The sixth Expedition to Nimrud sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq took the field on March 3rd, 1955, and concluded its work on May 5th. Once again we are indebted to several Institutions and many persons for their help. Generous financial aid was received from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Griffith Institute; the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham; the University of Cambridge; The Iraq Petroleum Company which through the good offices of Mr. M. S. Maidand lent us machinery and invaluable technical aid; much personal service was given to us through the kindness of officers in the Company. The Expedition is again deeply grateful to H.E. Dr. Naji al Aṣil, the Director General of the Iraq Antiquities Department and to all members of his staff for their goodwill and skilled advice. To H.E. Rashid Nejib, the Mutasarrif of Mosul, and to many friends in that town, as well as to the British Vice-Consul and to the British Institute we are also deeply indebted.

In the course of the season we had the honour of receiving His Excellency the British Ambassador and Lady Wright and many other distinguished guests. More than a thousand visitors watched the progress of the excavations at various times.

During this season excavation was continued in a small area of the Burnt Palace and in the street flanking it on the east, with the object of elucidating the building sequence on the Palace site, and providing a stratigraphical link with the newly discovered Nabu Temple complex. The work was restricted by the presence of the massive walls of the latest palace, which have concealed or destroyed much of the evidence; and it must be emphasised that the sequence described here, although it probably presents an accurate picture of the general development of the site, is local and may be varied elsewhere by the absence of some building phases and the interpolation of others. The areas examined were:

(i) the north-west and south-east corners of the Palace courtyard, with the three rooms running northward from the east end of the Throne-Room, numbered 7, 11 and 20 on the previously published plan (Fig. 3),

(ii) a narrow section across the street that divides the east wall of the Palace from the Nabu Temple façade,

(iii) the Temple façade and the shrine of Nabu.

The first account of the discovery of the Treasure of Ziwiye was published in two places by the then Director of Antiquities of the Persian Government, M. André Godard. The first, Le Trésor de Ziwiyè: (Editions de l'Institut Franco-Iranien) gave the text of his lecture to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The other was Le Trésor de Ziwiyè, a beautifully illustrated book published at Haarlem in 1950 by the Iranian Archaeological Service. For these publications we are deeply grateful to M. Godard. I need not describe this collection in detail, only mention that it consists of objects of gold, ivory and bronze of great beauty, variety and interest which were discovered, unfortunately in the course of clandestine excavations, at Ziwiye near Sakkez in Azerbaijan 120 km. south east of Lake Urmia. It is now dispersed, some pieces being in Teheran, others in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, others elsewhere. According to M. Godard, some of the pieces, e.g., those of ivory, are Assyrian work of the ninth-eighth century B.C., and were exported from Assyria to Sakkez. The other objects, in M. Godard's view, belong to the ninth century, or in some cases to the seventh century B.C. The fact that some of these pieces contain motifs and features hitherto regarded as characteristic of Phoenician, or in other cases of Scythian art of the sixth century B.C., is explained by M. Godard by means of a new and striking theory: that we have (except in the case of the ivories, which he considers Assyrian) in these mixed works of art examples of the native art of the kingdom of Mannai, an art which later was appropriated or copied by the immigrating Scythian tribes, who afterwards dispersed it widely, and thereby caused it to be known to the modern world as Scythian. I shall not discuss this theory here, I shall offer only some notes about the dating.

The fifteen letters here published, unlike the two previous selections, do not form a coherent group, although in a few cases two or three letters can be considered together on the basis of the occurrence in each of the same proper name or technical term. Their principal common feature is that, even though at least two concern affairs in Babylonia, none of them can usefully be treated in relationship to any of the main geographical areas—Babylonia, Syria and the districts on the northern and eastern frontiers—to which a large part of the collection relates.

The present writer has once again the privilege of thanking his teacher, Professor Emeritus Sidney Smith, for assistance and advice in his initial attempts at editing these letters, and Professor C. J. Gadd for examining, and making some valuable suggestions upon, the more difficult of the letters, particularly XXV, XXVII, XXXI and XXXII.

Most of the inscriptions relating the events of the reign of Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria 745–727 B.C., have been found in the ruins of Nimrud (Kalḫu). The latest of these finds are two fragments, which have been subsequently joined to form the lower left part, or about a fifth, of one large baked clay tablet (see Pl. XXIII). The first of these fragments (ND 4301) was found during the 1955 excavation of the Nabu Temple. It lay in the rubbish 80 cm. above the centre of the stone floor of the Tašmetum cella, not far from the cylinder seal ND. 4179 which was in the S.W. corner (Sq. C4. NTV). The other fragment, ND. 4305, was found in surface soil cleared from the west end of a trench (E-W at H.6). Even when joined these fragments do not afford a single complete line and the broken nature of all fifty-eight lines precludes the full understanding of the text and prevents more than a tentative treatment especially in the translation and comment.

The stamp seal under consideration comes from Professor M. E. L. Mallowan's excavations at Brak. It was found in the debris on the Agade floor of Court 3 in the Palace of Naram Sin, and dated to that King's time. The excavator has listed it with the important objects which deserve special attention.

This strange seal (Pl. XIII. 1) deserves indeed a study of its subject, its style and especially the idea underlying its composition. The scene depicted on the seal is not unusual as far as subject is concerned, quite singular, however, in its composition. Fortunately, the interpretation of this complicated composition is self-evident. Not only a single “phase in a cow's career” to quote Sir Arthur Evans, is recorded in this idyllic scene, but three of them, reflecting the cow's whole career. The three drawings of Fig. 1 are the result of dismembering the complicated picture into three distincdy different postures of the cow: (a) Grazing, with her head bent down; (b) giving birth to a calf; (c) suckling and licking her youngster. It is clear that not three animals are depicted, but only one single cow at three successive stages in time. This summary expression of a story which comprises a series of consecutive movements is indeed ingenious. It becomes a photographic story rather than a mere picture.

The Tablet 6 A 343, which is now in the possession of the Danish National Museum at Copenhagen, was excavated in the year 1936 by the Danish Expedition to Hama in Syria. For permission to publish the text, I am indebted to the Carlsberg Foundation, which sponsored the excavations; to Professor Harald Ingholt, Yale University, who directed the Expedition; and to Mr. Niels Breitenstein, Keeper of the Department of Classical Antiquities at the Danish National Museum. I take the opportunity to thank Mr. Breitenstein for his interest in my work with the Hama tablets in general. For very generous and valuable assistance with the reading and interpretation of difficult signs and passages especially in the latter part of the text, I am much indebted to Professor Benno Landsberger of the University of Chicago.

The tablet 6 A 343 was found in the remains of the ancient city of Hama, in Building III of Level E, which provides us with the year 720 B.C. as a lower date: the year in which Hama was conquered by the armies of Sargon II of Assyria. It is, however, possible that at least some of the tablets found in Building III should be dated to the ninth century B.C., inasmuch as a letter (6 A 334) found in the same archaeological context may with some probability be dated to the reign of one Marduk-apil-uṣur, a local ruler of Suḫi and a contemporary of Shalmaneser III of Assyria.

The texts presented in this study are two which were discovered by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq during the 1955 season at Nimrud. The field records of the Expedition show that both tablets came from a rubbish pit H 2 within the precincts of the Nabu Temple. They formed part of a large collection which was disturbed and partly destroyed by persons searching for loot and burnt-bricks after the destruction of Calah in 612 B.C. Some time in the sixth century there was an attempt to repair and renovate the city by the impoverished inhabitants of the district, who found in the old Assyrian pavements invaluable building material. Much excavation of the Temple area was then undertaken, and the site was studded with pits which were subsequently refilled with unwanted debris including the remains of the Temple library.

Until the discovery of the royal archive of Mari belonging to the first half of the eighteenth century B.C., the principal sources for the study of the history of international law and diplomacy in the second millennium B.C. were the diplomatic records of the Egyptian and Hittite empires found at Tell el Amarna and Boǧazköy, covering the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.; few earlier documents of international character were known. The new evidence, combined with that of contemporary texts from Babylonia and Alalaḫ, proves that many of the rules and principles recognised in the fourteenth century B.C. as governing the relations of civilised states were already established some four centuries earlier.

The lump of blue glass found by H. R. Hall at Eridu in 1919 is well known to students of early glass. From the circumstances of the excavation Hall deduced that the piece was made at least as early as 2000 B.C. and this view is generally accepted.

The piece has been fully discussed, with other pieces of glass made before 1500 B.C., by H. C. Beck. He considers that the piece was a manufacturer's piece of material made very near to where it was found, and so is evidence of a glass factory in Mesopotamia much earlier than any previously known, the earliest factory in Egypt being about 1000 years later. The Eridu glass supports the view, held by some authorities, that glass making was introduced into Egypt from Mesopotamia.

The cause of the blue colour of early Egyptian glass was the subject of controversy for many years and it was not until a systematic series of tests were made by Farnsworth and Ritchie in 1937 that the question was finally cleared up. They examined 58 pieces of blue glass of the XVIII Dynasty and showed that the pieces of bluish green colour were invariably coloured by copper and those of a pure blue or violet blue were invariably coloured by cobalt. The amount of cobalt required to give a deep colour is very small, less than 0.2 per cent.

Objects showing strong oriental influence in the large Etruscan tombs have been studied by many distinguished scholars writing over a long period of years and from many different standpoints—by Karo as a classical archaeologist and Lehmann-Haupt as an authority on Armenia, followed by Randall MacIver, Poulsen, Kunze, Schachermeyr, Herzfeld, Pareti, Curtis and Hanfmann. Nor must the pioneer work of Herzfeld on Urartu and Etruria be forgotten. Among the many Italian scholars working in the wider field of Etruscan studies we are especially indebted to the work of Giglioli, Minto and Pallotino. But certain basic problems still remain to be solved and in the light of the recent invaluable studies by Barnett on Urartian metalwork we can hope that an approach from a purely oriental angle may be able to make a new contribution to answering these questions, and may possibly supplement the suggestions concerning the chronology of these tombs recently published by Professor Hawkes.