At some point early on during his reign, Sar-kali-sarrē, made a journey to Sumer. The occasion was so momentous that an entire year was named in commemoration of the excursion. This paper investigates the evidence for that royal visitation, with special attention given to the administrative documents that record the king's sojourn at Girsu. The investigation also considers the rationale for the king's decision to make an expedition to Sumer and asserts that Sar-kali-sarrē may have undertaken the journey in order to begin his building works at the Ekur in Nippur. In addition, the paper identifies some of the highest officials of the Akkadian court who traveled with the king. These individuals are significant because they are usually conspicuous in administrative documents, and as such their presence can establish prosopographic synchronisms between Sargonic archives.

The Babylonian Flood Story contains a conundrum which has stimulated various solutions, none of them convincing. Recent advances in lexicography seem to dismiss them, but an entirely unrelated observation suggests a way to interpret the texts in keeping with Babylonian beliefs and practices.

After Ea had told Ut-napishtim how to prepare for his escape from the Flood, he gave him an explanation of his strange conduct for his fellow citizens. The gods had taken a dislike to Ut-napishtim, so he would go to dwell with his patron Ea in his home, the Apsu. Thereupon Ea would act, apparently to benefit the people, in fact, to indicate that the catastrophe was about to break. The manner and significance of Ea's action as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, has long puzzled Assyriologists.

Two unpublished terracottas from Ur, now in the British Museum, and a terracotta from Ur, now in the University Museum, Philadelphia, deserve attention for the contribution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.

The composition of the battle of Til-Tuba from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh is usually described as a relief depicting a recorded historical event. It is considered a good and solid example of the Assyrian concern with history and the Assyrian propensity for propagandistic depictions of current events. The scene, which is surely saturated in the ideology of empire, has already been discussed from that point of view. Is it true to the historical event? Is it an exaggeration? Did the Assyrians really do these things? How close or how distant is this depiction of the battle from the real historical event of war?

The Assyrian method of representation is generally one that is attentive to minute details and concerned with ethnographic accuracy, even when the composition is hierarchical and representations of the body are stylised into abstract patterns. Realism is certainly a distinctive aspect of Assyrian narrative art and accurate details of dress and landscape were used to create what Roland Barthes would have called the effect of the real.

A study of the excavated structures at Ur which Woolley identified as domestic and possibly Kassite (or later) in date. Through an examination of the objects excavated in the structures and associated graves (principally pottery, glass and faience vessels, scaraboids and tablets) the housing in area EM is dated to roughly the 13th century b.c. while the remains in areas XNCF, AH, YC and KPS are dated to the 8th/7th centuries b.c. The review also presents a summary history of Ur from the mid third millennium b.c. to the neo-Babylonian period highlighting the periods of royal patronage at the city.

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.

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.

I try to show here that we do not at present have any substantial evidence for fixing the absolute value of any Assyrian capacity unit. This situation is likely to remain so until epigraphist-philologists and archaeologists recognize the need for common effort to solve this problem. Departure point of the present study was the discovery that, in a group of twenty-one documents from Nimrud dated in the period 699–652 B.C. which derive ultimately from the temple of Nabû, eighteen have common patterns from which one can deduce a few basic facts about metrological practice and terminology in the Neo-Assyrian period. To what extent they can be generalized must be decided by specialists in Neo-Assyrian on the basis of more evidence than I have at my disposal.

In his very useful treatment of Neo-Assyrian measures, J. N. Postgate called attention to ND 5457, which contains the phrase ina KAL-ti, i.e. ina sūte dannate, “in the heavy sūt”. He further observed that a calculation in the text indicates that this “heavy” sūt is twice the size of another (unspecified) sūt in the same text and went on to draw parallels between the well-attested light and heavy Assyrian weight norms, which stand to one another in the relationship of 1: 2, and with the Nimrud wine vessels, which were thought to show a similar pattern. He then identified this heavy capacity norm with an emār of 184 litres, deduced by the excavators of Nimrud on the basis of marked jars found there. There are, however, several points that still need clarifying.

The most important of the rich and varied pieces of carved ivory discovered at Nimrud during 1949 and 1950 have already been illustrated and discussed in previous numbers of this Journal. The photographs which accompany this article, Plates XII-XVIII, illustrate the remainder of what still needed to be published from those two seasons: anything omitted is probably too much mutilated or fragmentary to be worth describing.

The first of the two daggers I propose to discuss I bought from Mr. John Whitaker of Cambridge, who acquired it from Messrs. Sotheby's sale on December 10th, 1932. The type, the patina, and the date when it came into the market suggest the possibility that it may have been associated with the two similar daggers recently acquired by the British Museum and said to have been discovered in a cave near Kirmanshah in the Luristan province of Persia, and with another now in the Louvre in Paris.

The dagger in my possession belongs to a series of Late Bronze Age daggers and swords best characterized by their inlaid hilt. The inlay of wood, ivory, or some other material has usually vanished and the remaining part of the hilt consists of a flanged tang, frequently with one or more rivet-holes and with a tang or a flange to hold the pommel.

This article reports three new radiocarbon dates from the Iraqi sites of Tell Fara (Shuruppak) and Tell Muqayyar (Ur), produced as a part of a larger dating project on the absolute chronology of Southern Mesopotamia from the Uruk period until the Akkadian era. The radiocarbon results presented here offer good absolute time estimates for the ED I/II period at Fara and the most reliable absolute age so far for the important archaeological find that is the earliest graves in the Royal Cemetery of Ur.

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.).

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.’

The kiln furniture made for the Cuneiform Tablet Laboratory at the British Museum was nearing the end of its working life by 1992. A design project was thus undertaken to produce a kiln furniture solution that meets with the current conservation criteria, loosely based upon traditional potters' saggars. The primary innovation is a perforated refractory dish providing the same compartment throughout the firing and the desalination treatments. After three years' service the new kiln furniture's performance is assessed by comparison with the former “Inconel” firing basket and stainless-steel wire gauze equipment.