I saw the great mound of Brak for the first time on a hot afternoon in November, 1934, when, together with my wife and Mr. Macartney, I was examining the ancient sites in the Khabur and Jaghjagha valleys of northern Syria. As we walked up the steep slopes of the tall we kicked aside countless fragments of potsherds and other ancient debris, and parched as we were it seemed tedious to speculate on what periods of history lay buried within. To us no less than to others bent on the same quest who had passed that way before, it was clear that here was a site of great historical importance. Layard, von Oppenheim, Dunand and Poidebard had in turn marked it down, but had been deflected by other objectives. Only Father Poidebard had stopped long enough to excavate a Roman camp on the plain near by, and after driving a trench into the upper slopes of the tall had satisfied himself that it had been an important Assyrian settlement. For my own part, I noted that this was a magnificent site which would be well worth digging, provided that sufficient funds were available for the purpose. But before attempting to come to grips with so formidable a mound it was obviously desirable to find out more about the general sequence of stratification elsewhere in the district. We therefore continued to look for a smaller site which would yield results more quickly, and after completing our survey in December, 1934, we decided to start on Chagar Bazar about 20 miles N.N.W. of Brak as the crow flies, where we dug for two successive seasons in the Spring of 1935 and 1936. The results obtained during these two campaigns I have already described in previous numbers of Iraq.

The district in which the Expedition operated is roughly triangular in shape. The base of the triangle is conveniently defined by the railway line running from Tall Halaf to Nisibin which demarcates the frontier between Turkey and Syria, a distance of about 75 miles: the two sides, each about 50 miles long, are marked by the lines of the rivers Khabur and Jaghjagha which converge at Hasaka into a single stream. Below Hasaka the steppe on either side of the lower Khabur becomes drier towards its southern end, being more remote from the rain-belt which hangs around the Turkish hills. Moreover, the wadis which drain into the basin of the upper Habur-Jaghjagha triangle have mostly been sucked dry before they can filter through to the southern steppe. Thus the climate in the district of Brak and Chagar Bazar resembles that of Ninevite Assyria and differs from the drier Babylonian conditions of the country below the latitude of Hasaka. The summers are indeed intensely hot, even the northern stretches of the steppe then become arid, and only the Khabur and the Jaghjagha retain perennial water. In the Spring, however, there comes a magical change, and striding northwards between these two rivers one treads upon a gaily variegated carpet of wild flowers. As far as the eye can see there is mile upon mile of scarlet ranunculus and golden marigolds interspersed with tall and smiling hollyhocks. Far to the southwest loom the wild and inaccessible hills of the Jabal ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and Baida, where till within living memory monuments of the early dynastic age had stood undisturbed for nearly five thousand years.

Tall Brak is situated at approximately the same latitude as Alexandretta and Nineveh, about 300 miles east of the Mediterranean and 130 miles west of the Tigris as the crow flies. The two nearest towns are Nasibin, 46 kilometres to the north and Hasaka, 43 kilometres to the south, where the River Jaghjagha joins the lower Khabur. Brak is within easy reach of water as it lies only four kilometres from the west bank of the River Jaghjagha and its confluence the wadi Radd.

The position of Chagar Bazar may be seen on the map in Text Fig. 8, p. 48, lying just over 40 kilometres south-west of Nisibin, not far distant from Brak. Mr. Gadd has shown that there is evidence on the tablets discovered in the course of the excavations, that the site in antiquity was called Til-sha-annim, a place otherwise unknown. There was nothing to suggest that Til-sha-annim was of greater importance than any of the hundreds of other small towns which studded the Khabur steppe between the fourth and the second millennia B.C. The quality and quantity of the objects discovered in the excavations are therefore an impressive testimony to the general level of prosperity attained by the inhabitants of these parts of Syria in ancient times.

The account of the first two campaigns has been fully described in Iraq, III, Pt. 1, and IV, Pt. 2, and Mr. Gadd has given a complete account of the tablets in Iraq, IV, 178 ff., and in VII, Pt. 1. There is therefore very little to add to what has been said before. The following pages describe the archaeological material discovered in the course of about a fortnight's work in the Spring of 1937, when we excavated a portion of a building which belonged to the earliest phase of level 1, see the rqoms marked 100-108 on Plate LXXXIII. This building was well dated by the tablets found in room 106, and Mr. Gadd has described their contents in Iraq, VII, Pt. 1. In addition, we excavated another fifteen graves which are marked on the plan in Plate LXXXIII; notes on their contents are given below. The principal objects found in the graves are discussed in the catalogue, and a detailed list of the graves will be found in an appendix to the catalogue. Two of these graves, G.200, G.206, are. of special interest because they contained the fine bronze (?) battleaxe, and carnelian cylinder seal with gold caps illustrated on Plate XLI, No. 1 and Plate XLII, No. 1, respectively. The remainder of the graves produced material which was typical of the last phases of occupation at Chagar Bazar and added no fresh information to what had already been obtained. One other grave, produced a fine copper pin surmounted by the head of a goat, see Plate XLII, No. 8; it belonged to the period known as Ninevite 5, c. 3000 B.C.