the translation an asterisk indicates where the present writer at least finds no connexion between clauses and assumes corruption.

In 1849 Sir Henry Layard's excavations among the ruins of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (the South-West Palace) produced a considerable collection of clay sealings, specimens of which were duly published in A second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. In his description of this find, Layard discussed a ‘royal seal’, a circular stamp showing the king killing a lion, and mentioned that, on the impressions, the device ‘is frequently encircled by a short inscription, which has not yet been deciphered, or by a simple guilloche border.’ Until now these impressions, preserved in the collections of the British Museum, do not seem to have been illustrated, although Professor Sachs was able to list forty uninscribed examples of bullae and sealings bearing the same motif, fourteen of them showing the guilloche border, in his paper entitled ‘The Late Assyrian Royal Seal Type’.

In all thirteen pieces of clay bearing impressions of inscribed ‘royal’ seals have been located so far in the Museum's collections, including additions made to Layard's original group (Collection no. 51, 9–2) from the excavations of Rassam, Smith, and Budge. They are here presented by courtesy of the Trustees.

Most of the Nimrud letters bearing important identifiable historical allusions have now been published. There still remain, however, about a hundred further documents, of which the letters of the present selection are amongst the best preserved. All the letters here published are from those which fell to the share of the British School of Archaeology at the division of the Nimrud tablets, and it has therefore been possible in every case to collate the copies (made in 1954) against the originals prior to publication.

The letters in this group are connected by no common theme, though there are several which relate to similar situations. In the first two (LXXI and LXXII), and in one of the three letters in Babylonian dialect and script (LXXXI), the writer excuses himself for failure to perform the king's orders; though despite the similarity of subject-matter there is a very different tone in the different letters. Thus, whilst in LXXXI the writer is full of apology, blaming his apparent neglect to communicate with the king upon the shortcomings of his messenger, the attitude of the writer of LXXI shows a sturdy independence of spirit. He declines to do what is asked of him in connection with a horse train, and after quoting what appears to be a proverb — ‘he who answered the king back died’ or ‘he who turned against the king died’ — sums up with the words ‘Now after I have sent a message let the king my lord do what he will do’.

In 1892 the Rev. G. J. Chester presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a freestanding figure in bronze of an Assyrian demon, which he said came from San el-Hagar, a small fishing village close to the mound of Tanis in the Egyptian Delta. Recently, when this figure was cleaned for the first time, a badly corroded inscription in Aramaic or Phoenician characters was revealed down the outside of each leg. Fortunately, it was still possible to make out some portions of the text. Although this does not provide direct evidence of the figure's identity, close similarity to a well-known inscribed figure of a demon in the Louvre, and the absence of any female characteristics which might denote the iconographically similar Lamashtu, indicate that this is the demon Pazuzu. See Plate VIII.

The figure is 10·8 centimetres high and represents the demon standing on a small rectangular base. Although the ears are human, the bulging eyes, wrinkled jowls, snout-like nose and protruding tongue give the face a leonine expression. A pair of goat's horns rising from the brow curve back to form part of a suspension loop on top of the head. The arms are raised on either side of the head with the ‘hands’ open, empty palms held forward. These are too worn to show certainly whether they were the animal paws usual on these figures. Though the double pair of wings is badly damaged, the feathers are carefully incised on both back and front of the surviving fragments. A pronounced ridge runs over each shoulder from the centre of the back to the chest, so that the wings appear to be strapped on to the body. The creature is ithyphallic, probably with a serpent's head at the end of the phallus. The thighs and legs, terminating in three talons, are rendered like those of a bird of prey. The demon has a scorpion's tail curled up to meet a short bar, which emerges from the lower part of its back, to form a second suspension loop.

Six or seven years ago a tourist bought a small carved ‘Hittite stone’ in Izmir as an attractive souvenir. Returning to Washington she read that I had been on Hittite excavations and asked me to look at her curio. One maybe grateful for her layman's interest, for her piece, which turned out to be one half of an ancient trinket mould, sheds an interesting light on trade between Anatolia and Mesopotamia at the end of the Third Millennium B.C.