This article is concerned with the seals and seal impressions on clay labels and business documents discovered at Nimrud during the five seasons of excavations conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, from 1949-1953. The seals, and particularly the impressions of seals on dated tablets, and a few bullae provide a valuable addition to our knowledge of the development of Assyrian seal engraving. One of the aims of this study is, of course, to obtain as close a dating as possible for the different types. For this we have previously been dependent on the few seals in public and private collections, dated by inscription; on the seals and impressions from the excavations at Assur, dating mostly to the thirteenth century B.C., and to the ninth-eighth centuries B.C.; on the few seals found at Khorsabad, presumably not later than the reign of Sargon; and on the impressions upon clay sealings found by Layard in Sennacherib's palace at Quyunjik, (a few of these Layard illustrated and others he described).

The new material leaves inevitably a number of gaps and problems; one of the principal gaps seems to be the lack of evidence for seals made at the time of Tiglath-pileser III; for example, we do not know whether the delicate engraving of seals such as ND.305 (Pl. XI, 1) was practised in his reign. The stone reliefs from Nimrud of Tiglath-pileser III are evidence of a distinctive development in design, and a comparable development in the art of seal engraving might be expected.

In Iraq, Vol. XVI, Pt. I, pp. 98–107, Professor Mallowan described the unique discovery of Assyrian writing-boards made of ivory and wood at Nimrud in 1953. They had been preserved in silt below water-level in a well in Room A B of the “North-West” Palace of Aššur-naṣir-pal. It is claimed that these boards, which originally formed a polyptych, are the earliest form of ancient book and as such warrant a more detailed study. In the article which follows, on pages 14 ff., Miss Howard describes the ivory boards and discusses the technique employed in their manufacture. It therefore remains to add such further evidence for the use of writing-boards in the Neo-Assyrian period as is available from contemporary literature. Scholars have long suspected that the Assyrians must have used wax-covered boards as a writing-material, but no example had hitherto been found.

The twelve letters here published have been selected on a geographical basis, the common feature being that they all appear to be concerned with the regions west of Assyria. The evidence is against all the letters of this group relating to the events of the same campaign, or even of the same reign, although it is possible to show correlations between certain letters of the group.

To only two letters can a precise date be certainly assigned. For some others, internal evidence supplies good ground for a closely approximate dating, whilst for the remainder direct internal evidence as to the date appears to be lacking, and an approximate dating can only be assigned after consideration of the evidence concerning the Nimrud Letters as a whole. This evidence, insofar as it has yet been studied, is that nothing has appeared which necessitates postulating a date after the reign of Sargon, whereas about twenty letters have already been noted containing allusions on the basis of which they can be placed either in the latter part of the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III or in the first half of the reign of Sargon. There is thus a prima facie case for dating the collection as a whole between about 740 and a few years before 705 B.C., the precise terminus being probably the year in which Sargon transferred his capital from Calah to Dur-šarrukin.

The tablets are approximately 33·8 cms. in length and 15·6 cms. in width, including the margins which are raised 3 mm. to allow for some clearance of the waxed surface, which was thus protected from abrasion when the boards were closed. Both faces of the boards within the margins were hatched with criss-cross lines to make a gripping surface for the wax on which the inscription would be written. The bees-wax with which the boards were coated was mixed with sulphide of arsenic, or orpiment, which rendered it sufficiently fluid to spread easily over the surface and more plastic for writing.

The copper shaft-hole pick from Khurab, Makran, is one of the most intriguing finds relating to the history of the camels. It is, in my opinion, quite certain that the animal figurine above the shaft-hole depicts a camel of some kind. The attitude of the seated beast, with its steeply rising thick neck, and slightly raised head, is characteristic and does not occur in any other mammal. In addition, there are the rounded nose and the thickened cheek.

There are, however, two species of camel, the Bactrian with two humps, and the single-humped dromedary. The Khurab beast has only one hump and thus might perhaps be regarded as a dromedary. But every other feature speaks against such interpretation.

The neck, for instance, is thick and provided with a flange and a “ruff” of locks of thick hair in front, as found in the Bactrian camel. Moreover, the hump is situated above the pelvis, a position occupied by the posterior hump of the Bactrian, and much too far back for the dromedary. The question has from time to time been raised whether this hump is a genuine part of the figurine. Mr. Lauriston Ward has assured us that the hump is definitely part of the original artefact and not a lump of corrosion. It requires interpretation, therefore, as part of the animal. One might argue that it merely indicates the raised hindquarters of the seated beast, but the distinct individuality of the “hump,” which rests on top of the outline of the back, deprives this assumption of any anatomical foundation.

In 1952 the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in the course of its excavations at Nimrud, found, in the chamber known as ZT 4, a collection of over three hundred Assyrian clay tablets. Dr. C. J. Gadd at once recognized that the greater part of the collection consisted of letters from a royal archive, and that they were closely similar in nature to those in the British Museum collection published by Harper. The tablets as found were unbaked and heavily impregnated with salts from the soil, and in order to preserve them it was decided to bake them in a furnace made from local materials and designed for the purpose by J. H. Reid, A.R.I.B.A. At that time there existed at Nimrud no apparatus for measuring furnace temperatures (a lack which has since been rectified), so that almost inevitably a few tablets were baked rather more than the ideal demanded. Whilst these few have taken on a coarse bricklike texture, their legibility is not substantially impaired by this, whereas about a dozen tablets which, probably by being placed in the coolest part of the furnace during the shortest firing, received insufficient baking, are now, as a result of the crystallizing-out of salts, crumbling in their boxes and liable to fall to fragments at a touch. The contrast fully vindicates the employment of this emergency treatment in the field.

Professor M. E. L. Mallowan, in his account of The Excavations at Nimrud (Kalḫu), 1951 makes four references to glass (two on p. 15, one each on pp. 18 and 19), three of them concerning glass fragments and one to the use of glass as an overlay. Two groups of these fragments were sent by him to Mr. D. B. Harden at the Ashmolean Museum, and Mr. Harden in turn passed them on to me for examination. Subsequently Professor Mallowan handed to me several other fragments. For the purpose of this account the material has been classified in six groups and labelled as specimens A to F. Each specimen may consist of a single fragment or of two or more closely related. Their character, their location when found, and the approximate date when they were deposited are summarised in Table I from information supplied by Professor Mallowan.

No inference should be drawn that the glass objects found were themselves of the dates quoted. They may have been contemporary or older.

The study of ancient religious beliefs is beset with difficulties because we do not know with absolute certainty what the peoples who inhabited the Near East in very ancient times really intended to convey by the designs they depicted. That those designs were not merely decorative but had a special symbolic or apotropaic value seems to be beyond question. In consequence of this ignorance of ours there is a tendency to accept explanations which seem to afford fairly satisfactory interpretations of many of these problems, and also an endeavour to expand them to the utmost to make them cover, directly or indirectly, as wide a field as possible. When an example occurs which cannot be forced to conform to the rules laid down by the explanations, it is said to be a peripheral work, or the mistaken rendering of an ignorant craftsman, or even a forgery.

From time to time, however, a book appears which deals with the subject of the religion of the ancients in some or all of its aspects, and which is fulL of new ideas, sometimes of a revolutionary character. Whether all the views enunciated by the author are accepted or not such a work has the salutary effect that it compels the reader to revise his preconceived ideas and to study carefully the opinions expressed in order to determine whether they should be rejected or accepted as a whole or with modifications.

In the season 1950–51, the Joint Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and of the Babylonian Museum of the University of Pennsylvania excavated in Nippur a cache of twenty-eight Neo-Babylonian tablets. They were found in the location TA/52, 30 cm. above level III/1 floor, and they now carry the numbers 2 NT 280 to 2 NT 307.

All but three of these texts are legal documents, the exceptions being 2 NT 306, a private letter, and 2 NT 283 and 307, the contents and paleographic features of which mark them as administrative tablets. They had been included in the cache for reasons which remain unknown. In the location TA/34 (level III/1) a tablet, 2 NT 165, was found which, because of the personal names it mentions, must be added to the present group. There is, of course, a definite possibility that the inhabitant of the house in which 2 NT 165 was found had hidden a group of valuable documents in a cache in an empty lot behind his backyard (cf. p. 70 for further discussion).

The graffiti from the tilery and pottery which the Twentieth Legion maintained at Holt, Denbighshire, included one which Professor A. Guillaume acutely recognised as written in neo-Punic script. He rendered the text as M‘QR YTN (or M‘QR YNA) that is “Ma‘qar, (son of) Yathanbaal (or Yathanmilk)”. But a close study of the graffito, undertaken by the first-named writer of this note in conjunction with Professor H. F. D. Sparks, has shown that Professor Guillaume's alternative reading is to be preferred, and may be expressed as M‘QRYN’. The second and seventh letters, here transcribed as rough and smooth breathing respectively, represent the vowels, in this case, of a Latin word. The third letter will represent hard c, as Q (qoph) is often used to transcribe this sound in non-Semitic words. The fifth letter (yodh) would stand for long i. From the photograph the exact form of the final letter (aleph) is not clear, but can be seen by close inspection. The evidence, however, of the drawing (here given as Figure 1) was confirmed by a squeeze and shows how the straight stroke not only touches but actually intersects the other stroke and thus forms a cross with terminal hook, which was a common neo-Punic form of aleph.