In the spring of 1969 the Soviet archaeological expedition began extensive studies of early agricultural sites in north-western Iraq. Up to that time the investigation of archaeological cultures representing the early stages of development of food-producing economies in Mesopotamia had been confined to north-eastern Iraq and western Iran, the mountains of Kurdistan and the Zagros with their foothills and valleys. But in north-western Iraq, from Mosul to the Syrian frontier, there are areas whose natural resources offer an equally fruitful prospect for investigation of this process. One such area particularly favourable to agriculture from its earliest stages is the broad and fertile Sinjar plain. Eastward the plain borders on the Mosul region, beyond which lie the Kurdish foothills around Erbil and Kirkuk, and on the north it is bounded by Jebel Sinjar, rising to a height of c. 1250 m. This range reproduces on a small scale the natural conditions of the Zagros, and abounds in caves, but is as yet inadequately investigated. Winter rainfall is relatively high, and a number of small perennial streams flow from the hills into the soft alluvial soils of the plain, which are extremely fertile and favour the construction of simple irrigation systems; in places these now extend up to 15 km. south of the range.

Assyriologists have long been aware of the evidence for a cult of the dead in Assyria and Babylonia, but there is at present, to the writer's knowledge, no systematic study of the subject. She has therefore examined the evidence relating to the cult of the dead, and attempted to compare the attitude towards dead kin shown in the cult with what we know of relations between living kin and of concepts of descent. In this study, comparisons are occasionally made with other societies not culturally connected with Mesopotamia. The writer's interest here lies in the application of social anthropology to the study of Mesopotamian society. Traditionally anthropologists have studied the type of society formerly called “primitive”, now more often called “small-scale” or “pre-industrial”. Ancient Mesopotamia was not a society of this type, but a peasant society, with a comparatively elaborate technology and a wide field of social relations, at least among the power-holding groups. Social anthropologists have only recently begun to study peasant societies. It will be appreciated that the writer has no formal training in social anthropology, and that this attempt is, therefore, highly tentative.

The factors determining the existence and importance of a cult of dead kin in a society have not been clearly revealed by comparative study. Scheinfeld has indeed shown that all societies that have such a cult have also the institution of inheritance of property, but the evidence examined by him does not permit the conclusion that inheritance is a precondition for the existence of a cult of deceased kin.

The jewellery published here forms part of the Muncherjee Collection, a large assemblage of South Arabian antiquities formed by an Indian businessman and acquired some years ago by the Aden Museum. Until recently a group of this jewellery was on loan to the British Museum, and I was there able to study it by the kind permission of Dr. R. D. Barnett and with the generous assistance of his staff. I am also grateful to the Aden Museum authorities for granting me permission to publish the jewellery. The drawings accompanying this article are the work of Miss Ann Seawright. By reason of their accuracy and accomplishment, they are far more descriptive than any verbal catalogue I am able to compose.

This article is intended only as a preliminary study of South Arabian jewellery. The group here described forms approximately a quarter of that in the Aden Museum collection, and it is hoped that at a later date a more detailed study of the whole collection will prove possible. In the meanwhile, any comments and observations on comparative and related material will be most welcome. With the exception of epigraphic sources, a survey of any facet of the South Arabian civilization is seriously hampered by the lack of stratigraphically excavated material, and although much has been brought to light by other means, especially sculpture, few serious attempts have been made to analyse the complex art forms of this culture. Likewise in this article I do not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the stylistic origins and development of the jewellery, but restrict myself to a simple description of the various pieces, quoting where possible any relevant parallels or comparisons.

The 1972 season at Umm Dabaghiyah took place under vastly different conditions from the first year. An exceptionally good Spring turned the countryside into a comparatively green and flowery land. Without a single dust storm and with thunder and rain only during the evenings and nights, we were able to work without interruption. These climatic changes are important to record, as within two consecutive years we have experienced two extremes which must also have been regular occurrences when the site was occupied.

The field work lasted for nine weeks, from mid-March until late May, and was followed by a further month at Baghdad when all the final drawings were prepared, a task impossible to undertake in damp tents.

The excavations took place under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and with the aid of a grant from the British Academy. Directed by the writer, the following team took part; Miss Deidre Bowden, Messrs. Stuart Munro-Hay, John McDonald and Peter Farries, site supervisors; Mr. Neville Akroyd, draughts-man and surveyor, and Mrs. Barbara Akroyd, conservator. Sayid Ismail al-Hajara, representing the Directorate General of Antiquities, was an invaluable member of the team and a first class site supervisor. We are grateful for his hard work and genuine interest in the site.

During the season we were most pleased to welcome the Director General of Antiquities, Dr. Isa Salman, when he visited the excavations together with members of his staff. Once again we express our deep gratitude to the Director General of Antiquities, to the Inspector General of Excavations, Dr. Fuad Safar and to the staff of the Directorate General for their helpful co-operation and interest. We also thank the Government officers at Hatra for their friendly help.

The publication of BM 131124—a fragment of a stele from Sheikh Hammad on the Khabur—and a fresh treatment of another neglected fragment published by V. Scheil in 1917, identified and re-edited by A. R. Millard (above, p. 57 ff.) has increased considerably the small corpus of Adad-nirari's historical inscriptions. Each of the extant texts is a commemorative inscription, usually brief and self-contained, incised on a stele or a stone slab. Another feature which they all share is that they are mainly concerned with Adad-nirari's expeditions to the west, though the precise regnal year of these is not indicated there. This present inquiry will be concerned with the specific character of the best preserved inscriptions and their value as historical documents.

None of the extant historical records of Adad-nirari III published so far can be classified as annals. They all belong to a category which we would like to designate as “summary inscriptions”. A distinctive feature of this type—called Prunkinschriften by Schrader and “Display Inscriptions” by Olmstead—is the condensation of early with later events into one geographically but not chronologically coherent narrative. Usually an inscription of this category is much shorter than any edition of the royal annals, especially as it was inscribed upon a surface with limited space, such as a commemorative stele or a slab. It normally contains the following elements: (a) a prologue, consisting of invocation to the gods and the king's titulature; (b) a geographically arranged summary of events; (c) the main section explaining the circumstances leading to the composition of the inscription, introduced by the formula ina ûmēšūma = “at that time”; (d) an epilogue with maledictions.

The excavations at Umm Dabaghiyah yielded a considerable amount of animal remains. From the rich sample 6,580 specimens could be identified, all from well-dated archaeological contexts.

The species found in the site and their frequencies are shown in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, the fauna of Umm Dabaghiyah has the following main characteristics:

(1) The fauna is not very rich in species; besides the five domestic species it contains only ten wild ones. Even if we add the wild bird species to them, the number of wild species will increase only to twelve.

(2) Although all five neolithic domestic species occur in the sample, animal-keeping itself is of insignificantly small importance compared with hunting; the domestic animals represent only 9·77–13·23% of the whole sample in the different levels. (In fact the domestic ratio is probably a little lower because in all probability also bones of wild sheep and goats occur in the caprovine sample). The overwhelming majority of the domestic sample belongs to the caprovines; the other species are far behind them with alternating frequencies. The domestic animals show well-marked anatomical differences from their wild forms. Local domestication seems to have existed only in the case of cattle.

In 1951 the Directorate General of Antiquities in Baghdad acquired a limestone statue of apparently Sumerian date. The dealer from whom the purchase was made claimed that he had found the statue at Tell Aswad, an ancient mound situated on the left bank of the Euphrates some 24 km. to the north-west of Ramadi. Shortly afterwards a team was dispatched by the Directorate to examine the mound and in the course of executing small trial trenches near the surface of the mound encountered structures of plano-convex mud-brickwork. In view of certain peculiarities in the style and proportions of the Tell Aswad statue doubts were voiced among members of the Directorate as to its genuineness, and in consequence approaches were made to various eminent archaeologists and art historians with a view to eliciting their professional opinions concerning it. On the basis of photographs supplied by the Directorate the consensus of opinion among the experts was that the statue showed certain stylistic differences from hitherto known Sumerian statuary which by themselves at least were not sufficient to mark the piece as definitely genuine or definitely false.

The John Rylands Library, Manchester (No. P 28, Box 22).

Dimensions: 5·5 × 6·4 × 2·3 cm.

Copy and photographs: Plates XIII, XIVa, b (the copy is traced off the photographs and corrected after collation).

Although our perception of what happened in Mesopotamian prehistory is very incomplete, our knowledge has been extended considerably by recent excavations and archaeological studies. Much of this research has been more or less specifically devoted to various aspects of the early development of villages and village economy. From this one fact seems to emerge: in the Hassuna Period at least two clearly different cultural traditions can be distinguished. In northern Iraq villages with houses built in the tauf technique were dominant. They had an economy based on herding, hunting and dry-farming, and a specific series of painted, incised and plain types of pottery. By the middle of the 6th. millennium B.C. a different cultural tradition can be recognized in central Iraq. Its main characteristics are that the economy seems to be based primarily on experimental irrigation agriculture, and that the villages consist of houses built of mud-brick, some of them large and complex with buttressed walls. A distinctive type of painted pottery, the Samarran, is prevalent in villages of this tradition, for example Tell es-Sawwan, Choga Mami and Baghouz.

Samarran pottery has now been found at a great number of Mesopotamian sites. But in spite of this, little is still known of the origin and of the temporal and spatial development of the Samarran culture and its characteristic ceramics in central and southern Iraq.

The third season of excavations at Tell Taya lasted from late September, 1972, into January, 1973. Work was sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which provided a grant towards the costs. Further vital support came from generous anonymous donations; from the British Academy; from the Royal Ontario Museum; from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and from the Ashmolean Museum. My own work has been made possible by tenure of a Gerald Averay Wainwright Fellowship. Staff on the site, besides myself, comprised my wife, S. Nan Shaw, conservator and registrar; Mr. George Farrant, architect; Mr. Stuart Brown and Miss Margaret Stout, site supervisors; Miss Susan Dobinson, who was responsible for the pottery; Mr. Nicholas Stainforth, general assistant; and Mr. Hilary Stuart Williams, architectural assistant. I am very greatly indebted to all of them for their hard work and patience. Sd. Khalid Sawit al-Durra represented the Iraq authorities, and I am further grateful, for assistance of many kinds, to numerous members of the Directorate-General of Antiquities, both in Baghdad and Mosul, and to the local government officials in Tell Afar.

The reports given below cover excavation work in Iraq from June 1972 to May 1973. The information on each site has been kindly provided by the director of the excavations, unless otherwise specified, and the final version has been checked by him wherever possible. The sites are arranged in alphabetical order, according to their best known name.

The material for this report was assembled by Mr. J. N. Postgate, Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. The Editors are glad to acknowledge his efforts, and wish to express 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 the compilation possible.

The third season of excavations of the joint expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University to al-Hiba took place from October 1972 to January 1973.

Work was concentrated in Area B located in the high west-central portion of the mound where occupation continued into the Old Babylonian period. Beneath the surface are the remains of an enormous platform of mud-brick, undoubtedly an Old Babylonian temple platform. Only the core of the platform was preserved.

In May 1879 Hormuzd Rassam left Mosul to explore the country around the Khabur river, rich in ancient sites. Among the places he visited was “the mound of Sheikh Hammad” where an Assyrian sculpture was said to lie. Rassam reported “I found the monument to be a representation of an Assyrian king on a black basalt tablet (supposed to be Shalmaneser II), but, unfortunately, the bas-relief had been broken, and only the head and shoulders of the figure were visible. This part of the monolith was covered with arrow-headed characters, which were very much defaced. It had been hurled down the mound by the Arabs … It is believed that the remainder of the tablet is buried on the top of the mound, and I intended, when I went back there on a future occasion, to search for it.” No particular monument in the British Museum's collections is known to be the piece Rassam secured, but it was suggested in a marginal note by the late C. J. Gadd in the copy of Rassam's book owned by the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum that BM 131124 might be one Rassam recovered from another mound not far away, mentioned in the succeeding part of his account, “a fragment of black basalt, whereon there were engraved a few hieroglyphic figures”. The description of the stone from Sheikh Hammad fits the fragment BM 131124 so much better that there can be little doubt of its identity and consequently it may be referred to by the name “Sheikh Hammad stele”.

The 1973 season at Umm Dabaghiyah took place under weather conditions different from those of the two preceding ones. The exceptionally good Spring of 1972, and subsequent heavy dew, enabled the scrub vegetation to come up and thus to hold the surface soil in place despite high winds and a practically total drought. In 1973, we had neither rain, apart from a few sparse drops, nor a single thunderstorm, while the real dust-storms started only late in May despite the high winds that were a constant factor. The only interruptions to the work were caused when gales blew the soft soil from both dig and dumps across the excavations, but very little time was lost through this.

The British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the British Academy, together with the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and the University of Sydney gave generous grants towards the work. The following team, under the direction of the writer took part: Mrs. Harriet Martin, Mr. Peter Fames, Mr. Hilary Stuart-Williams, site supervisors; Mr. Douglas Rawlinson Hobbs, surveyor, draughtsman and photographer; Mrs. Gwyneth Rawlinson Hobbs, conservator; Hr. Søren Berthelsen of Aarhus University, pottery classification; Mr. Peter Dorrell, geomorphologist and photographer; Mr. Richard Hubbard, environmental studies. Sayid Ismail al-Hajara represented the Directorate General of Antiquities for the second time, and again proved invaluable both as a site supervisor and general supervisor; we are indeed grateful to him. During the season we again had the pleasure of welcoming the Director General of Antiquities, Dr. Isa Salman, and the Inspector General of Excavations, Dr. Fuad Safar when they visited the excavations. We are most indebted to them for their encouraging cooperation and genuine interest in the site. We should also acknowledge the friendly help of the Government officials of Hatra.

In the summer of 1971, a most interesting and important over life-size statue of Hercules was uncovered at the North Gate, one of the four main gates of Hatra. The work, which was conducted by a staff from the Directorate General of Antiquities, started at the beginning of July 1971 and continued until the end of March 1972. The excavations which were concentrated on the gate, revealed several important historical and architectural aspects of Hatra.

During the excavations, numerous statues were found. They represent kings, nobles and divinities of Hatra, and among them is the statue of Hercules. It was found in a rectangular arched niche-cella set against the mud-brick wall that extends from the right tower-like structure of the gate and turns at a right angle to face the only entrance of the gate. The niche-cella, made of regular local limestone, is constructed so that it faces the entrance. A person leaving Hatr a through the North Gate would have to face the niche-cella which contained the standing statue of Hercules.

The statue of Hercules was found standing in situ in the arched niche-cella (Plate XXXa). His forearm was found behind the right feet on the floor of the niche-cella. His club was discovered in two pieces on the floor level of the area before the nichecella. The upper part of the club with the attached right hand were found immediately in front of the niche-cella (Plate XXXb) and the lower part lay not far from it (Plate XXXc). Pieces of the fingers of his right hand were found scattered on the pavement of the niche-cella.

The small collection of ancient Near Eastern seals in the school museum at Charterhouse was called to our attention by the kindness of Mr. Ian Blake. It was assembled in the nineteenth century through two gifts, that of D. G. Prinsep in 1876 (eight cylinders) and that of Leonard Marshall in 1896 (sixteen cylinders and five Sassanian stamp seals). No information has survived about the exact source of these seals, though, as will be seen, they might well all come from sites in southern Iraq. We are most grateful to the Governors and Headmaster of Charterhouse for allowing these seals to be taken to Oxford for study and photography. The School authorities also subsidized the cost of photography, which was done by Mr. R. L. Wilkins of the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. In the following concise catalogue Professor O. R. Gurney is responsible for the seal inscriptions (save for a single Sassanian one kindly read by Dr. A. D. H. Bivar), and Dr. P. R. S. Moorey for the classification, description and discussion of the designs. We gratefully acknowledge advice on various points from Mr. Briggs Buchanan and Professor W. Lambert, who bear no responsibility for any persisting errors. For the abbreviations used in the catalogue see pp. 80–1. Measurements given are in millimetres (height × width); figures such as 1–1956–2 are the Charterhouse registry numbers.

In 1965 Roman Ghirshman drew attention to a particular element of Elamite architecture which he called the “salle à quatre saillants”: this is a rectangular room with four pilasters placed near the short walls and a large doorway in the middle of its long side, opening on to a courtyard. It must have served as the reception, audience and throne hall. Ghirshman identified this architectural form in successive Middle Elamite levels on the Royal City mound at Susa in houses belonging to officials of the Sukkalmahhu, and so it may reflect Royal Palace designs, as do the Neo-Assyrian Residences at Khorsabad. He has dated these levels from c. 1800 to c. 1300 B.C. He also noted its reappearance at Susa in the Palace of Darius. Here it is slightly modified: there are two “salles à quatre saillants” placed side by side with doorways piercing through them both (see also fig. 11). It would be possible to maintain that the double and single “salles à quatre saillants” are distinct but this has neither chronological nor geographical significance.

The eight centuries between these buildings cannot yet be filled with more Elamite examples of the “salle à quatre saillants” because very little Elamite architecture has been discovered. It does not appear in the funerary palaces at Choga Zanbil and has not been found on the Iranian plateau at this period. The Kassite palace at Dur-Kurigalzu shows no trace of it, and Geoffrey Turner in his recent study of Late Assyrian palace plans did not draw attention to this feature.