Introductory report and a detailed illustrated catalogue of the pottery finds from this second millennium BC Assyrian site, in modern northern Iraq.

The Excavations at Tell Al Rimah: The Pottery (BSA Studies)

History

Oates, David

Oates, Joan

Postgate, Caroline

Ancient Civilizations

British Institute for the Study of Iraq

The late 4th millennium in South Mesopotamia is universally known as the Uruk Period because it is at Uruk that the German excavations have exposed the most remarkable manifestations of this complex society. Although the Uruk period in Iraq itself remains little understood, in recent decades artefacts and entire settlements have been discovered in places as far apart as the Mahi Dasht in Iran and the Euphrates in South-eastern Turkey. This volume attempts to track the Uruk phenomenon in the Near East, bringing together research on some of the most significant individual sites within the Levant and Egypt, placing emphasis on the artefactual evidence. The eleven papers were originally presented at a conference in Manchester in 1998. The contributors are Hans Nissen, Renate Gut, Mitchell Rothman, Virginia Badler, Joan Oates, Marcella Frangipane, Gil Stein, Fiona Stephen, Edgar Peltenburg, Govert van Driel, Graham Philip and Toby Wilkinson.

Artefacts of Complexity: Tracking the Uruk in the Near East (Iraq Archaeological Reports)

Postgate, J. Nicholas

The work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932-1982, with an introduction by Seton Lloyd.

Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery

Curtis, John.

The Middle Babylonian Legal and Economic Texts from Ur

Gurney, Oliver R.

The library of Nimrud, probably established in 798 BC, was a prestigious royal foundation whose scribes had contacts all over the East, particularly with Nineveh. The 259 cuneiform tablets and fragments which constituted the library mainly described magical and medical rituals, prayers and instructions for training scribes. All the epigraphic finds from Sir Max Mallowan's excavations of 1955-7 are described in this volume, with additional material from the Iraq Archaeological Service's excavations of 1985.

Literary Texts from Temple of Nabû Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud 4

Literature & Fiction

Black, Jeremy

Classics

This is the first fundamentally new work to come out in half a century on one of the world's most famous Islamic archaeological sites: Samarra, in Iraq. This capital of the Abbasid caliphs in the 9th century is not only one of the largest urban sites worldwide, but also gives us the essence of what the physical appearance of the caliphate was like, for early Baghdad is long lost. Northedge sets out to explain the history and development of this enormous site, 45 km long, using both archaeological and textual sources to weave a new interpretation of how the city worked: its four caliphal palaces, four Friday mosques, cantonments for the military and for the palace servants, houses for the men of state and generals.

Historical Topography of Samarra (Samarra Studies)

Northedge, A.

Middle East

The XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale convened in London to celebrate the British Museum's quarter millennium. Nineveh, the last great imperial capital of the Assyrian Empire, was a topic well suited to the occasion. On the museum's behalf excavations were conducted at the site intermittently for more than 80 years, from 1847 to 1932. The attractive bas-reliefs that adorned the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal have become some of the museum's most familiar exhibits. The vast numbers of clay tablets sent back from Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard and his successors are less eye-catching but remain the cornerstone of almost all Assyriological research. But there is more to Nineveh than an imperial city of the seventh century B.C. Mallowan's famous deep sounding of 1931-32 took the history of the settlement back another five thousand years. More recent research has collected evidence for the city's history in the post-Assyrian periods. Looking beyond the local horizons, the renown of Nineveh as an important city survived the end of ancient Mesopotamian civilisation in the literary and historical traditions of the Greeks and the Bible. The proceedings of RAI 49 comprise a wide range of papers on Nineveh and form an invaluable and well-informed academic resource for future research on the city itself and the civilisation that built it.

Nineveh: Papers of the XLIXe Rencontre Assyrilogique Internationale, London

Collon, Dominique

This is a facsimile reprint of the trail-blazing book by David Oates, originally published by the British Academy in 1968 and out-of-print for too long. It is primarily the report of his survey and excavation of sites in northern Iraq between 1954 and 1958, but it is at the same time a memorial to the great explorer, Sir Aurel Stein, whose pioneer fieldwork on the Roman frontiers in Iraq in 1938-39 provided the initial stimulus.

Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq

In 1952 in one wing of the North-West Palace at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, Max Mallowan excavated an archive room containing royal correspondence from the reigns of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II of Assyria. Subjects include Assyrian military activity in Babylonia and on the northern frontier, royal building projects, events on the Phoenician seaboard, and relations with King Midas of Phrygia. Some texts were published in Iraq between 1955 and 1974; the majority have remained unpublished until now. Two hundred and forty-three texts are published here; most are in New Assyrian script and the remainder in New Babylonian. Chapters divide the tablets into the geographical areas they are concerned with. The texts are presented with transliterations, translation and notes. Plates at the end of the book give facsimiles of the tablets.

The Nimrud Letters, 1952: Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud V

Saggs, H.W.F.

For all five thousand years of its history Iraq has been home to a mixture of languages, spoken and written, and the same is true today. In November 2003, to celebrate the country's rich diversity and long history as a centre of civilisation the British School presented a series of talks by experts on each of the major languages of Iraq and their history, and this illustrated volume brings these now to a wider public. Iraq's languages come from different linguistic families - Semitic, Indo-European, and agglutinative languages like Sumerian, Hurrian and Turkish. Some, although long dead, have a prime place in the history of the Old World: Sumerian, probably the first language to be written and the vehicle of cuneiform scholarship for more than two millennia, and Akkadian, the language of Hammurapi and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and used across the Near East for administration and diplomacy. The history of Aramaic is even longer, stretching back to overlap with Akkadian before 1000 BC. It survives, precariously, in both written and spoken forms, being one of four languages spoken in Iraq today. Of these Arabic as a major world language has often been described, but here we have an account of the vernacular Iraqi Arabic dialects, and the descriptions of Iraqi Kurdish and Turkman are unique, detailed and authoritative.

Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern

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Books by British Institute for the Study of Iraq