In Iraq 30 (1968) I published a fragmentary text from Ur, then numbered 7/80, containing part of a treatise on the tuning of the sammû instrument, and with the collaboration of the musicologist David Wulstan, who himself contributed a companion article, I added an interpretation, with a table showing that the text described seven different tunings, with instructions in two chapters for the conversion of each one to the next, first by lowering, then by raising the pitch of one string by a semitone. The copy of the text was subsequently published again as UET VII 74 and the number 7/80 was abandoned when the tablet was sent to Baghdad and renumbered in the Iraq Museum. This text, usually known as “the tuning text” — a better name would be “retuning text” — provided the decisive clue to the understanding of the Babylonian musical system and its terminology, which have since been expounded by several musicologists and compared with the Greek system of “octave species”. So well established did the theory become that it was applied without question by several scholars when a few years later a tablet apparently containing a musical notation using the same terminology was recognized among the tablets from Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Little notice was taken in 1982 when Raoul Vitale wrote an article calling in question the basic assumption of the theory that the tuning system and the scales were upward rather than downward. Only recently has M. L. West proposed in this article “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Human Melodic Texts” (Music and Letters 75/4 [1993], 161–79) that Vitale's theory should be seriously considered.

The use of waxed wooden writing boards in Mesopotamia can be traced back at least to the Ur III period and the indications are that at certain periods they were a major vehicle of cuneiform writing. This article deals with the use of writing boards at Sippar in the Neo-Babylonian/early Achaemenid period, based on the numerous references to their use in the archives of the Ebabbara. The word used for a set of writing boards was lē'u, normally written with the logogram gišDA but occasionally written out phonetically. This article presents a catalogue of the evidence from Sippar followed by an analysis of the purposes for which writing boards were used, an examination of the procedures and officials involved, comments on their manufacture and a review of the evidence concerning the end of the archives. An appendix gives editions of twelve new texts.

Assyrian sculptures have been treated in various ways. Neglected original records about pieces found at Nineveh can still be informative. Pieces that did not go at once to major public museums were sometimes liable to rejuvenation, detached from their original contexts but endowed with new significance as commercial assets, as independent works of art, or as integral parts of contemporary architecture. Two Nimrud sculptures, built into the walls of Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh, represent a unique fusion of Assyrian and Scots artistry, now vulnerable to financial pressures.

If we conduct today a survey of early scientific studies on the archaeology of the Near East, most of them seem to be only of historic interest. Only a few of the results published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century remain valid. Nevertheless the first three decades of the twentieth century were a very important period for setting the agenda in methods and aims of Near Eastern archaeology. Moreover, many of these early theories and propositions still have an effect on current research, even when in the present state of knowledge they are out of date or no longer of relevance.

In his book Zur Datierung des Königsfriedhofes von Ur (Rudolf Haibert Verlag Bonn, 1966) Nissen has re-examined the sequence dating of the Royal Cemetery of Ur and attempted to relate it to history. The archaeological analysis is necessarily based on the two great volumes written by the late Sir Leonard Woolley in 1934. This is not the first attempt of the kind, for another, unsuccessful one was made by Pallis many years ago. The fact is that the stratigraphic evidence of many critical points is defective and the major problems cannot be solved by using the internal evidence alone.

Nissen's new assessment of the situation depends largely on one important observation, namely: that Woolley made an error in the orientation of the Neo-Babylonian Temenos Wall which measures 103° on all plans except on pl. 274 where it is 98°. The discovery of this error has led Nissen to re-draw the cemetery plan with the wall aligned at the correct angle and to re-orientate many graves which during certain seasons Woolley specifically states were plotted with reference to that base line.

The late Peter Hulin devoted much of his scholarly life to the study of the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria (859–824 BC). He copied and studied a number of texts of this monarch excavated at Nimrud. Among them, the inscriptions on the throne base (ND 11000) were published in 1963. Unfortunately, however, his death in 1993 prevented him from publishing the further fruits of his effort.

After Hulin's death his file of Shalmaneser III texts was placed at the disposal of Professor A. K. Grayson for use in his third volume of the series Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods: Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858–745 BC), Toronto, 1996 (RIMA 3). Thus Hulin's study of several new texts from Nimrud, as well as some others, was effectively utilized and incorporated in RIMA 3, with full respect being paid to his contribution.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement RIMA 3 by publishing Hulin's hand copies of Shalmaneser texts found among his papers in a publishable state, together with several photographs, and to add some philological notes on them. Among Hulin's copies, those of the lengthy texts on the large stone tablet ND 6237 (below, No. 1) and on the broken statue N D 5500 (below, No. 2) are of primary importance. These texts were originally assigned to Hulin by Professors M. E. L. Mallowan and D. J. Wiseman for publication in the journal Iraq. His copies were entrusted to Dr Jeremy Black of the Oriental Institute, Oxford University, by Mrs Mary Hulin and are gratefully used in this publication by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

At the foot of, and roughly south-south-east of, the ziggurrat at Nimrud stood the temple of Ninurta, on the floor of room 1 of which, excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in 1956, were found “a number of fragments, some of them inscribed, of a burnt white limestone statue of Shalmaneser III, in the round.” These fragments, now in the Iraq Museum, were numbered as a group by the excavator ND 5571, and by the Iraq Museum IM 60497. They comprised the right elbow and a small part of adjacent body behind and below (IM 60497A), two subsequently joined inscribed fragments (IM 60497B), a fragment of clasped hands (IM 60497C), and some other fragments including one bearing traces of seven lines of inscription so very slight as to be, for the present writer, beyond consecutive comprehension.

The right elbow of the statue of Shalmaneser III “found in fragments by a ploughman in fields in the outer town near the foot of the south-east corner of the akropolis” is missing; but not only is the thickness (13 cm.) of the forearm at the lower end of the elbow-fragment IM 60497A considerably too small to fit the upper end of the right forearm of the statue found by the ploughman, but it also extends too far above the elbow (that is, it extends upwards beyond the point above the elbow down to which the statue's upper arm is preserved) to allow any possibility of regarding it as having belonged to the ploughman's statue.

The Sealand Dynasty ruled in southern Mesopotamia ca. 1740–1460(?) b.c.e., but Sealand archaeological deposits are extraordinarily rare, and the dynasty itself is known almost entirely from a limited number of texts. Sealand Dynasty social and ecological practices remain mysterious, and ceremonial activities are at best poorly understood. Faunal remains from the small site of Tell Sakhariya in southern Iraq provide our first glimpse into the Sealand animal socio-economy. Sakhariya's occupants herded and hunted in multiple environmental zones. In pre-Sealand times Tell Sakhariya was an important ceremonial site, and the large-scale food sharing and possible ritual dog burial in its faunal assemblage might indicate that Sakhariya retained ideological significance into the Sealand era.

In the course of a wordy article which offers no new solution to any problem, R. L. Crocker makes a series of criticisms of articles by us on the subject of Babylonian music. It is gratifying that he, the musicologist who has been most concerned, acknowledges that Gurney's corrections to the system, published in Volume 56 of this journal, are “almost right”. However, he accuses us of suffering from and perpetuating methodological and terminological confusions, and of being insufficiently emancipated from modern European musical concepts. It seems to us that there is more confusion in Dr Crocker's paper than in ours, and that in places he is more guilty than either of us of preconception based on modern musical theory.

A real step forward in the understanding of the Babylonian tonal systems was made a few years ago when T. J. H. Krispijn produced an improved reading in 1. 12 of the crucial “re-tuning text”, UET VII 74. Line 12 rounds off the preceding list of tuning adjustments. In what had previously been read as NU.SU.U[D] “no more” (i.e. “end of sequence”), Krispijn recognized nu-sú-ḫ[u-um], “tightening”; the damaged sign on the edge is compatible with ḫu, and the reading seems secure. This has consequences for readings in all that precedes and follows. Previously, te-[x x] in 1. 15 and te-n[i]-m[a] in 1. 19 had been taken to be from enûm, thus “you alter”, and the same verb had been restored in both sections of the document. It was then open to the modern interpreter to decide whether “alter” meant “tighten” in § 1 and “slacken”in §2, or vice versa. With the new reading it became clear that § 1 was about tightenings, and that the verb in § 2 was to be read as te-n[é]-e!-[ma], “you slacken”, from nê um, while a different verb was to be restored in § 1, namely [tu-na-sà-ah]. These are the technical terms for re-tuning a string, known from the lexical texts cited by Gurney in his n. 5, and they are both present on UET VII 74. A further consequence of the new reading was that it confirmed the view for which R. Vitale had argued on other grounds,3 that the “front”strings of the instrument played the highest notes, not the lowest as others had supposed.

Figs, 1 and 2 show a conspectus of the restorable pot-shapes of both plain and glazed ware found in the Sassanian buildings excavated at Kish in 1932-3. Almost all of them come from the SS 7 complex, at an average depth of 2 metres: a few are from SS 6 or SS 8, at a similar depth. They form a group that should prove most valuable for purposes of dating on less well documented sites in Iraq, for it seems most probable that this pottery belongs to the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. The latest coin found with the pots is one of Justinian I (A.D. 527-65).

A. Plain ware. The commonest shapes are the hemispherical and truncated conical bowls which often bear Aramaic incantations; jugs which have ovoid bodies and rounded or pointed bases; jugs with pinched lips and flat bases or base-rings; and large three-handled jars for storing liquids.

The series of silver coins struck at Aradus in the last two centuries B.C. contains, in the letters added to the reverse type, rather more information upon the relations of the successive issues than is commonly to be derived from Greek coins: and a study of the specimens in the British Museum and Oxford collections, with the aid of casts from Berlin, Copenhagen, and Paris, has suggested that there may be a profitable field for investigation of the organization of this and the neighbouring mints. The statistics collected have therefore been recorded here as a starting-point.

Despite the fact that Mohenjo-daro is of world-wide interest, and is such a rich field for discussion and speculation, until recently only two books had been written giving an authoritative account of the excavations, and the remains and the culture which they disclosed. These have now been joined by a third, namely, Dr. Mackay's full-length monograph on the excavations from 1927 to 1931.

When one has viewed the excavations, and read the works of Sir John Marshall and Dr. Mackay, and one realizes the immense amount of hard work and scholarship which has been lavished on them, it seems petty and churlish to raise the carping voice of criticism. Mohenjo-daro is not easily reached, and once the traveller has arrived there, without a well-prepared scheme of provisioning it is a difficult place in which to maintain oneself for a period of days while engaged in study. The fact that the available works of authority are so few and the visits of competent observers so rare makes it necessary that some more independent voice should be heard, even though it be a critical one. Without this, the few works would gain an almost Biblical authority and infallibility; this would be most deplorable, as it is almost always the least fortunate observations that secure the most frequent repetition. There is another point also which often escapes attention, and that is the relative proportion of certain objects, styles, and fabrics to the whole, stress being laid on them often in such a way as unintentionally to mislead the student and to give a false impression of quantitative importance.

The late antique Christian chronicle preserved as the Excerpta Latina Barbari contains a brief, but extraordinary notice on the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar; many of its unusual details can be understood in the contexts of traditional stories about Nebuchadnezzar and the interests of the work itself. The best clue to the meaning of the passage on Nebuchadnezzar is the Excerpta's closely parallel passage on Alexander the Great. In the Excerpta Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander reflect one another and in a sense compete with one another. Many of the odd details of the notice on Nebuchadnezzar can be explained as directing the reader toward this parallelism. The parallelism itself seems to serve two purposes. First, to provide symmetry to the Excerpta's idiosyncratic account of world history in which Alexander liberates the world conquered by Nebuchadnezzar. And second, to show Nebuchadnezzar subtly outdoing Alexander, so that Alexander's encounter with the God of the Jews, as it is found in the Excerpta, can be provided with an implicit interpretation and characterization.

During 1970 the Ashmolean Museum acquired at auction in London two Syriac-inscribed bronze censers of a now well-known but insufficiently studied type decorated with New Testament scenes in relief and with incised ornament on their plain surfaces. The following speculations about these objects are offered in admiration to Sir Max Mallowan, and as a reminder of bumpy but delightful journeys to certain ancient monasteries in the Mosul area where such objects will have been used: forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.

Several fresh examples of these censers have come to notice in recent years, so that the number known to exist in museums or private collections must now exceed 30 or even 40, while the number still in ecclesiastical possession is presumably very much greater. All of those recently acquired by museums must once have belonged to churches or monasteries of the Near East; and one may suspect that some of these communities have either recently been robbed or, more probably, have been induced to sell or succeeded in selling some of the more battered contents of their sacristies.

In the course of excavations at Abu Salabikh in the 1970s and 1980s bird bones were recovered in small numbers from a range of contexts. These have been identified and are described here. In general, they give a picture of the contemporary rural environment round the city in the mid-third millennium BC, and shed light on contemporary diet. One unusual find in particular is discussed in more detail: that of an entire goshawk skeleton placed near a child in a grave with an adult (Grave 158). This is an interesting piece of evidence which might be taken to illustrate the practice of falconry in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia.

This paper reviews the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the three sets of Late Assyrian bronze gates on Tell Balawat (Imgur-Enlil). Attention is drawn to the strategic importance of the site in the light of recent investigations at Balawat. Architectural aspects of the elevation view of Imgur-Enlil depicted on the Mamu Temple gate erected by Assurnasirpal II are discussed in terms of the possibilities and problems in attempting to correlate graphically the elevation view with plan views of unidentified square enclosures on the campaign gates of Shalmaneser III. The logical graphical transposition from elevation to plan view and the narrative context suggest that three square empty enclosures are representations of Imgur-Enlil.

The discovery by Hormuzd Rassam of two bronze-clad gates of Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) and his successor Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) in 1878 added a new dimension to the knowledge of the art of Assyria (Rassam, 1880/82: 1897: 200–20). However, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that Tell Balawat was accepted as the true provenance of the gates and firmly put on the Assyrian map as the site of the town of Imgur-Enlil (Lloyd, 1947: 173).

This article continues the publication of tablets from the library of the temple of Šamaš at Sippar begun in volume 52 of this journal. Presented here are the library's copies of two texts which have in common the fact that they are not what they purport to be: Maništūšu's cruciform monument, and a literary letter of Samsu-iluna. Both texts are clearly fictitious compositions which postdate their supposed royal authors by a long time. Their purpose was apparently to supply evidence of historical precedent. The invented evidence which these documents present as fact would be intended to substantiate or advance the claims of those who wrote them. While both tablets are duplicates of known texts, each adds to a greater or lesser degree to our knowledge of these texts, not least by filling lacunae and by confirming or rebutting the restorations of previous editors.

The identification of a tablet from niche 8 B as a duplicate of the last column of a large Neo-Babylonian exercise tablet from Ur allows this text to be properly identified for the first time. It is one of several royal letters in Akkadian, some apparently genuine, others certainly bogus, which entered the scribal tradition and survive in late copies. This example purports to be from Samsu-iluna, the son and successor of Hammurapi of Babylon, to Enlil-nādin-šumi, a man whose several titles identify him as a very senior figure, and apparently a royal prince. As is the case with the Cruciform Inscription of Maništūšu, anachronisms in the text mark the composition out as later than it purports to be. Following the formulae which name the letter's addressee and sender the text itself opens with the phrase umma ana narê, an expression that also appears in a probably genuine letter of Nebuchadnezzar I.

Writing in 1931, Eckhard Unger observed that published Neo-Babylonian texts written at or referring to Dilbat and dated by the Neo-Babylonian kings were scarce; those dated by the early Achaemenid kings, up to the end of the reign of Darius I, were more numerous; the latest unequivocally dated text from Dilbat was VAS 6, 331, dated by Bēl-šimânni, one of the Babylonian rebels against Xerxes; Seleucid and Parthian texts from Dilbat were unknown. In 1976 these observations still held, and Joachim Oelsner contemplated the possibility that the dearth of later texts from Dilbat was connected with Xerxes' suppression of the Babylonian revolts in the early years of his reign.

Oppert-Menant, Doc. jur. 276 ff. No. VI was problematic. Its publication in 1877 did not include a facsimile of the cuneiform text, but relied on a transliteration that is now antiquated and partly incomprehensible, accompanied by a largely unsuccessful effort at translation. It was plainly written at Dilbat on 7/IX/14 Darius, called “Kings of Lands”. Oppert ascribed it to Darius I, but the omission of “King of Babylon” from the royal title (or at least from the transliteration of the title) suggests to a modern reader that Darius II was intended. Oelsner judged properly that as long as the cuneiform text was not available there was no way to assign the text confidently to the reign of one Darius or the other.

Khirbet Karhasan was excavated by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, as part of the Saddam Dam Salvage Project. The excavations brought to light a hoard of Middle Assyrian faience ornaments, which formed a coherent assemblage. Collections of similar ornaments are known from Assur and Nimrud where they have been variously interpreted as decorating the rich garments for a god, a divine image, and even the walls of temples. In the absence of any other persuasive view a hypothesis is advanced based on the evidence of archaeological context, iconographic associations and a viable reconstruction, that the ornaments are equally adaptable to the decoration of ceremonial horse-harness.

The tell of Khirbet Karhasan is situated on the right bank of the Tigris approximately 75 km north-west of Mosul. The site on the edge of a prominent terrace overlooks a broad floodplain. In 1986, prior to the flooding of the site, the Tigris channel was 3 km north of the tell. The tell was sheltered by low hills which formed the western slope of the valley some 500 m to the south of the site. The hills rose some 40 m above the tell to approximately 50 m above the floodplain.