The reports given below cover excavation work in Iraq during 1975, together with a few which could not be included in the last collection of reports for 1973–4 in Iraq 37 (1975), 57–67. The information on each site has been kindly provided by the director of the excavations, unless otherwise specified, and the final version checked by him wherever possible. The sites are arranged in alphabetical order, according to their best known name.

The material for this report has been assembled by Mr. J. N. Postgate, Director of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, and the Editors are glad to acknowledge his efforts. They join with him in expressing their gratitude to all those colleagues who have so willingly contributed information on their work, and especially to Dr. Isa Salman, the Director-General of Antiquities in Iraq, for his generous co-operation which alone has made this compilation possible.

Excavations were restarted at this Early Dynastic site to the north-west of Nippur by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq under the direction of J. N. Postgate, and lasted from September to December, 1975. Work was confined to the main north-eastern mound, in Areas A and E investigated by the Oriental Institute expedition in 1963 and 1965.

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.

During his excavations of the successive cities of Troy, Schliemann uncovered a few clay pots adorned in relief with a crudely moulded human face, presumably female, which might have been thought to be in the tradition of the vase decorated in relief and painting with a female face from Hassuna and the pots with moulded faces from Kish. Professor Frankfort, however, in his most interesting article Ishtar in Troy, proposes quite a different derivation for these pots, termed by him “face-urns”, which implies that they were used for funerary purposes, although they did not contain human remains and were not found in graves, but in dwellings, which suggests that they may have been domestic utensils. A piece bearing rudimentary indications of a human face was also discovered and, although not found in the same level as the pots, has been thought to be the cover which fitted over the mouth and neck of one of the vessels. From this fact Frankfort concludes that the derivation of this type of pot can be traced back to certain objects of stone and clay which consist of a bell-shaped base surmounted by double volutes with perforated centres which were not uncommon at various sites in strata of the Protoliterate d (= Uruk III, Jamdat Naṣr) period.

The study presents a reconstruction of the arrangement of the soldiers of Lagash as represented in the first and second registers of the “Stele of the Vultures” of King Eannatum according to both philological and iconographic data. Through a process of deconstruction, it is possible to read the composition as the result of a combination of two perspectives employed by the Sumerian artists.

The choice of this subject originates from the fact that the area of research to which I have been devoting myself recently includes the figurative cultures of Mesopotamia and Syria in the Early Dynastic and the Early Syrian periods, specifically in the field of war. Some of the data resulting from this research focus on the representation of the “head of the enemy”, which appears repeatedly in the documentation of the second millennium BC in Syria but so far seems to be absent in contemporary Mesopotamia. Despite the evident difference between the forms of representation from these two areas, I perceived in the figurative cycles of the Neo-Assyrian reliefs not only the recurrence of this theme but also the intentional display of severed heads, which reaches its climax in the numerous examples from the South-West Palace in Nineveh. My first aim is, therefore, to suggest a plausible approach towards identifying the origin of the display of “severed heads”, previously absent from Mesopotamian scenes of warfare, in the visual communication of the Neo-Assyrian period. My second aim is to offer an interpretation which may help shed light on ideological, cultural and anthropological aspects essential to the Neo-Assyrian political programme and its visual representation.

Hundreds if not thousands of statuettes of the Hellenistic and Roman times of alabaster, clay, and bone have been found all over Babylonia in Graeco-Roman ruins and tombs and in many places in Middle-Mesopotamia, e.g. at Dura. They present a great interest not only from the artistic but also from the religious and mythological points of view. Those of clay have been collected and illustrated by Mrs. E. Douglas van Buren and all those found at Seleucia will soon be published and illustrated in a comprehensive study by Miss W. van Ingen of the University of Michigan. I have dealt with some of them repeatedly, especially from the point of view of the history of art.

In this short note I wanted to correct a mistake of mine regarding some of these statuettes and at the same time to draw the attention of fellow-students to one very curious variety occurring among them. I mean the statuettes which represent a human figure—without doubt a deity—in the squatting position so typical for the Orient in general.

Excavations carried out in the last five years by “La Sapienza” University of Rome and Iraqi teams at the site of Abu Tbeirah (Nasiriyah, Iraq) exposed a large multi-phased mud-brick building (Building A), internally articulated into various rooms with different purposes, which probably hosted a wide range of activities. This building presents an opportunity to investigate the use of these spaces in order to glimpse the daily life and the socio-economic structure of its past inhabitants. In this paper we present the preliminary outcomes of this study, based on the results of a micro-debris analysis that looked at the distribution of the material residues embedded within the floor of Room 5 of the building.

Hittite political history consists of a continuous series of wars. The Hittite empire, situated amidst bellicose neighbours and lacking natural frontiers, called for rulers whose power relied on strong armed forces. Every king, when he ascended the throne, at first had to fight against aggressive enemies, in order to keep the inherited territory intact, whereas later on during his reign, he usually endeavoured to expand its borders.

The sources on the warfare of Hittite kings are rather numerous; they can be traced from the very beginning of the Old kingdom until its disappearance (ca. 1600–1200 B.C.).

The Samarran ceramic assemblage of the Mesopotamian region has long remained an enigma. With the exception of the work of Braidwood et al. and Oates, the nature of the relationship between Samarran and other contemporary Mesopotamian and Iranian styles has not been systematically explored. This paper begins by challenging contemporary perceptions of the Samarran “culture” and continues by investigating the relationship of Samarran wares to those of the Hassuna and Ubaid traditions. Comparisons among these assemblages are made by means of recent miner-alogical data from the site of Tell 'Oueili (Tell 'Awayli) in southern Mesopotamia. The Ubaid 0 ceramic assemblage at Tell 'Oueili is seen to have a substantial Samarran component, and, in light of this information, new questions arise concerning the place of this style within the region. The data provided by Courtois and Velde are used to test the following hypotheses about Samarran ceramics: [1] that they were imported to the southern Mesopotamian plain, [2] that they were locally made in southern Mesopotamia, and [3] that they are an integral and undifferentiated part of the Ubaid 0 assemblage.

Dr Matthews was kind enough to show us a draft of the preceding article before publication so that we could reply, for which we thank him. Our original article was intended as a review of the problem of the Early Dynastic to Akkadian transition and as a quick general overview of the WF excavation at Nippur, rather than the final statement on either. The point of the article was not to define the Akkadian Period but to make steps towards the identification of an assemblage of material culture (pottery, tablets, objects, and seals) found in levels which are dated to the historical Akkadian Period. That assemblage included pottery types, but we did not suggest that a single pottery type or a few types alone should be the basis for dating; nor would we prefer, as is implied by Matthews, to define a period by pottery as opposed to other objects. What the Nippur WF excavation gave us was a well-stratified sequence of artifacts; and we were careful when suggesting the level at which we might have entered the Akkadian (historical) period not to be adamant about the date of the pertinent level and to precede it with a “transitional” level (Level XVII) which might have been either Early Dynastic or Akkadian. Perhaps we should have been more cautious and extended that transitional label to cover Level XVI as well.

In the spring of 1904 the German excavators at Babylon unearthed the remains of a group of buildings on the mound Hornera in the east of the city (Fig. 1). The northern part is a Greek theatre, constructed principally of crude brick, though brick rubble laid with gypsum mortar is used in some special places.

‘An das Bühnengebäude schliesst südlich ein grosses Peristyl mit anliegenden, meist ziemlich gleichwertigen Zimmern an. Die südliche Reihe dieser Zimmer ist grösstenteils vernichtet. Vom Peristyl liegen noch die Bruchziegel-Fundamente soweit, dass nach ihnen die Hauptmasse genommen werden konnten. Die umlaufende Halle war im Süden zweischiffig, wie das bei Palaestra-Peristylen häufig ist. Von den Säulen, die auf diesen Fundamenten standen, haben sich ziemlich zahlreiche Reste in der Form kreisförmig zugehackter Barnsteine, von denen einige roh gehauene, sicher einst feiner verputzte Profile trugen, erhalten. Im Osten öffnete sich, ebenfalls in Säulenstellung, gegen die Halle des Peristyls eine langgestreckte Exedra.’

In the Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse, Vol. I, Plate 16 (repeated in II, 24), there stands among the symbols carved upon a finely-executed and preserved ‘boundary-stone’ one that is at present unique, namely, that in the lower left corner, numbered 22 in subsequent publications. It is true that one other has been compared with it—L. W. King, Babylonian Boundary-Stones, Plate III (at bottom)—but there is really no resemblance here. Dismissing, therefore, the suggestion (most inapparent to the eye, and founded only upon this supposed identity) that a sheaf of corn is the object depicted on top of the divine seat or shrine, the only remaining explanation offered of this thing is that it is a shell, in particular that of the pecten, the comb-shell. While it is not possible to disprove this, several arguments may be brought against it. First, the representation is not much like the thing compared. Three typical pecten-shells, from species which occur particularly in the Persian Gulf, do not show anything like the transverse line following the curved border which is so carefully marked upon the emblem; contrariwise, the sculpture has nothing like the prominent ‘wings’ at the apex of the shells. Next, even the largest of the three shells proffered as specimens, Pecten townsendi Sowerby, is quite small, being about 4 inches in extreme measurement, so that if the object resting upon the ‘seat’ is a pecten-shell it must be many times magnified in the representation.

Two unpublished terracottas from Ur, now in the British Museum, and a terracotta from Ur, now in the University Museum, Philadelphia, deserve attention for the contribution they can make to the problem of identifying the well known “goddess on a goose”. I am grateful to Carole Mendleson for the catalogue descriptions for Nos. 1–2.

(1) B.M. 127484. U. 17163 (Diqdiqqah), Plate VIIa. 60 × 78 mm. Chair relief. Bottom part only remaining. A figure, almost certainly the same goddess as No. 2 below), wearing a flounced and pleated skirt. She is seated on a standing “goose” and faces to the right with her feet resting on a seated “goose”. The entire scene is on a platform. This appears to be a sideways view of the scene shown in B.M. 1933–10–13, 215 (see No. 2 below) though there is no sign of flowing streams. The relief is well made with details of the standing bird's feathers clearly shown.

Smooth reddish clay, buff on the outside; feet of the chair broken off.

Paolo Emilio Botta, who was sent to Mosul as the French Consul in 1842, explored at Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus and then began investigating ancient stone foundations at Nebi Yunus. Muhammed/Mehmed Pasha and local religious leaders, who were worried that the tomb of prophet Yunus (Jonah) and a local mosque would be destroyed by the excavations, opposed these investigations and the work stopped as a result. After Nebi Yunus, Botta started to work at Kuyunjik in December 1842. While his workers were busy at Kuyunjik, someone from the village of Khorsabad talked about stones with inscriptions and reliefs on them on top of a hill. After three months of exhaustive work at Kuyunjik, on March 20th, 1843 Botta sent a group of workers to Khorsabad for excavation. However, problems arose about Botta's work in Mosul. The Pasha of the province in particular created obstructions. We have done research in the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry of Turkey on Botta's excavation permits and documents, the obstructions created by the Pasha of Mosul, the details of the story of Botta's experiences at Khorsabad and the relevant correspondence. In these archives we have found documents about the problems Botta experienced at Khorsabad, the conditions for excavation permits and the construction of an excavation house, the plan of the excavation house mentioned by Botta, which was drafted like a fortress next to the village houses and sent to Istanbul, as well as petitions of the villagers opposing Botta's work and his excavation house. Here, we attempt to re-read Botta's excavation seasons, permits and the problems he encountered through the documents in the Ottoman Archives in order to understand how this period is to be understood. Through these documents and correspondence, we were able to study the problems that arose between the Ottoman State and France as a result of Botta's excavations at Khorsabad.