This issue of IRAQ brings with it what has now become a usual healthy mixture of scholarship from both younger and older researchers, spanning the Chalcolithic through to the Parthian periods. The results of new projects sit easily beside fresh looks at older excavations. New texts are published from the British Museum, from the museum in Slemani in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and from recent excavations in southern Iraq, while older texts are also revisited for clarification and re-interpretation. We have been very impressed by our colleagues’ productivity during the 18 months of pandemic and hope that the gradual lifting of restrictions on travel and close research collaboration will bring great rewards to us all.

We are very pleased to be receiving a steady stream of articles by Iraqi colleagues, and hope that this will continue. In particular we are indebted to Dr Abdul Razzak Aboudi of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, who has provided excellent and tireless translation and mediation during the publication process over the past year. In the hope that further Iraqi colleagues will feel encouraged to submit to the journal, we are planning to put an Arabic-language version of the Instructions for Contributors on the CUP website. Here we are very indebted to our colleague Dr Jacob Jawdat, co-editor of the journal Sumer at the SBAH, who has provided us with a draft translation.

In the last editorial we reported that SOAS, University of London, had just announced that it was closing down cuneiform studies, specifically instruction in the languages of the cuneiform world. Due to an extraordinary anonymous donation, which was secured by the efforts of Professor Eleanor Robson, it has proven possible to employ Mark Weeden, one of the co-editors of this journal and formerly of SOAS, in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London, from where he will be able to collaborate with other departments, particularly Hebrew and Jewish Studies, in the teaching of the languages of the cuneiform world. Hopefully this will be part of a new beginning that can put the subject on a firmer footing in London.

As in previous years, we owe enormous thanks to our many anonymous peer reviewers for their careful and helpful suggestions, to the journal Editorial Board for support, to Saadi al-Tamimi for Arabic translations of article abstracts, and to the CUP team, especially Craig Baxter, for rapid and efficient article processing.