This Festschrift in honour of David Hawkins has provided the opportunity of publishing a set of caricatures by David, recording some of the participants in the excavations at Kayalıdere in eastern Turkey in 1965.

During the twenty-fourth century BC, Aleppo, centre of cult of the weather god Hadda, was administered by an overseer under the control of Ebla, whose major god was Kura. Although Hadda had a temple in Mari, the region of the Middle Euphrates was dominated by the cult of Dagan, while ʾAdabal was the god of the Orontes valley. The king and his family played a regular role in the rites of Hadda at Aleppo. Twice a year, a renewal rite required the replacement of his mace and pair of bull's horns. Besides the mace, a chariot and two bulls with human faces were attributed to this god, an iconography which lasted into subsequent centuries.

While a good deal of attention has been given by prehistorians to the process of “state formation” in the ancient Near East, less effort has been devoted to exploring the nature of historical states through their archaeology. This article endeavours to redress the balance a little, by looking at some of the documentary evidence for the process of government in Assyria in the late second millennium BC, in particular at its level of intervention in local economies, and by placing it alongside the archaeological evidence for the presence of Assyrian administration, as reflected in the ceramic repertoires of Tell Sheikh Hamad on the Habur and Sabi Abyad on the Balikh. Both the literate administration and the material evidence for craft production display a degree of conformity which would seem to reflect an ethos of centralized control. This invites comparison with the material evidence for other Late Bronze Age palace regimes, whether archives of Mycenaean clay tablets or the ceramic repertoire of the Hittite empire. Here too written instruments and material markers of state control could be taken to reflect a concept of the “state” (as opposed to “empire”) which does not agree well with some analyses of social evolution in this region, and prompts some concluding thoughts on the relationship between the material record and the ethos of government in state-run societies.

This essay reviews the evidence concerning the Tabalian king Wasusarma and his father Tuwati, who appear in Neo-Assyrian and Urartian annals. The context for the removal of Wasusarma (Uassurme) from power by the Assyrian king is assumed to have lain in the events depicted in the large inscription of TOPADA. The historical and geographical import of this inscription is explored through a close reading of its historical portion, concluding that its background is set in a local struggle for power over north-western Cappadocia.

The hitherto unpublished Late Babylonian fragment BM 47806 + adds another example to the group of rituals which counteract witchcraft by banning sorcerers to the netherworld. Šamaš is asked to hand them over, on his journey to the netherworld, to Ḫumuṭ-tabal, the ferryman of the dead. The edition of BM 47806 + is preceded by a brief overview of rituals of this type, including a discussion of the relationship between ritual burial of figurines – symbolising the dismissal of sorcerers to the netherworld – and their ritual burning, the other single most important technique of figurine magic deployed to kill warlock and witch.

This article presents editions of all the extant Babylonian incantations against field pests. The sources date to the first millennium BC and many have not been published before. They are mostly tablets of the Neo-Assyrian period, from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, but the corpus also contains some Neo-Babylonian fragments from Nineveh, as well as a tablet from Sultantepe (ancient Huzirina) and two Late Babylonian tablets from southern Mesopotamia. Some of the pieces certainly belong to a series called in antiquity Zu-buru-dabbeda “To Seize the Locust-Tooth”, a compendium of incantations and rituals designed to combat by magic means the destruction of crops by locusts, insect larvae and other pests; other pieces are parts of related and similar texts. Some of the rituals require the observation of the Goat-star rising above the eastern horizon, which suggests they were performed at night as a precautionary measure during the winter months of the barley-growing season.

In 1989 Muzahem Mahmud Hussein found the second of four rich tombs in the harem section of the NorthWest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud. The tomb contained the burials of Yaba, queen of Tiglathpileser III, and of Atalia, queen of Sargon II, and the tomb can therefore be dated to the last decades of the eighth century BC. This paper concerns three pairs of bracelets from Tomb II, and focuses in particular on the strange iconography of one of the pairs.

Assyrian sculptures have been treated in various ways. Neglected original records about pieces found at Nineveh can still be informative. Pieces that did not go at once to major public museums were sometimes liable to rejuvenation, detached from their original contexts but endowed with new significance as commercial assets, as independent works of art, or as integral parts of contemporary architecture. Two Nimrud sculptures, built into the walls of Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh, represent a unique fusion of Assyrian and Scots artistry, now vulnerable to financial pressures.

Frederick Charles Cooper accompanied Austen Henry Layard on his second expedition to Assyria (1849–1850) and recorded the excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh, and expeditions to other sites. The British Museum recently purchased twenty-eight of Cooper's drawings that were previously unknown. Six of them are published here because of their particular archaeological interest, and they can be linked to entries by Cooper in his diary, now also in the British Museum.

It has long been suspected that the use of iron predated the so-called meteoric and smelted iron of the later stages of prehistory. Certainly small objects of iron such as awls and pins are found from the Chalcolithic period onwards and the rightly famous iron swords from Alaca Höyük demonstrate skills in making larger weapons in the Early Bronze Age. I document the use of iron ore for hammers and maces at Early Bronze Age sites in the Taurus Mountains and early Chalcolithic Tell Kurdu in the Amuq valley. This intensive understanding of materials and their properties led, millennia later, to the ability to smelt terrestrial iron.

Dendrochronological dating of two phases of the monumental Gateway excavated at Tille Höyük on the Turkish Euphrates was carried out by Peter Kuniholm and his team in 1993. Very recently Carol Griggs and Sturt Manning, also of Cornell University, used AMS 14C to check cross-matching of tree-ring sequences. New dates suggest that the first phase of the gate was constructed toward the middle of the twelfth century BCE, probably a few decades after the fall of the LBA Hittite capital at Hattuša. Some implications of this lower dating for our understanding of the Early Iron Age are discussed, and new reconstructions of the Gateway plan are provided.

On the basis of cylinder seal impressions from the Middle Bronze Age strata of Tell Hammam al-Turkman (Syria) a case is made for cultural and possibly commercial connections between that site and the region of Old Babylonian Sippar in Iraq.