It will be recalled that, since 1960, four cuneiform tablets containing valuable information regarding ancient music theory have been brought to light. One could almost say that it has been uncanny how each text, as it was discovered or recognized, has elucidated the other. Before BM 65217 + 66616 is examined, it is in order to review these texts briefly.

Text 1. CBS 10996, NB, Nippur. The (incomplete) first column of this mathematical text (a list of coefficients) deals with the strings of musical instruments. The string names are given, together with pairs of numbers; these are equated with special Akkadian terms that refer to intervals on the musical scale. Fourteen separate and distinct intervals are now recognized on the basis of this text: seven “primary” intervals of fifths and fourths, and seven “secondary” intervals of thirds and sixths. This text (see Fig. 1 where the “primary” intervals are listed as 1–7, the “secondary” intervals as a–g) hinted at a heptatonic scale.

Text 2. U 3011 (UET 7, no. 126) = Nabnītu 32, NB, Ur. This lexical text is a musical treatise whose (incomplete) obverse (see Fig. 2) column i presents the Sumerian and Akkadian names of nine musical strings as well as several of the terms known from Text 1 to be intervals on a scale. This second text provided the key to the understanding of Text 1 because it explains that the nine strings were numbered as: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, fourth behind, third behind, second behind, behind, i.e. 123456789 = 123454321. For an OB (MB?) parallel to this text, identified by Prof. Aaron Shaffer in November of 1977 in the University Museum, Philadelphia, see Iraq 43 (1981), 79–83; and below, pp. 81–85.

In November of 1977, in the University Museum Babylonian Collection in Philadelphia, Aaron Shaffer identified a small fragment whose obverse is closely parallel to the obverse of Nabnītu 32. His handcopy and transliteration (of the obverse) are presented directly below.

There is little question that this fragment belongs to Nabnītu 32, col. 1 ( = Music Text 2) as reconstructed from U.3011 (UET 7, 126) + K.9922 (see MSL 16, 249–54).

Although the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur remains among the best-known archaeological discoveries ever made in Iraq, it still offers many complex and teasing problems of chronology and interpretation. These have to be resolved before the evidence it offers may confidently be used to illustrate particular aspects of Sumerian custom and society in the third millennium B.C. On present reckoning this concentration of hundreds of superimposed graves, cut into successive levels of rubbish, extended over at least 600 years from about 2650 to 2050 B.C. In Woolley's view it included two groups of “royal” burials. The earlier, of the archaeological period Early Dynastic III A, is the better known of the two, comprising sixteen shaft-graves or “death-pits”, with multiple burials. They were separated by an interval of between four and five centuries, and by numerous single private graves, from the rather less well-known building complex described by Woolley as the “Mausolea” of the Ur III kings (c. 2112–2004 B.C.). In 1977 I attempted to elucidate the status and social function of the people buried in the Early Dynastic “royal” graves, suggesting that it was too soon to assume that all the rulers of Sumerian city-states at this time had been buried in this particular way. Not only is it to be doubted whether the men (?) buried in the three tombs 1618, 1631 and 1648 were of the same high rank as those in the other thirteen “royal” tombs, but they may even have been of men, and more particularly of women, whose status and special privileges had more to do with the character of the cult of the city-god of Ur than with any secular authority such as kings and queens in the modern sense.

In 1891, B. T. A. Evetts published three black diorite artefacts from the British Museum: a Middle Babylonian kudurru fragment, a Gudea door socket, and a piece of a mortar dedicated by Eanatum to the goddess Nanshe. All three were found together in the ruins of some old London houses, and Evetts speculates that they were possibly brought to London in the seventeenth century by merchants who shipped them from Basra either as ballast or as objects of curiosity.

The Eanatum fragment (Plate IV) is what remains of a mortar whose bowl was approximately 39 cm in diameter. Two inscribed sides, at right angles to the top surface into which the bowl of the mortar is sunk, and at slightly wider than right angles to each other, are partially preserved. These sides are not perfectly plane, but undulate slightly, and are polished, as is the top and the bowl. The rounded edges separating the two inscribed sides from each other and from the top are unpolished, and may have been so in antiquity, or the originally polished surface of the edges may have eroded from friction, as did part of col. i of side IV along the top edge.

The reconstruction of the original that most readily suggests itself is a parallelepiped, with the bowl resembling a rough circle inscribed in a parallelogram, and four sides formed by the downward projection of the parallelogram, two of which are the partially preserved inscribed sides. Presumably, the other two sides would have been inscribed as well. The inscription is arranged in five columns per side, running parallel to the top edge. Beneath the fifth column on each preserved side, the surface is polished but uninscribed, and there is 3–5 cm of polished blank surface between the inscribed columns and the edge that separates the two preserved sides.

Situé à l'extrémité sud-est des ruines de l'antique ville de Kish, le tell A reste célèbre dans l'histoire de l'archéologie. Les fouilles anglo-américaines dirigées par Stephen Langdon et Ernest Mackay y mirent au jour, lors des campagnes de 1923 et 1925, cent cinquante sépultures présargoniques creusées dans les ruines d'un palais sumérien. Ces deux découvertes, sans équivalent à l'époque, furent à l'origine de la publication immédiate des travaux sur le tell A. Actuellement, ces données s'intègrent mieux dans nos connaissances sur le troisième millénaire mais la masse d'informations sociologiques que représente le cimetière A n'avait fait l'objet que de rares études.

Or, il est acquis depuis les travaux de Lewis Binford et Arthur Alan Saxe que les pratiques funéraires véhiculent des renseignements “potentiels” sur la société qui les produit. En s'appuyant sur des exemples ethnographiques, ces chercheurs démontrèrent que l'hétérogénéité des rites funéraires d'un groupe précis était liée au degré de complexité de l'organisation sociale, et que chaque traitement contenait implicitement les caractéristiques sociales (âge, sexe, type de décès…) de l'individu défunt auquel il se rapportait. C'est dans cette optique que nous tenterons de réinterpréter le cimetière A de Kish.

Il convient toutefois de s'attarder sur la documentation disponible. Le rapport de fouille d'E. Mackay présente d'importantes lacunes. Les limites exactes de la fouille ne sont pas connues. On ignore la position et l'étendue du cimetière. Mackay notait à plusieurs reprises que des objets semblables à ceux des tombes jonchaient la surface du tell A. Ne disposant d'aucun plan, nous en sommes réduits à supposer que les 150 sépultures découvertes ne constituent qu'une partie représentative de la nécropole et que de nombreuses tombes ont subi l'action de l'érosion (ou du pillage) alors que d'autres n'ont pas encore été fouillées.

Preliminary report on the eighth season's work in spring, 1983. Principal results can be summarized as: new information on the nature and extent of the building in Area A (? late ED palace); completion of excavation of Grave 162 which contained 5 equid skeletons; excavation in ED II housing and cross-section through ED II city wall on east side of Main Mound; recovery of another 4,000 sq m of city plan north of Area E, locating streets and house plans and identifying the north-eastern corner of the Central Complex.

The work of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq at Abu Salabikh was resumed at the beginning of March, 1983, and the team left the site on 7th May. Many thanks are once again due to the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage under their President, Dr. Muayad Sa'id Damerji, and to Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-Azzawi, Director-General for the Southern Region. We were fortunate to have with us as Representatives of the Organization Sd. Kamil Alwan Shehab and Sd. Hassan Khdheyr Hashim, to whose good-humoured patience we were all much indebted, and we are also very grateful for the benevolent assistance of Sd. Muhammad Yahya, of the Diwaniyah Inspectorate. As in previous seasons we received generous support from the British Academy, the British Museum, and the National Geographic Society, Washington DC, and once again we also received very material support from Dragage S.A. at Shomeli. A great debt is owed to the staff of the Expedition for their support and hospitality in Baghdad.

The statements of time-spans (Distanzangaben) were thoroughly investigated by scholars discussing the problem of Mesopotamian chronology in the second millennium B.C., and were recently the subject of a detailed article. Some of these statements are no more than approximate estimates (e.g. all the statements of time-spans in Nabonidus' inscriptions) and are of no help for the establishment of an exact chronological scheme. Other statements reflect the efforts of the scribes to base their calculations on available data, thus becoming an important source for the study of chronology.

The publication of the Assyrian King-Lists (henceforth AKL) accelerated the investigation and understanding of the statements of Distanzangaben of the Assyrian kings. Poebel, who believed that the AKL supplies all the necessary data for the establishment of an exact Assyrian chronology, tried to fit the statements of time-spans into his kinglists-based chronological scheme. Soon afterwards, Weidner took the same line of enquiry. Later on, Landsberger demonstrated that there is a major chronological gap in the tradition of the AKL following the reign of Išme-Dagan (son of Šamši-Addu I) and that it is impossible to establish an exact chronological scheme just by combining all the available numbers of regnal years. Landsberger proposed that in the time of the Middle Assyrian kingdom there had still existed an “ungekurzte Rezension der Königliste”, and that this recension had served as basis for the calculations of time-spans by Shalmaneser I and Tiglath-pileser I. By calculating these time-spans backwards he tried to overcome the gaps existing in the tradition of the AKL in its present form, and this approach was accepted by subsequent scholars.

Numerous studies addressing Mesopotamian historical geography have been written under the influence of a hypothesis according to which the Ekallatum monarch Išme-Dagan conducted his military actions only in the region to the east of the Tigris. Initial inquiry enables one to understand just how such a hypothesis could emerge. After all, Išme-Dagan's correspondence, found principally in the Royal Archives of Mari, is replete with references to his wars against the Turukkeans, a bellicose tribe who occupied and often controlled much of the land between the Tigris and the Zagros foothills, thus constituting a perennial threat along the Transtigridian frontier of Išme-Dagan's hegemony.

However, evidence gleaned from a closer inspection of all Išme-Dagan texts refutes this hypothesis. It is the purpose of this essay to attempt to demonstrate that such an investigation will disclose the fact that the dynast participated as well in noteworthy military actions to the west of the Tigris. As a consequence, a number of sites which traditionally have been situated to the east of the Tigris must now be localized in the Jezirah, that is, in the “island” of land bounded on the west and south by the Euphrates, on the east by the Tigris, and on the north by the Taurus mountains.

In autumn 1983 a joint team of the Belgian and British Archaeological Expeditions to Iraq carried out a three week season of survey and excavations along the ruins of Ḥabl aṣ-Ṣaḫr near modern Baghdad. The work was directed by H. Gasche and R. G. Killick with assistance in the field from J. Black, E. McAdam and J. Moon. We wish to extend our thanks to Dr. Muayad S. Damerji, President of the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage who showed great interest in our work. Sd. Ahmed al-Bayati represented S.O.A.H. and deserves many thanks for all his efforts on our behalf.

The ruins known today as Ḥabl aṣ-Ṣaḫr lie some 20 km south-west of Baghdad and approach to within 2 km of the site of Tell ed-Der (Fig. 1). The name is given to a levee 30 metres wide which now rises 1 metre above the surrounding plain. This levee can be followed for 15 km and may be clearly distinguished from the spoil heaps of the many canals which criss-cross the area by the ubiquitous presence of broken baked bricks. Excavations were undertaken here for the simple reason that Ḥabl aṣ-Ṣaḫr seemed likely to represent the remains of one of the major defensive walls built by Nebuchadnezzar. The building of these walls is described in the commemorative texts of that king (Langdon 1912, Nbk. 4, Weissbach 1906, p. 27, Levy 1947, p. 9). From these records it is clear that Nebuchadnezzar initiated a strenuous building programme to improve the defences of his country.

Modern discussion of what identifiable astronomical phenomenon lies behind the biblical story of the so-called Star of Bethlehem was effectively begun by the astronomer Johann(es) Kep(p)ler (1571–1630), mathematician to Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor 1576–1612. In the years 1604–5 a supernova appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus and excited considerable discussion in Europe. Kepler kept a detailed record of his observations of the star. In the preceding year, 17 December 1603, at Prague he had also witnessed a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn with Mars moving into the vicinity soon after, which interested him in his capacity as court astrologer. The supernova appeared in the neighbourhood of these three planets. In medieval times the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, known as the “great conjunction” (recurring only once every 19·86 years on average), was regarded as of great astrological significance. Kepler calculated that a similar conjunction with Mars moving into the vicinity soon after had occurred in the year 7 B.C. = Julian year 39. On that occasion the conjunction had been a triple conjunction, a very much rarer event than the normal single conjunction.

Ashmolean Museum inv. 1937. 993. Photo: P. R. S. Moorey, Ancient Iraq (Assyria and Babylonia) (Oxford, 1976) 47, plate XXX (reverse only). Cf. Plate IX (enlarged). An originally unbaked clay tablet: W., 8·2 cm, h., 6 cm, th., 1·4 cm (maximum).

The tablet was in the possession of Stephen Langdon and came to the Ashmolean as part of Langdon's bequest. No Kish excavation inventory number is scratched on the edges as on material from Kish. There is no reason therefore to assume Kish as the provenance. No exact provenance is in fact available for the tablet. The tablet is inscribed in Greek script on both sides. It was referred to but not published by Sollberger in his important collection of the fourteen known fragments of Babylonian texts in the Greek alphabet, the “Graeco-Babyloniaca” texts. To this collection can now be added the Harvard tablet, which contains part of an incantation inscribed in cuneiform on the obverse and Greek script on the reverse.

The Ashmolean tablet differs physically from these in two respects, (a) Size. It is considerably smaller in all dimensions than the other tablets in the British Museum with Greek script which Pinches estimated to have been about 5 in wide by 9 in high when complete. Their thickness is also greater at 2–3 cm. (b) Oblong shape. Apart from tiny chips the other fragments (including the Harvard text) are from tablets which had the usual shape of Babylonian tablets, height greater than breadth. It is like the other tablets in being unbaked. The size and shape of the Ashmolean tablet are, however, typical for Seleucid period cuneiform business documents.

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.

Since November 1982 the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq has been excavating Tell Mohammed ‘Arab as part of the Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project organized by the Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage. In this article the main results of these excavations will be described.

The work of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq is sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and supported by the British Academy. The expenses of the work force are paid out of the budget of the Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project while the expenses of the supervisory staff are met by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq.

The area of the Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project lies along the Tigris River and extends about 60 km from north-west to south-east and a maximum of about 11 km wide. The countryside is mostly rolling hillsides often quite steep with rock (mainly evaporites) emerging in places. The ground is red alluvial soil with strata of river gravel and conglomerate, with deep wadis cut by run-off rainwater. The climate is characterized by hot dry summers and cool dry winters. The mean annual rainfall is about 450 mm per year with over 90% falling in the six months from November to April. Although this is above the reliable 200 mm isohyet, this year there was insufficient rain for wheat and barley. The previous winter too was exceptional with snow and frost in January and February. The area is suitable for arable farming (barley and wheat, irrigated vegetables and orchards of mulberry, pistachio and olive), for animal husbandry (mostly sheep and goats), and for fishing in the Tigris or its tributaries.

Pottery is the most common archaeological artefact: indeed sites are often designated as “pottery” or “pre-pottery” on the basis of whether or not sherds have been found. The fabric of pottery is examined to see how it is made and where the various constituents came from. Shapes and any patterns or designs painted, impressed, carved or scratched on the surfaces, are studied. It is used as a chronological and a cultural indicator. But the purpose for which the pot was made is often overlooked. There are few processing activities which do not require the use of a vessel or vessels: oils and dyes are used in weaving, aromatic oils and salves are mixed in perfume-making, food preparation requires containers for a multitude of purposes. Many other activities could be added, for instance, tanning and metal working and religious ritual.

This wide range of uses makes it more difficult to pin down the actual function of a particular pot. The same shape can be used for a number of purposes. More information is required.

The exact provenance of the pot is important. Was it in a shrine, a house, outside a building, inside a building? Was it near an oven, an altar, beside a hoard of metal goods? The position is by no means conclusive. Vessels used in preparing food may have been kept inside a house while the oven was outside in a courtyard. However, the find-spot can be a guide.