This preliminary report is devoted to the excavation season of Autumn, 1978, although it does also include mention of a grave discovered accidentally on the North-East Mound in November, 1979, while we were not supposed to be digging, only studying at the site. The work in 1978, which in fact lasted from the beginning of October until 10th January 1979, was supported by generous grants from the British Academy, the British Museum, and the National Geographic Society, Washington D.C.; we are as grateful as ever to these institutions for their continuing support. Our team was composed of Mrs. Ellen McAdam and Messrs. R. Bewley, A. R. Green and A. Sheen (site supervisors), Mr. and Mrs. R. K. Vincent, Jr., (photographer and graves recorder), Miss Catherine Sease (conservator), Miss Frances Wollen (cataloguer) and Miss Siriol Mynors (pottery recorder). We were joined for a month by Dr. Rosemary Ellison, who initiated a sieving and flotation programme, and after Christmas by Mr. R. G. Killick, who completed the planning of the West Mound. As representatives of the State Antiquities Organization we were lucky to have Sd. Nadhir Al-Rawi and, for the second time, Sd. Ali Hashim: to both of them we were all much indebted for their untiring help and cheerful collaboration. During the season we were especially pleased to have visits from the members of the Isin and Larsa expeditions, as well as from Dr. T. C. Young, Jr., our better half in the Hamrin.

The fragmentary obelisk of Ashurnasirpal II published here, in an entirely new reconstruction, was excavated at Nimrud by a British Museum expedition in late February 1853. The field director was Hormuzd Rassam, under the remote supervision of Henry Rawlinson in Baghdad. Since Rassam seldom receives proper credit for his Assyrian discoveries, which included the palace and much of the library of Ashurbanipal, the so-called White and Broken Obelisks, the Shamshi-Adad stela, the Balawat Gates, and much else, and since it is convenient to have succinct names for objects of this kind, I propose that this particular monument, which now bears the number 118800 in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum, should be known as the Rassam Obelisk. I am indebted to my colleagues in the British Museum for their comments on this paper, and to Miss Ann Searight for the drawings; the photographs were taken by the Museum's Photographic Service.

The flints described here are of interest because they make up a complete late flint industry. They come from well-dated deposits in an area apparently without earlier or later occupation, and can thus be regarded as characteristic of the period. The industry is simple, with a very restricted tool range; there are abundant blades, denticulate sickle blades used in composite sickles of wood and bitumen, small numbers of micro-borers for perforating beads and occasional other tools.

The first section below deals with flints from stratified Early Dynastic III levels of the main mound excavated in 1975, 1976, 1977 and 1978, the second with flints of the same date found in 1976 in what is thought to be a flint knapper's working pit.

The flint used is a fairly fine-grained nodular flint, generally brownish-grey, with brown bands near the cortex. Many specimens have been burnt. Rare blades are made of a dark grey, rather opaque, obsidian. Both flint and obsidian must be imported, neither being obtainable locally. The flint is similar to that used at the same date at Kish, and both may be imported from the same source.

Parmi les objets recueillis en 1976 sur le carrelage le plus récent de la pièce 13 de l'E.babbar de Larsa, on note une perle à quatre spirales en or (Pl. XIII, L. 76.5). Elle a été ramassée en un endroit où le carrelage avait été démonté: les carreaux de la pièce 13, comme ceux de la pièce 8, étaient en cours de pillage lorsqu'un incendie général mit fin à l'existence de cette partie du sanctuaire. A titre d'hypothèse, ce carrelage, malgré l'absence de briques estampées, est attribué à Adad-apla-iddina. Dans l'état actuel de nos connaissances sur cette partie de l'E.babbar, la perle ne peut être postérieure à la fin du XIe siècle av. J.G. Mais elle peut être beaucoup plus ancienne, sa petite taille lui permettant d'échapper aux regards, comme elle avait échappé à l'œil des ouvriers qui procédèrent, dans l'antiquité, au démontage du carrelage.

Cet objet attire à nouveau l'attention sur une série bien connue depuis les travaux de M. Mallowan, W. Culican et K. Maxwell-Hyslop. Ce type de bijou mérite, à cette occasion, un nouvel examen, d'autant que la centaine d'exemplaires connue à ce jour n'a jamais fait l'objet d'un catalogue. En raison de l'incertitude de la plupart des datations (et l'exemplaire de Larsa n'échappe pas à ce sort commun), il semble approprié de fonder la typologie de ces perles — dans la mesure de la précision des publications sur ce point — sur la technique de la fabrication, assez variée. Cette variété n'a rien pour surprendre, s'agissant d'un type de perle dont l'aire de répartition s'étend depuis le domaine égéen jusqu'à la vallée de l'Indus.

The Middle Assyrian Tablet BM 130660 adds new material to the latter part of Tablet 12 of Utukkū Lemnūtu, which is imperfectly known from NA and LB sources, mainly from Kuyunjik and Assur. The gaps in the previous publications can now be restored from the MA tablet, together with unpublished duplicates from Kuyunjik, Babylon, Borsippa, and Nimrud.

The bilingual MA tablet is of particular interest because, although in SB dialect, it differs substantially from the NA and LB copies of Tablet 12. Although many of the MA textual variants are purely orthographic, the following types of significant variants can be distinguished:

First, grammatical variants in the MA Akk. may affect the meaning of a passage, such as the MA use of lipparis in place of liprus in the parallel texts (1. 26′). In some cases the MA grammatical variant may indicate a corrupt text, or a misunderstanding of the Sum., as in 1. 30′, in which the MA Akk. reads, “may the wise judges, holy ones of Ištar(?), exclude him from the house”, whereas the NA/LB recension reads correctly, “may the great wise judge Ištar exclude him from the house”.

Hammurapi's Code of Laws says that a woman who lived in the Old Babylonian period brought a dowry with her from her father's house when she married. The laws specify that if the marriage failed, and she was not to blame, she kept her dowry for any subsequent marriage. If she died, her sons or (if she had none) her father's family, not her husband, inherited it. Some texts that list dowries of the Old Babylonian period, and texts of related or similar content, are edited and discussed here.

The range of possessions that belonged to women in those times can now be illustrated from these texts, and they also indicate some activities and interests of the women, who generally came from well-to-do families. Some hints of their personalities too emerge from their possessions: Bēlessunu daughter of Ibni-Amurru, and Ṭāb-Esagila the nadītum-priestess daughter of Marduk-muballiṭ both had plans for some comfortable upholstery or mattresses, and took with them a box of palm fibre; Bēlessunu was also a business woman with her own seal and her own set of weights. Bēletum the nadītum daughter of Riš-Nabium liked to entertain in style, and so took fifteen eating-bowls with her. Narūbtum the daughter of Ikūn-pî-Sin had an enormous wardrobe, consisting of no less than 24 garments and 42 headdresses, all carefully looked after in individual clothes-chests; she also had burial shrouds ready for her death, to keep up appearances even in the grave. Not all of them were fortunate enough to possess their own slaves or slavegirls. A letter from Sippar in the time of Hammurapi tells that it was difficult even for a nadītum priestess to acquire slaves. Narūbtum daughter of Ikūn-pî-Sin was fortunate in having nine slavegirls; most of the dowries list two or one or none.

The tell at Arpachiyah in Northern Iraq has proved to be a key site in providing detailed information concerning the Halaf culture. At the suggestion of Dr. Joan Oates and Professor David Oates an eight week season of excavations was begun on the site on 5th September, 1976. Mr. Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Minister of Information, arranged a grant to help finance this season. The staff consisted of two conservators (Mr. Jalal Ibrahim and Mr. Kalil Qabtan), a photographer (Mr. Mudhir al Khalide) two experienced Shergati excavators with three assistants, and the author as director. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Mosul Museum, Mr. Manhal Jebur, Mr. M. Said al-Iraqi, and Mr. Hazim Abdulhamid. In addition special thanks go to Dr. Isa Salman, the Director General of Antiquities at the time, and to Dr. B. Abu es-Soof. During our two months on the tell we were visited by the late Professor Fuad Safar, Dr. Oates, Mr. M. A. Mustafa and Mr. T. Matsutani, all of whom provided us with sound advice which certainly assisted in the solution of some of the more difficult problems we encountered.

The basic intention of these excavations was to expand on Sir Max Mallowan's 1933 season at Arpachiyah, to check and, if possible, to improve on the archaeological sequence that he established and which was published in this journal in 1935. The information produced in this report is taken in part from the writer's Ph.D. dissertation, The Halaf Culture in Mesopotamia, Institute of Archaeology, London University, to be submitted in 1980.

In his report on the excavations at Ur, Woolley wrote: “Every woman's grave of the old cemetery seems originally to have contained cosmetics; such were an invariable part of the tomb furniture. The ordinary receptacle is a cockle-shell, or rather a pair of cockle-shells of which one is the receptacle proper and the other the lid … In all these were found remains of the actual cosmetics used, paints or powders now reduced to a hard paste: the colours are white, red, yellow, blue, green and black, of which green and black are the most common.”

A large number of these cosmetic shells are preserved in the collection of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities in the British Museum. They vary from small fragments to complete double shells filled with cosmetic, and it is consequently impossible to make an accurate estimate of their number or of the percentage occurrence of the various colours. However an approximate count supports Woolley's observation that green and black predominate; the other colours present are blue, red, white, yellow and purple.

The Ur report includes a short note by A. K. Graham on his analysis of two samples of cosmetics; these were simple chemical analyses to identify the elements present and some of his suggestions as to the way in which the elements were combined are not supported by recent X-ray diffraction analyses carried out at the Research Laboratory of the British Museum. The results presented in Table I were obtained from a small group of samples chosen to represent the whole range of colours; the X-ray diffraction analyses were, where necessary, complemented by X-ray fluorescence analysis and by optical microscopy.

Tell Arpachiyah and Tepe Gawra, two sites located in the Mosul region of Iraq, together provide the basis for much of Northern Mesopotamian prehistory. Excavations by Sir Max Mallowan at Tell Arpachiyah in 1933 and by the University of Pennsylvania at Tepe Gawra between 1932 and 1938 produced the key ceramic sequences for the Halaf and northern ‘Ubaid cultures in particular. Halaf and ‘Ubaid pottery subsequently excavated at other sites in northern Iraq and in Syria and Turkey as well has, as a general rule, been interpreted in terms of Arpachiyah and Gawra ceramic sequences. It therefore seems worthwhile to re-examine the early pottery of these two important sites using the recently developed technique of neutron activation analysis. A carefully designed programme of neutron activation analyses would provide a new perspective on the Tell Arpachiyah and Tepe Gawra pottery and could perhaps answer some important questions about the Halaf and ‘Ubaid cultures in the Mosul region and beyond.

Firstly, activation analysis offers a method for correlating more directly the Arpachiyah and Gawra prehistoric sequences on the basis of pottery imports. The analysis of Halaf potsherds from sites in the Khabur headwaters region has already demonstrated that painted pottery was being traded there on a considerable scale by the latter part of the Halaf period. It seems likely that pottery could also have been traded between Tell Arpachiyah and Tepe Gawra from quite early on since the two mounds are separated by a distance of only twenty-five kilometres. If the pottery exported from one of these sites could be identified by neutron activation analysis at the other site, then the degree of temporal overlap between the prehistoric occupations of the mounds could be better assessed.

The land of Kirruri, frequently mentioned by the Assyrians, is a key area for the understanding of Assyrian political geography, and has been the subject of a number of attempted identifications. Billerbeck placed it in the region centred on the pass of Kalishin, whilst Streck identified it with the plain west and southwest of lake Urmia, bounded by Ushnu, Urmia and Solduz. Consideration of the references to Kirruri in the light of more recent knowledge shows the impossibility of these areas for an identification, inasmuch as Kirruri was within (albeit only just within) the area of customary Assyrian control from the early ninth century, whereas the areas mentioned by Billerbeck and Streck were still not firmly in Assyrian control when Sargon II came to the throne in the late eighth century. Forrer placed Kirruri much nearer to metropolitan Assyria, siting it in the Harir plain (often known as the Dasht-i-Harir) north of Shaqlawa, although he did not give his arguments in detail. The question was re-examined by L. D. Levine, who accepted Forrer's siting as in the right area, but too limited in extent. More recently J. E. Reade, in a useful article, has returned inter alia to the question of the position of Kirruri, placing it in the area between Koi Sanjaq and Rania near to the Lesser Zab, adducing as the main specific evidence for this siting Tukulti-Ninurta II's campaign of 886 B.C.

The Neo-Assyrian stone vase BM 93088 (82–5–22, 300a) was briefly described in E. A. W. Budge's Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities (3rd ed., 1922), p. 196 no. 220. That description misleadingly suggests that the vessel is made of na4na-aḫ-bu-[x]; in fact the term referred to the vase itself as the full text of the inscription (Fig. 1) shows:

a-na-kuI.dsin-PAP.MEŠ-SU šar4kurAŠ na4na-aḫ-bu-[ṣ]u an-ni-u a-naIaš-šur-DINGIR.MU-TI.LA.[B]I ˹DUMU˺-[ia]

at-ti-din man-nu šá TA pa-ni-šú TA DUMU.MEŠ-šú DUMU.ME DUMU.ME-šú i-na-áš-šú-u-nidŠÁR šar4 DINGIR.MEŠ

˹a-di˺ DUMU.MEŠ-šú TI.LA li-ki-mu-šú-nu a-du ma-li-ke-e-šú MU-šú-nu NUMUN-šú-nu ina KUR lu-ḫal-li-qu

“I, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, have presented this naḫbuṣu to my son Aššur-ila'a-muballissu. Whoever takes it away from him, from his children (or) his grandchildren, may Aššur, king of the gods, take the life of his children (and) make the name (and) seed of his counsellors disappear from the land.”

With the curse-formula compare D. D. Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (OIP 2), 139, 68–72 and 147, 36–39 and 148, 27–29. The plural forms here are presumably the result of abbreviating a longer original. Note the use of the preposition adi/adu, “as for, concerning”, for which the current dictionaries give only Old Assyrian attestations.