This report really covers the work of two seasons, because that planned for autumn 1980 had to be deferred until March 1981, and this was followed in the autumn of the same year by a rather curtailed spell at the site in October and November. A special vote of thanks is due this year to the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage under its President, Dr. Muayad Sa'id Damerji, for enabling us to carry on our work despite difficult circumstances. We received the readiest co-operation from the Director-General for the Southern Region, Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-Azzawi, and we shall remember with gratitude the very real help and friendliness afforded us by Sd. Abd-as-Salam Sim'an and Sd. Abd-ar-Rahman Muhammad Ali as Representatives of the Organization, and by Sd. Muhammad Yahya and his staff at the Diwaniyah Inspectorate. As in former years we are indebted to four institutions for their generous support with funds: The British Academy, The British Museum, The National Geographic Society, Washington D.C., and the Royal Ontario Museum. We thank them again for both the visible financial backing and the moral encouragement implicit therein. For their warm hospitality on several occasions we are also most grateful to the French and British engineers of Dragage (at Shomeli) and GKN (at Diwaniyah), who also gave us material assistance of crucial importance by allowing us to draw fresh water for the camp.

In 1970 Geoffrey Bibby drew attention to a tablet from Ur of c. 1800 B.C. which equates weights on the Dilmun weight standard with those on the standard of Ur. He concluded that the Dilmun weight standard was the same as that used in the Indus Valley, but was puzzled by the inconsistencies in the arithmetic, which he explained by assuming that the merchants took a commission each time the weight was converted from one standard to another, that is a different rate of exchange was used to convert from Dilmun weights than was used to convert from Ur weights. Collation of the tablet in the Iraq Museum, however, has removed the problems in the mathematics and the need for Bibby's elaborate commercial procedures.

The object here published (Plate VI) is a heavy lump of grey stone (diorite or basalt) measuring 40 × 34 × 13 cm, roughly shaped to form a gate socket, and carrying an inscription of Ur-nammu which is apparently hitherto unattested. The owner, who inherited it from her father, reported it to the Keeper of the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1978, and at his suggestion the present writer took a photographer from the Museum to inspect the object at her home, where the photographs here published were made. The owner's father, then resident in Baghdad, received the stone as a present from the Turkish Governor of Baghdad in 1918 when he was about to surrender the city to the British forces, but nothing is known of its previous history. It is at present in the Ashmolean Museum on temporary loan.

Work on my publication of the University of Pennsylvania's 1931 soundings at Fara prompted me to look again at the material from the Early Dynastic cemetery at al-‘Ubaid. This study resulted. It attempts to re-define the relative dates of the graves within the al-‘Ubaid cemetery. It also reviews the evidence for the dating of the cemetery as a whole in an effort to establish its position within the Early Dynastic period.

There is an extended discussion of the pottery types found in Sumer in ED II and IIIa. The neglect of this material has recently been highlighted by Professor Adams' survey of the Sumerian “heartland”. One of the most striking problems to emerge from his study is the difficulty of identifying pottery and sites of this period.

Amongst the large collection of material, comprising metal objects, seals and pottery, which Woolley acquired from the site of Amarna in northern Syria, was an axehead of the comparatively rare “crescentic” type. The collection was not acquired as a result of excavation, but rather was purchased from the villagers who had looted the cemetery (Woolley 1914, 91). The axehead, which is in the collections of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum (B.M. 116050, 1922–5–11, 183) (Figs. 1a and b and 2:24), is well preserved and undamaged. It is 240 mm long and weighs 121·5 gm. Its method of manufacture seems to have been one in which the basic shape was cut out of beaten sheet copper. The blade is uniform in thickness and in fact is very thin, about 1 mm. The ends of the “crescent” were cut round at a steeper angle to produce tangs. These and the central tang were hammered causing them to become thinner and to splay out giving them a somewhat irregular appearance. The ends of the tangs were then bent around the haft and made secure by further hammering. Assuming that the bending of the tangs has not been altered since the finding (and hence, deposition) of the piece, the haft itself must have been curved to receive the axehead. The Amarna axehead has been briefly mentioned previously (Hançar 1934, Fig. 16d; Stronach 1957, Fig. 13: 3) but has never been properly published. The dating of this axehead will be discussed below as a part of a discussion aimed at clarifying the typological and chronological problems posed by the small number of widely distributed occurrences of crescentic axeheads throughout the Near East.

In the remarkable expansion of archaeometallurgical studies in the last fifteen or twenty years Mesopotamia, where much pioneer work was done fifty years ago, has steadily slipped from view. This is in marked contrast to the time when Woolley's discoveries in the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur gave the Sumerians an assured place in general studies of early metallurgy. As research priorities in archaeometallurgy in the Near East moved to the investigation of the primary processes of metal exploitation and the development of support technologies, the source zones of Anatolia, of the Negev and Sinai, and of Iran inevitably eclipsed a region which had always been an importer of metals, to a greater or lesser degree already processed. This excluded Mesopotamia from a role as innovator in the basic techniques of metal recovery, and also probably in pioneering the skills of smelting and of alloying copper. Nor, for the same reasons, has Mesopotamia been drawn into the lively debate about the relative significance of external forces and internal transformation mechanisms in the development of metallurgy in prehistoric Europe, for which the primary eastern point of reference was Anatolia. But the certain fact that Mesopotamia had to import all her metal has kept metallurgy among the factors considered in current debates over explanatory models for the emergence of a complex society there in the later fourth and earlier third millennium B.C., some-times giving rise to conclusions hard to reconcile with the sparse archaeological record.

A summary report on the last three seasons at Tell Brak presents an opportunity for both my colleagues and myself to offer a tribute to our President, Professor Seton Lloyd, in the year of his eightieth birthday. May he long remain the doyen of Near Eastern archaeologists.

It is a pleasure also to express my gratitude to the institutions which have generously contributed to the cost of the excavations, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the British Academy, the British Museum, and the C. H. W. Johns and Crowther-Beynon funds of Cambridge University. The Director-General of Antiquities and Museums, his staff in Damascus and Aleppo, and his representatives in the field were unfailing in their friendly support and advice. Any credit for the success of our operations must also go in large measure to the staff of the expedition, whom I thank most warmly for their energy and loyalty. They were:

Assistant Directors: Dr. T. A. Holland (1978, 1980) and Mr. David Jeffreys (1981).

Site supervisors: Dr. John Curtis (also registrar); Mr. Peter Dorrell (also photographer); Mr. David Hawkins (also epigraphist and registrar); Dr. Ismail Hijara; Dr. Jonathan Hodgkin; Dr. Alastair Marshall (also surveyor); Mr. Thomas Oates; Dr. Walid Yasin al-Tikriti; Mr. Andrew Tomlinson; Mr. Jonathan Tubb.

Conservators: Mr. James Black; Mrs. Cathy Tubb.

Pottery recording: Dr. Kate Fielden; Dr. Joan Oates (also registrar, photographer); Miss Jenny Oates; Miss Susan Oates.

In a previous article we discussed the recently excavated upright-handled jars and stemmed dishes from Abu Salabikh (Moon 1981). In the following pages we attempt to follow the wide distribution of these two pottery types by presenting similar material from other Early Dynastic sites. Occurrence of both in association clusters about Northern Babylonia, so a good starting point is provided by Kish, where upright-handled jars and stemmed dishes were first commented upon.

As with so many sites dug in the earlier part of the century, available records leave much to be desired. “Ingharra was badly excavated, the excavations were badly recorded, and the records were correspondingly badly published” (Lloyd 1969, 48). However, the attention to detail afforded by Mackay's description of the upright-handled jars and stemmed dishes is admirable (Mackay 1925, 23–37; 1929, 130–156). And while the caution that is the privilege of hindsight must now be applied to some of the deductions, there is no need to reiterate pure description.

It is with the greatest pleasure that I dedicate this brief article to Professor Seton Lloyd, an archaeologist of enormous distinction, and one whom I am pleased and honoured to call friend, whose work in Iraq still forms the basis for all prehistoric interpretation.

Well-dated ceramic materials are rare, even in the archaeology of the historic periods in Mesopotamia. In particular the third millennium remains imprecisely documented, especially in the north. It is for this reason that I present here a preliminary report on the pottery from the Late ED III destruction level at Tell Brak. Seldom can pottery of such early provenance be so precisely dated. There can be no doubt that this level represents the initial Agade conquest of the north, and the vessels published here comprise the complete or reconstructable pots found in situ on the floors of major buildings in areas CH and ER destroyed at this time (Pls. VIIIb, IXb, XVIa, b). In both areas many of the vessels contained cereals and other food substances, and it is from these well-stratified deposits that the radiocarbon samples have been obtained.

The following summary is necessarily somewhat speculative and glosses over many problems of interpretation.

The Broken beginning of the text (1′–3′) seems to describe a state of turmoil in southern Babylonia for which the king (Merodach-baladan) seems to be held responsible; Marduk and the gods in anger decide on the removal of the king (4′–5′) and the appointment of his successor (?, 6′). The new king, Bel-ibni (or rather, as the historical records show, his Assyrian patron Sennacherib), in the course of the campaign to remove Merodach-baladan, destroys and plunders the Babylonian shrines and removes the statues of the gods (7′). Among others this affects the goddess Ba-KUR and her temple Etenten in the town of Ša-Uṣur-Adad. Ninurta sends the king a vision concerning Ba-KUR (8′–9′) and the town of Šapija also sees Ba-KUR (10′). Alarmed by this Bel-ibni restores the statues of the gods plundered from Ša-Uṣur-Adad to Nabu-belšu (the local chief?) and grants the town freedom from certain state services (11′–13′). The statue of Ba-KUR is then brought back to her temple in Ša-Uṣur-Adad by Nabu-gamil, an official of the temple of Ba-KUR and Ninurta (14′–17′). Subsequently the king Bel-ibni wrote the official tablet exempting the town from state services and presented it to Nabu-gamil and gave the town free of claims to Nabu-belšu (18′–20′). The text continues with curses on any future person who harms Ša-Uṣur-Adad and its gods or alters the town's privileged status (21′–34′). The text of the king's decree ends with line 34′. There is a slight gap on the tablet before lines 35′–40′ which apparently form the colophon of the copy of the decree actually presented to Nabu-gamil, invoking curses on anyone who tampers with that copy. After a wider gap there follows a second colophon (41′–43′) identifying the scribe who copied the present tablet.

The inscribed objects published here have never been adequately published anywhere, or, in one case, never published at all. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to describe each of the objects in detail and to publish the inscriptions in full. Two of the inscriptions are on stone mace-heads of a distinctive type, and are significant for the dating and derivation of such mace-heads. This will be discussed, and since little has been written about the site of Sherif Khan (ancient Tarbiṣu), the history of modern excavations there will be traced and a brief sketch will be provided of the ancient history of the city.

The first excavations at Sherif Khan were by Layard, who worked there in January and February, 1850. They were reopened by Rawlinson in the spring of 1852, and all the objects considered here come from his excavations. They can be identified from a report sent by Rawlinson to the Trustees of the British Museum on the 21st April. 1852.

As a student of Seton Lloyd's, I learnt at first hand about the Diyala excavations in which he had taken part, and this was a memorable experience. Among the many remarkable finds he made at Tell Asmar was a metal hoard of Early Dynastic III date. In the south-east corner of Room E 16:35 of the earlier Northern Palace, plastered into a hole in the wall and hidden behind a later cross-wall, was a pot and within it there were between 60 and 80 copper or bronze objects. “There were drinking cups, lamps, daggers, flat strainers with thin handles, a long drinking-tube with a perforated end. A number of finely wrought bowls both circular and boat-shaped, were nested together in groups, and the collection was completed by various small cooking-pots with bucket handles and vessels whose purpose was not apparent from their shape.” Among these objects were “a hollow knife or dagger handle which … proved to be of bronze and to contain the remnants of an iron blade”, a fluted bowl which recalls those of silver found in the later Tod Treasure and another bowl of bronze which bore a dedication to the god Abu which enabled the nearby temple to be identified since the hoard had presumably originated from it. It is, however, the aim of this paper to examine the two buckets from the hoard and to relate them to other buckets which show similar peculiarities of manufacture.