The Archaeological Expedition to the Ḫabur region of N. Syria was under the auspices of the British Museum and of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. For financial assistance we were greatly indebted to a number of scientific bodies and to individual subscribers. The British Museum made it possible for Mr. R. D. Barnett of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities to give us his valuable help, and generous financial support was forthcoming from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, and from the Auckland Museum, New Zealand. Our warmest thanks are also due to the munificence of individual subscribers among whom were Mr. Louis G. Clarke, Lord Latymer, Sir Charles Marston, and Mr. A. L. Reckitt.

The present paper is an account, necessarily condensed, owing to the cost of printing, of an archaeological survey which I was able to carry through a great portion of the Iranian Province of Fārs between November 1933 and May 1934. Its object was to continue the researches which had led me during two preceding cold weather seasons from the extreme south-western border of British Makrān through large parts of Persian Balūchistān and Kermān to the mouth of the Persian Gulf and thence along its coast as far as Bushire. In the concluding pages of my detailed record of these journeys, carried out under the auspices of Harvard University and the British Museum, I have explained how political conditions connected with tribal unrest had, in the early spring of 1933, prevented my intended move into Lāristān and neighbouring districts of Fārs, official orders from Tehrān having stopped all further explorations for the time being.

The strange document here published by permission of the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum is written with evident care on a perfectly preserved tablet of baked clay measuring in., now numbered 120960. It was acquired from a vendor who seemed to have trustworthy information that it was found at or near Tall ‘Umar, the site of Seleucia on the Tigris, before the beginning of the American excavations there, which is an unexpected provenance in view of the dating by the reign of Gulkishar, who was a king generally supposed to have ruled only over the extreme south of Babylonia, certainly not later than the seventeenth century B.C. This dating is itself not the least interesting feature of the document, for it gives us another text to add to the very few tablets hitherto published of the First Dynasty of the Sea-Land. But what is still more extraordinary about the tablet is that it is unique in the history of chemistry, containing, as it does, the earliest record known of the actual formulae for the making of glazes. Up to the present the earliest extant texts of this kind (also in cuneiform) are from the Royal Library at Nineveh, no older than the seventh century B.C.

The length of the costumes depicted upon archaic Sumerian representations affords a clue for dating them. A consideration of monuments of which the relative antiquity is certain shows a gradual elongation of the dress in Mesopotamian lands, from the most ancient period down to the Sargonid dynasty.

Entemena of Lagaš, who reigned shortly before Sargonid times, wears the full length dress which extends down to his feet, it being made of six or seven rows of fleecy flounces (Fig. 1). His uncle Eannatum wears a similar dress on the Stele of the Vultures.

The grandfather of Eannatum, Ur-Nanše, has a dress which leaves off above the ankles, and is composed of only three superimposed rows of flounces (Fig. 2).

The ‘Relief Circulaire’ of Lagaš is, according to stratification, more ancient than the representation of Ur-Nanše. Here the length of the dresses is still shorter (Fig. 3).

The life-size bronze head illustrated on Plates V–VII was found by Dr. R. Campbell Thompson and Mr. R. W. Hamilton at Quyunjiq in 1931 (during the excavations at Nineveh on behalf of the British Museum which were financed by Sir Charles Hyde, Bt.) and published in A.A.A., vol. XIX, pl. L. Since that time, however, the corroded surface of the metal has been cleaned, and the head appears once more in its pristine beauty.

The metal has not yet been analysed, but it would appear to be bronze, and the head to have been cast, certain details having doubtless been worked out with a chisel. On grounds of style the workmanship may be assigned to the Akkadian period, and may be dated approximately to the twenty-sixth century B.C.

THE strange document here published by permission of the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum is written with evident care on a perfectly preserved tablet of baked clay measuring 3¼x21/16in