The seventh expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq took the field on March 4th, 1956, and concluded its work on May 5th. As usual we are indebted to several institutions and to many persons for their help. Generous financial aid was received from: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Les Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels; the Iraq Petroleum Company, which also furnished the Expedition with apparatus and invaluable technical help through the good offices of the Fields Manager in Kirkuk, Mr. L. J. Teyssaud.

The complex of buildings described in this article lies on the east side of the citadel of Nimrud, close to the south-east corner. It is bounded on the east by the citadel wall, on the north by the street leading up from the gate of Shalmaneser III, and on the west by a second street dividing it from the Burnt Palace (Pl. I). A building on its southern side, in the angle of the fortifications, was investigated by Layard, who refers to it on his plan as “The Palace of the Grandson of Esarhaddon”; his excavations were hampered by the presence of a considerable post-Assyrian cemetery and he exposed only a small part of the uppermost of the sequence of buildings on this site. Our investigations have so far touched only the outer face of its north wall, which fronted on the south wing of the Nabu Temple, but this has sufficed to show that the site was continuously occupied throughout the life of the Nabu Temple, although the buildings upon it had no connection with the Temple area; hence it is of importance only as a limiting factor in the layout of the Temple itself. It is, however, clear that the south-east corner was always, with the exception of the Ziggurrat, the highest point in the citadel, and the considerable slope, represented by a drop of some five metres in ground level from the southern boundary of the site to the street of Shalmaneser III on the north, undoubtedly influenced successive architects in planning its development.

The text of this fragment consists of a number of medical prescriptions, and the six of these which are either complete or very nearly so, together with the first line of a seventh (Obv. i, 26, given as the fourth in order) form the basis of this study. Details of the discovery of the fragment were given in Iraq, XVIII, Pt. 2, p. 130; for the copy see Pl. XXV of the same issue. The system of transliteration which is adopted is that which conveys the text exactly as written, in the belief that, while this procedure inevitably makes for slow reading in a scientific work, only thus can it be safeguarded against possible transcriptional error. The translation wrestles with difficulties both of meaning and interpretation and the need for improvement should be recognised in many places.

The tablet N.D. 5435 was discovered at Nimrud in 1956, in the course of the excavations conducted by Professor M. E. L. Mallowan under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. I am much indebted to Professor Mallowan for his generous permission to publish the text in the columns of Iraq, and would also like to thank Dr. J. Læssøe, one of the epigraphists of the Nimrud Expedition in the 1956 campaign, for kindly relinquishing his right of publication and inviting me to prepare an edition of the text. Dr. Læssøe read my article in manuscript and contributed some valuable suggestions.

The great site of Persepolis, though known for centuries past from the accounts of many travellers, remained until 1931 one of the very few of the great capital cities of the ancient Near Eastern world still untouched. Yet its monuments have formed the objects of serious study since more than a century; Ker Porter's careful drawings (1817) are by no means to be despised, but the pioneer work of Flandin and Coste, carried out in 1840–1841, before Botta and Layard had even found the famous capitals of Assyria, was not merely remarkable, it was in the first class. Following it came that of Texier in 1852. But only Flandin and Coste's great work can be compared with the latest handsome presentation of the subject, which is based on every modern scientific aid and incorporates the results of large-scale excavations, with the end in view of producing a definitive and complete record.