The second season of excavation at the Ubaid-related site of H3 took place in October 1999 and lasted for four weeks. The site lies on a low peninsula, the Jazirat Dubaij, at the north end of Kuwait bay. The work was carried out jointly by the British Archaeological Expedition to Kuwait and a team from the National Museum of Kuwait under the direction of Dr Fahad al Wohaibi. The work of the Expedition was made possible by the generosity of many people and it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge the help of Dr al Rumayhi, Secretary General of the National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters; vital sponsorship from Shell Kuwait Ltd initiated by its general manager, Dr Ken Taylor, who has been an invaluable friend to the Expedition; financial support from the British School of Archaeology in Iraq; the assistance of the National Museum of Kuwait in providing accommodation and food and in paying for workmen; academic sponsorship from the Institute of Archaeology UCL, and friendly support from the British Embassy and the British Council in Kuwait. Our special thanks are due to the Ambassador, to Col. the Hon. Alastair Campbell, the Defence Attaché, and to the members of the RAF squadron who took aerial photographs of the site for us.

The main objectives for the second season of excavation were as follows: to define the large stone structure identified last season on the highest part of the mound (Carter et al. 1999) and to begin its excavation (Area A); to continue work in the other two areas sampled in 1998 (Area B) to the west of the mound, and Area F around the Iraqi dug-out or “foxhole” to the south (Fig. 1) and to collect a representative sample of the environmental data. In addition, it was hoped to determine the position of the ancient coastline south of the site and to complete the survey of the Jazirat Dubaij.

The 23rd season of excavation at Tell Brak took place from March 13 to May 16, 2000, with David Oates as Project Director, Geoff Emberling as Field Director, and Helen McDonald in charge of the house and recording of pottery and objects. The season was co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and was primarily funded by the Adelaide Milton de Groot Fund, in memory of the de Groot and Hawley families, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; we also gratefully acknowledge significant support from the National Geographic Society (grant #6738–00), the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. We would like to thank the Director General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria for his encouragement and interest. We also thank Ammar Abdul Rahman from the Department of Antiquities in Damascus, who paid us a visit during the season, as well as our representative from Hassake, Hussein Yusuf. The excavation staff was a pleasure to work with: Donald Hansen, Selma al-Radi, Marta Ameri, Jean Evans, Walton Green, Melanie Hatz, Torben Larsen, Tomasz Pazdej, Laurie Tedesco, David Thomas and Tim Skuldboel were site supervisors; Jack Cheng was registrar and photographer; Henry Wright conducted a series of soundings and gathered controlled samples of material relating to fourth millennium occupation of the mound; Michael Charles and Mette Marie Hald once again ran the botanical sampling programme; Jill Weber analyzed faunal remains; Susan Rees was conservator; and David and Joan Oates supported the project through the off-season and in the field with their expertise and enthusiasm.

“The complex sequence of burials, labelled Burial 14, involved inhumation of more than seven individuals. Initially, during excavation, the entire sequence was thought to comprise a single, multichambered tomb. But reconsideration of the stratigraphy and grave contents made it apparent that there were three separate burial phases.” With this honest admission McGuire Gibson and Augusta McMahon started their description of this strange burial complex. Their interpretation of the excavation led them to propose that one of the burial phases consisted of a two-lobed chamber containing the remains of three individuals (called Skeletons 2, 3, and 4). In this article I will suggest that this burial phase should be subdivided into at least two phases, an “Early Dynastic (ED)” burial containing Skeleton 3 and a “Late Akkadian” burial containing Skeleton 2. The dating of Skeleton 4 is uncertain but most probably it should also date to the Akkadian period.

There are three reasons for suggesting this: first, the finds associated with Skeleton 2 appear to be considerably later than those associated with Skeleton 3; second, the two-lobed shape of the burial can be more easily explained as the result of several graves dug into each other than as the result of a single burial; and third, burials of three individuals in one grave at the same time are very uncommon in southern Mesopotamia in the second half of the third millennium BC.

Following several seasons of survey and sampling of prehistoric sites in the middle and western Khabur drainage, we have secured more than fifty radiocarbon dates that provide an internally consistent, accurate and detailed chronology for this region. In this paper we provide a short synopsis of each sampled site by archaeological period (Table 1), accompanied by drawings of diagnostic ceramics. A complete presentation of the archaeological, artifactual, botanical and zoological records will be published as a monograph.

The Yale University teams have conducted a series of excavations, surveys and sampling projects in the middle Khabur region over the past thirteen years (Fig. 1). The principal goals of these efforts have been to document the prehistoric periods and to relate the distribution and density of sites to the natural environment and its changes, as well as to changes in the social, economic and political contexts prevailing locally and in northern Mesopotamia. In order to carry out intra-regional and inter-regional comparisons and interpretations, it is essential to have a solid chronological foundation. Unfortunately, accurate, calibrated radiocarbon dates based on modern techniques have been few and scattered, thus giving rise to unwarranted dependence on cross-comparisons with ceramics, or on isolated dates. Moreover, with calibration it is apparent that the commonly accepted definition of a “millennium” to encompass only a thousand years is not always accurate. This means that to use “conventional” radiocarbon dates often results in a very biased view of rates of change and of relations between regions.

This note on three unpublished glass inlay plaques from a badly burned and fragmentary alabaster pedestal cup (Fig. 1) found in the period IVB (late 9th c. BC) level at Hasanlu is offered as an addendum to John Curtis's article “Glass Inlays and Nimrud Ivories” in a recent issue of Iraq. The pieces are of interest because their method of manufacture appears to differ greatly from those published in the Iraq article.

The Nimrud plaques and two of the three Hasanlu plaques, Plaques A and B (Fig. 2a), show rosettes or flowers. While the use of a flower motif, and perhaps its significance, is similar, the similarity ends there. The third Hasanlu plaque, Plaque C (Fig. 2a), is unlike the other two. It had no identifiable decorative design and was inlaid with a circular piece (now missing) near the center.

The Nimrud plaques are many in number and were purposefully made for their function as inlay pieces. However, the three found at Hasanlu were cut from two or more larger objects for reuse as inlays in the alabaster cup along with carnelian and Egyptian Blue beads and a broken glass bead (Fig. 3a, b). The decorated obverse surfaces of Hasanlu Plaques A and B appear to have been made by the mosaic technique. Unlike the petals on the Nimrud plaques, which are now a uniform opaque white glass, the petals on Plaques A and B have a central section of glass of one color outlined by glass of the same consistency but of another color. The round center of the flower is yet another color.

Inspired and also shamed by John Russell's discovery of the fair copy of Layard's excavation notes for Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (Russell, 1995), I have recently gone through the extensive Layard Papers in the British Library in the hope of further interesting finds. From his first excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh, November 1845–June 1847, there is very little, only some notes and sketch plans of Nimrud; but these would have been only a fraction of the records Layard originally made. He presumably discarded all others, such as field notes, journals and diaries, sketches and site plans, after completing Nineveh and its Remains (1849). Of the excavations on Sennacherib's palace at Kuyunjik, in May and June 1847, there is only Layard's later fair copy of his field notes LN 1 (Russell, 1995, pp. 72–7 and SWPS, pp. 10–12). By comparison, for his second campaign, October 1849–April 1851, there is a wealth of material, both for Nimrud and especially for Kuyunjik, and although much of this does not necessarily add greatly to our knowledge of Layard's discoveries, his notebooks and diaries certainly do contain new and interesting details. These documentary sources will be used in a separate article, charting the course of Layard's excavation of Sennacherib's palace.

BM 114862 (1921-2-12, 3) is a fragmentary one-column tablet, a copy of which was published as CT 58 25. The provenance of the tablet is unknown; it was acquired from the dealer J. E. Gejou. Its size is 6.5 × 14.5 cm. B. Alster and M. Geller, editors of CT 58, claimed (CT 58: 16) that the text preserved on the tablet is a duplicate of UM 29-15-132, a tablet from Nippur, Išme-Dagan O (2.5.4.15), published by Sjöberg (1974–5: 161–3, 172–4, 178). The present paper contains a transliteration and a translation of BM 114862 based on the author's collations. A new copy of part of the reverse (ll. 1–17) is also provided (Fig. 1).

The main conclusions of the paper are that i) BM 114862 is not an exact duplicate of UM 29-15-132, but probably a different recension of the same composition; ii) BM 114862 preserved the whole text of Išme-Dagan O, for UM 29-15-132 can be shown to be a collective tablet whose reverse preserved Išme-Dagan M (2.5.4.13) and a catchline referring to Išme-Dagan B (2.5.4.02); iii) Išme-Dagan O was probably a tigi of Ninurta.

In one of his last papers the late Professor van Dijk published a narrative composition about Inana (van Dijk 1998). This article attempts to present an alternative translation of ll. 146–7, and to offer an interpretation as to their meaning in the context of the composition as a whole.

The lines in question are preserved in two Old Babylonian mss. (sigla are van Dijk's; the two mss. differ in the order of the lines):

ms. A( = CBS 1531 )

146 [i3-ne-eš2]-ta ud-da šid-bi ba-da-tur ud 6-bi-a ba-da-bur2

147 [ud-da]-ta? en-nu-3-bi 3-am3 ud 6-bi-a ba-an-da-sa2

ms. B( = YBC 4665)

147 ud-da-ta ˹en˺-[nu-3-bi 3]-˹am3?˺ ud 6-ba ˹ba˺da-an-sa2

146 i3-ne-eš2-ta ud-da ˹šid-bi˺ a-ba-da-an-tur ud 6-ba a-ba-da-an-bur2

Van Dijk renders these lines as follows:

Ab heute wird dann die Summe des Tageslichtes geringer werden, in Tag und Nacht wird es getrennt,

an jeglichem Tage, an dessen dritter Nachtwache, werden Tag und Nacht sich gleichkommen!

Van Dijk's rendering of the verb bur2 in 1. 146 is based on the assumption that in this case it means šalāqum “to cut open, to split” (van Dijk 1998: 28). The evidence supporting this assumption is, however, by no means strong, as bur2 = šalāqum is qualified with ša ṣurrum “with reference to obsidian” in Aa VIII/2 174 (MSL 14: 501), and the Akkadian verb is not attested in connection with day and night.

The cuneiform tablets in the British Museum published here come from Old Babylonian Nineveh. A tablet from the Ashmolean Museum is also published here because its contents, reminiscent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, seem to link it with some of the British Museum fragments. Despite the fact that it was registered in the same year, the Ashmolean tablet almost certainly does not come from Nineveh, as the ductus is entirely different, and so is the clay. According to the sequence of numbers to which it belongs, the most likely findspot is Kish.

The tablet fragments and flakes numbered BM 134537 A–I and 134538 probably all belong to a single, very large tablet of the Old Babylonian period. They are written in Old Babylonian script quite similar to that of the letters from Tell al Rimah, and distinct from the script of Sippar. They were found by Campbell Thompson in the temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, together with other fragments which include a possibly bilingual text, and three letters.

Among the papers of L. W. King in the Department of the Ancient Near East in the British Museum there is a copy of a hitherto unknown inscription, on a brick, of the twelfth-century Assyrian king Ashur-resha-ishi I. This inscription is of special importance because it records the name of a palace, Egalshahulla “The Palace of Joyfulness”, at Nineveh, a palace name previously unattested.

It is well known from other inscriptions that Ashur-resha-ishi I sponsored building works at Nineveh. One such text, attested on three brick fragments, may in fact refer to this palace but the name is unfortunately broken (RIMA 1 p. 315 A.0.86.5 lines 10–11 šá É.GAL […] šá URU ni-n[a-a…]).

The Neo-Babylonian Sippar tablet edited below, previously published in photograph only, is a unique member of a group of first-millennium cuneiform astronomical texts commonly known as ziqpu-star texts. Like other members of this group, the tablet's reverse side provides a list of ziqpu-stars (stars which culminated near the centre of the sky when viewed from Assyria or Babylonia) and measures the intervals between these culminations. What is novel about our text is that it is written on a round tablet that preserves on its obverse the remains of circular diagram or planisphere of the ziqpu-stars in the sky. Below we present an edition of the list of ziqpu-stars on the reverse, followed by a study of the planisphere on the obverse and remarks on the place of the tablet in the corpus of cuneiform astronomical texts.

Despite the vast amount of both ancient material remains and ancient written sources from the Mesopotamian world, it is often frustratingly difficult to fuse together the various sources of evidence. Especially the correlation of stones and other naturally occurring materials used in crafts and industries with the names for them in the ancient languages is fraught with notorious difficulties. Contemporary scholars have a “cautious, even pessimistic approach to the possibility of reaching one-to-one equivalence translations”, since popular etymology may deform names, comparative etymology may be unreliable, and ancient principles of nomenclature may be at variance with modern classifications. However, occasionally it is possible to propose a new identification which, notwithstanding the necessary cautions outlined above, seems plausible on a number of grounds.

Amethyst is “a transparent quartz, coloured deep purple or violet by some compound of manganese or iron”, and it is documented in Mesopotamia from Old Babylonian times on (and even before that, although rarely). It may possibly have been imported from Egypt, but Anatolia or Iran are more likely to have been the source. But hitherto its Mesopotamian names have not been identified.

Now the meaning of the Akkadian word ḫašmānu(m) has not been precisely established thus far. It is known to refer both to a coloured stone and to a colouring of wool and leather. Campbell Thompson was unable to make any progress in explaining the word, which he read as tarmānu on the (at that time perfectly reasonable) basis of the possible reading of the first sign as /tar/ or /ḫaš/. But subsequent publication of other texts giving alternative spellings with /ḫa-aš-/ clarified the word as ḫašmānu beyond doubt.

This paper draws attention to a few objects and items of information which should have been included in a previous study on Nineveh and its neighbourhood during the Post-Assyrian and Greco-Parthian periods (Reade 1998). For earlier periods, see now the Reallexikon der Assyriologie entry on Nineveh (Reade 2000), although this regrettably cites only once an important volume of papers edited by Parpola and Whiting (1997); for later periods the Mosul entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam is invaluable (Honigmann and Bosworth 1991). References below to museum objects, archives, drawings and photographs are all to the collections of the British Museum; they are kept unless otherwise stated in the Department of the Ancient Near East (formerly Western Asiatic Antiquities), and are published by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

For three seasons, 1935 through 1937, Max Mallowan excavated at Chagar Bazar, after selecting it during a survey of the Upper Habur region in 1934. The Mallowan excavations are most notable for the “Prehistoric Pit”, with its deep sequence of Halaf and 3rd millennium BC levels, and for the horizontal exposure of early 2nd millennium BC buildings at the centre of the site. These excavations made a substantial contribution to the initial identification of the northern Mesopotamian archaeological assemblages and artifactual sequence. But there are questions remaining about the sequence and the nature of occupation at Chagar Bazar. In 1999, a new programme of excavations at the site was begun, a joint project involving the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (Dr Augusta McMahon), the University of Liège (Professor Önhan Tunca), and the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (Mr Abdul-Massih Bagdo of the Hasseke Department of Antiquities). Our first two seasons took place in March-May of 1999 and March–May of 2000.

The new research programme focuses on two related diachronic questions. The first is Chagar Bazar's internal cycle of occupation, abandonment, and re-occupation, and the internal diversity within the site. The second question is the changing role of the site within settlement trends in the Upper Habur, focusing on its status as a relatively small site in the Mesopotamian context.