The fifth season of excavations at Tell al Rimah lasted from March 9th to June 9th, 1968. The work was sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and supported by contributions from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels, and the British Academy. The staff included Mrs. Joan Oates, who undertook part of the conservation work and shared the recording of the pottery with Miss Carolyn Prater (now Mrs. Postgate) who has subsequently been engaged in the preparation of a pottery corpus; Miss Barbara Parker, epigraphist and photographer; Miss Elizabeth Dowman, in her third season as conservator and registrar; Mr. Christopher Walker, epigraphist; Mr. Edward Blandy, photographer and assistant surveyor, and Mr. Roger Whitney, draughtsman, who also helped with the recording of the pottery. Dr. and Mrs. Richard Ellis assisted us during the first part of the season, and Mr. Julian Reade, who was principally engaged in a study of material from Tell Taya, gave valuable help at the end. The Representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities was Sayyid Manhl Jabr, whose energy and local knowledge were of the greatest value to us. I must acknowledge my debt to all my colleagues, and to the staff of the Directorate General of Antiquities, especially the Director General, Dr. Faisal al Wailly, and the Inspector General of Excavations, Professor Fuad Safar.

The most interesting epigraphical discovery made in the course of the 1968 season of excavations at Tell al Rimah under the direction of Mr. David Oates was a circular plaque of baked clay, TR.5708, maximum diameter 12·5 cms., found in the Palace area, site C. The plaque was buried in a repaired section of a wall in a building of level 5, the level above that in which Old Babylonian archives had appeared in 1967. The level is tentatively dated by Mr. Oates to about the 16th century B.C., but it was perfectly clear that the plaque was not in its original position. The brick-work at the base of the wall had apparently been eroded by water-action, and the gap had been filled up with a packing of earth, in which was the plaque, and faced by a single row of bricks placed slanting against the wall. The back of the plaque is quite smooth, but two small lumps of libn adhere to it, suggesting that it was originally plastered on to the face of a wall.

The slightly convex face of the plaque is inscribed with a six-line inscription written in a clear Old Babylonian script, of which a copy appears as Fig. 1.

Tr. 4001, which forms the subject of this note, was found in 1967 in late Assyrian fill above the north-eastern corner of the earlier temple; it lay above the line of that temple's north façade, just to the north of room II (see the plan in Iraq 30 (1968), Plate XXVIII). The tablet was therefore found fairly close to the neo-Assyrian shrine, but above it, and the late Assyrian terracing of the temple-zigurrat mound suggests that there may have been building on its summit, which would constitute an equally plausible provenance for our tablet.

The problems involved in any attempt to elucidate the earliest history of the domesticated horse in the Near East are notorious; an enormous literature already bears witness as much to the popularity as to the complexity of the subject. After over a century's research and argument there is still no certainty, nor even a general agreement, about where and when the animal first appeared in the area, who brought it and what it was first used for. The three main categories of evidence—osteological, philological and pictorial—are of uneven significance. Thorough scientific examination of osteological evidence is fundamental in any attempt to establish indisputably the presence of the domesticated horse at any specific time on any particular site. This was clearly demonstrated by the re-examination of the equid bones from Anau, Sialk II and Shah Tepe II/III in Iran which showed them to those of asses or half-asses not horses as had previously been supposed. Although a certain amount is now known about the onager (a half-ass) from the ninth millennium onwards in Syria and Iraq through osteological evidence, horse bones have yet to be identified in a Near Eastern archaeological context before the later third millennium B.C. Despite uncertainties of translation in the earliest texts from Iraq philological evidence is of the greatest importance and has been the most fruitful source of fresh historical information in recent years. Pictorial evidence is severely compromised by the difficulty of distinguishing with confidence between various types of ass and the horse when portrayed by ancient artists, often working on a very small scale. This has inevitably led to widely ranging discussions of equids of uncertain identity.

The Sumerian šu-il-la is an Emesal composition which,like the balag and ér-šèm-ma, was utilized in public worship. Forty-seven šu-íl-la incipits are listed in the kalûtu catalogue IVR 53 + RA 18 (1921), 158f., but the broken state of the catalogue and the poor state of preservation of the majority of Emesal texts makes it impossible to identify most of the catalogue entries. Only three surviving texts can be identified with certainty—by their colophon or presence in the catalogue or both—as Sumerian šu-íl-la's:

A. Sjöberg Mondgott 166ff. Sin; incipit IVR 53 iii 48

F. H. Weissbach Misc. pl. 13F. and duplicates Marduk; incipit IVR 53 iii 54 (edited below).

RAcc. 70f. and 108ff. An; the beginning is broken, so that it cannot be ascertained whether this is the šu - í l - la to An whose incipit is listed in IVR 53 iii 44

The last two contain subscripts specifying the cult occasions upon which they were to be recited. Four additional fragments can probably be classified as šu-íl-la's because of their extensive parallels to the Sin and Marduk šu-íl-la's (see below).

Unlike the balag and ér-šèm-ma, the šu-íl-la was never organized into long liturgical compositions, but the individual šu-íl-la's collected in Ashurbanipal's library were arranged within the library in a fixed order, corresponding to the order in which they were listed in the catalogue IVR 53. This can be shown by the fact that the catch line of the Sin šu-íl-la (as preserved in IVR 9) is identical to the incipit which follows the incipit of that Sin šu-íl-l a in the kalûtu catalogue.

For many centuries Tell Nebi Yūnus, the smaller mound of Nineveh, has been revered as the burial place of the prophet Jonah. This shrine, at one time part of a Christian monastery but now contained within a mosque, and the surrounding village, now a suburb of Mosul, have hitherto restricted archaeological activities on this site. A brief summary is given below of the few discoveries so far made, but the main subject of this article is a comparative study of the inscriptions of Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.) and of his son Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.), which describe the ekal māšarti or arsenal they built here. These, when considered together, provide a more detailed picture of the general layout and aspect of this building than is usually to be found in such texts, and it is hoped that this study may prove to be of some guidance in the event of this site ever being more fully investigated in the future.