During the month of April 1952 we were digging the deepest levels of a brick-lined well which had been found a year previously within the chamber NN of the North West Palace of Aššur-naṣir-pal. Below the two hundred and forty-fifth course, at about 18 metres (60 feet) down from the well-head, we were struggling to bail out the water faster than it was surging up. Indeed, we only succeeded in getting down to bedrock, 25·4 metres or 331 courses from the top, by working continuously all day, and then again, after a respite at sunset, by the light of hurricane lamps from midnight for six hours until dawn.

In the deeper levels many objects which had been cast into the well when Calah was sacked at the end of the seventh century B.C. began to appear. As each drum-load of precious sludge was ready to be hauled to the surface we realised that any one of them might hold a king's ransom. At last it happened. The foreman announced that ‘a lady has been found,’ and before our eyes we saw this ivory head emerge from the deep waters where it had lain, immersed in mud, for more than 2,500 years. Carefully we wiped away the thick coat of slime that partly concealed her face, her hair and her crown. What we beheld was a thing of beauty still radiant with life. The warm brown tones of the natural ivory, set against the dark black tresses of hair that framed the head, combined with the soft rounded curves of the face to give an extraordinary impression of life. The slightly parted lips appeared to have a light reddish tint; the black pupils of the eyes were encased in dark lids; the crown, fillets and stand were of a rather darker brown than the face. Originally crown and base must have been decorated with ivory studs of which only two now remained.

The twelfth season of excavations at Nimrud lasted from March 2nd to May 16th, 1962. The expedition was generously supported by contributions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the British Museum, Les Musées Royales d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. My thanks are once again due to all my colleagues on the staff. Mr. Jeffery Orchard, Secretary of the School in Baghdad, was Assistant Director and catalogued the ivories and other finds. Both in the field-work and in the cleaning of the ivories we were fortunate in having the assistance of Mrs. Olwen Brogan, F.S.A., a field archaeologist of very wide experience, and of Mrs. Prudence Harper, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Mr. Peter Hulin, of Oxford University, was the epigraphist, Mr. Nicholas Kindersley took charge of the photography and of the pottery, Mr. Terence Mitchell acted as registrar, and Mr. Julian Reade gave valuable help with the ivories and also undertook the reconstruction of a large panel of glazed bricks which was one of the major finds of the season. The laborious work of cleaning and conserving the ivories was in the hands of Miss Ann Searight and Miss Stephanie Page. All members of the staff shared in the supervision of the excavations and helped most willingly with tasks other than their own. Sayid Selim al-Jelili was once again the representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities and a most valuable member of the expedition. This year we encountered many unforeseen problems, and we owe an especial debt of gratitude for their unfailing help to the Director General of Antiquities, Sayid Taha Baqir, the Inspector General of Excavations, Sayid Fuad Safar, and to members of their staff, in particular Sayid Akram Shukri, Director of the Iraq Museum Laboratory, Sayid Ali Nakshabandi and Sayid Isa Toma who worked with us at Nimrud. We must also express our thanks to the Iraq Petroleum Company, who most generously lent us valuable equipment for the lifting of the throne base of Shalmaneser III and its transport to Baghdad, and to Mr. Robert Ayton who took charge of the operation. Among visitors to Nimrud during the course of the season we were particularly glad to welcome Miss Margaret Munn Rankin, a member of the Council, and Dr. Donald Harden, a member of the Executive Committee of the School.

Over three hundred glazed bricks were last year discovered in Courtyard T of Fort Shalmaneser. They were lying between the buttresses that flanked the entrance to T 3 and must originally have formed a panel set into the wall above. Though most of them had been broken into several separate fragments, few had fallen clear and the most important of these was in fact discovered from the fill of a nineteenth-century trench on top of the mound. The bricks were taken to Baghdad where it eventually proved possible to reconstruct their entire design.

An inscription dates the bricks to the reign of Shalmaneser III; they were found resting on a confused mass of mud-brick and charcoal, and had clearly collapsed during one of the sacks of Calah, when the wooden fittings of the door below were set on fire and its east jamb demolished. The bricks, whose total weight must have exceeded three tons, fell immediately, but since only mud mortar can have bound them to the wall behind, brought down at the same time very little mud-brick. When the main body of the wall did fall shortly afterwards, it sealed them in what was still an extremely loose heap. This process of destruction, while serving its purpose at the time, saved the bricks from the dangers of exposure, and even the fire only damaged those which came to rest face down on the smouldering wood. Two of them, however, which carried a representation of the god Aššur, were split into an unusually large number of fragments and must have been cracked before the panel fell.

The throne-base of Shalmaneser III found at Nimrud in 1962 comprises two blocks of yellowish-brown limestone; one block sat close against the east wall of the room (T1) in which it was found, the other fitted tightly to the west side of the first. The dimensions of the throne-base are 2·28 m. (7½ feet) north-south and 3·82 m. (12½ feet) east-west (at centre) respectively.

The east block has a narrow panel of three lines of inscription (the signs being smaller than those of the rest of the inscription) running north-south along the extreme east part of its upper, horizontal, surface, and panels each of twenty lines of inscription running east-west and west-east respectively along the north and south parts of that surface; these panels leave between them an uninscribed portion comprising two-sevenths of the north-south dimension of the block.

The six letters here edited, four of them substantially complete, are amongst the hitherto unpublished tablets found at Nimrud in 1952. The legibility of these letters, first copied by me in Baghdad in 1954, has been much improved by the skilled treatment they have received at the hands of Mr. C. A. Bateman of the British Museum; in one case the extensive improvement in legibility rendered it advisable to make a completely new copy, and on other tablets obscure passages have become (at least physically) clear. I wish to express my thanks to my friend and colleague Professor D. J. Wiseman, Joint-Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, for arranging for these and other letters of the collection to be put at my disposal for further study.

LXV is written from Babylon by an official, probably the governor of Arrapha, on behalf of himself and the Turtan at the moment that the gates of Babylon had been forced at the final crushing of the Ukin-zer rebellion in 730 B.C. Possibly connected with the aftermath of the rebellion is LXVI, which is taken to be a reply to a royal enquiry informing the king that no Babylonian “fifth column” had appeared during the Assyrian action against the southern capital.

It must be very unusual in the history of archaeology for a site to have a history of excavation in two stages, separated by over a century. Ur, Babylon and Susa were touched, it is true, by early workers in the Mesopotamian field; but their work there had little to compare with that of our generations. Yet the brilliantly successful excavations of Professor Mallowan and his staff of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq have repeatedly carried us back to the first beginnings of Assyriology, in particular by their great finds of ivories to that second day of Layard's excavations, the 9th of November, 1845, when Layard's men sank their spades into the soil of the North-West Palace and brought out the first of the ‘Nimrud Ivories’. These finds of ivories by Layard have now all been published in full and discussed at length, and in the publication I put forward the view that the work of decorating with them perhaps furniture or rooms was originally carried out by Phoenician and Hamathite craftsmen for the ruler of Hamath, Iau-bi’di, and that it was Sargon who carried off the ivories to Nimrud when he destroyed Hamath and swept away its wealth as booty in 719 B.C.

During the spring of 1957, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq carried out a second short season of excavations at Balawat, ancient Imgur-Bel. The excavation of the temple of the god Mamu was continued and to the east of the cella two small rooms were uncovered. In one of these was found a collection of forty tablets, in varying state of preservation. Of this collection I publish twenty-nine, the others being too badly preserved to give a useful text.

The majority of the tablets were written between 697 and 671 B.C., during the reigns of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon. There are three isolated documents of earlier date: BT.101, 710 B.C.; BT.106, 734 B.C.; BT.131, 719 B.C. There is one isolated tablet of much later date, belonging to the reign of Sin-šar-iškun, BT. 105. It is noticeable that these tablets do not contain any of the names familiar from the transactions of the main group of documents.

The latter half of 1962 has witnessed a remarkably varied number of events including not only two rewarding excavations by the Directorate General of Antiquities and the continuation of its restoration programme at various ancient sites, but also the official opening of the new Iraq Museum, the return of two distinguished foreign expeditions to the field and a festival. If, then, we select the opening of the new Museum to begin this article, it is in the belief that the completion of that admirable enterprise marks a great and important step not simply towards the general advancement of Mesopotamian studies in Iraq and abroad, but equally towards the fuller realization by the Iraqi people of the outstanding material and intellectual achievements of their ancient forbears. To those, therefore, who have worked for the creation of the new building, and to those who have followed its progress it must be a source of great satisfaction that within the course of the next two years we may hope to see a great national collection installed in its new home.