British Museum Excavations Research Articles

A fragmentary limestone votive vessel of Iron Age date from Enkomi-Ayios Iakovos rediscovered

Two fragments of a stone vase decorated with palmettes under the handles, discovered during the British Museum excavations at Enkomi-Ayios Iakovos in 1896 and briefly described by Alexander Murray in a report published in 1900, were reidentified in the Museum reserves only in the past few years by Thomas Kiely. They deserve to be studied in detail because this type of object is rather rare in Cyprus, part of a small series dominated by the colossal vase in the Louvre from the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Amathus, and to which an unpublished example from Idalion can now be added. The Enkomi fragments are especially notable because they were found in the ruins of the famous Late Bronze Age site of Enkomi, along with other Cypro-Archaic limestone and terracotta items; these discoveries are complemented by Iron Age figurines from the excavations of Porphyrios Dikaios in the 1940s and 1950s. In this article, T. Kiely presents the history of discovery and the archival record, and describes the two fragments in their present condition, while A. Hermary provides a detailed analysis within their broader cultural and topographical context.

‘Nevermind the Camel!’: The Hogarth Archive and the Wilderness of Zin

ABSTRACT The recent acquisition of the Hogarth Archive by Magdalen College Archives provides new insights to be achieved on the extraordinary work of David George Hogarth as one of the preeminent scholars of the Balkans and Middle East in the last half of the 19th and the early 20th century. He was a committee member of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) and director of the British Museum excavations at Carchemish. His role in the Wilderness of Zin Survey, a joint effort by the War Office and the PEF to map the region of Sinai in the anticipated advent of war with Turkey, has been further illuminated by the discovery of new letters written by C. Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence.

Authoring the ancient sites of Cyprus in the late nineteenth century: the British Museum excavation notebooks, 1893–1896

This paper considers the performance of archaeology in the field. To do so it examines the notebooks recording the British Museum excavations in Cyprus during the period 1893–1896. Archaeologists have described the practices of writing and drawing as a performance that accords archaeology its disciplinary identity. However, there have not been systematic studies of the centrality of fieldwork in the disciplinary culture of nineteenth-century archaeology as there have been for other field sciences. Histories and geographies of science have shown that field knowledge was produced through a variety of spatial practices – including inscriptive practices – whose meaning, processes and intentions were embodied in the material artefacts of science, such as instruments and notebooks. Drawing on that work, this paper locates the British Museum notebooks as material objects of science in the disciplinary landscape of late nineteenth-century Cypriot archaeology and in British classical archaeology more broadly. In doing so, this paper furthers our understanding of how classical archaeology became established as a field-based scientific discipline in the later nineteenth century. This paper argues that the British Museum notebooks functioned as paper tools in the field: they constructed a new interpretative model of the ancient Cypriot artefacts that placed the island within the prehistoric Greek world. This archaeological model was established through the more accurate, schematic, abstracted and numerical syntax of the notebooks. Importantly, the British Museum archaeologists through the use of the notebooks as paper tools created a new entity, the excavated Cypriot artefact, that was firmly associated with the conditions of its discovery and evaluation processes.

Sidon (Lebanon): Twenty Middle Bronze Age Burials from the 2001 Season of Excavation

The 2002 season of the British Museum excavations at Sidon uncovered twenty burials of the Middle Bronze Age. These included 'warrior' burials in constructed graves containing bronze weapons, child burials in jars, as well as the more common types of simple burials on plaster floors or sand. More burials have been found in the following season and the total so far has reached thirty-six. The graves and their contents are described in detail in the first article by Doumet-Serhal followed by an article on the scarabs (Taylor). Analysis of skeletal remains was undertaken at the Department of Archaeological Sciences in Bradford University (Ogden and Schutkowski) and the faunal material which includes not only sheep/goat but also fish, pig, tortoise and bovid is described by Vila (CNRS, Lyon).

Glass Inlays and Nimrud Ivories

In the 1989 British Museum excavations at Nimrud four small glass plaques were found that were published in a recent volume of Iraq (Curtis, Collon and Green 1993: 15–16, Figs. 14: 5–6 and 16). They came from Room T20 in Fort Shalmaneser, and were found in a deposit that predated a reconstruction of the building probably in the reign of Esarhaddon. The plaques are almost square, measuring about 1·4 × 1·55 cm and 0·15 cm thick (Figs. 1–2). They are made of blue glass and have recessed designs showing six-petalled rosettes in glass of a different colour. Where this inlaid glass survives it is now white but may originally have been yellow. One of the plaques has a small hole right through the centre. It was suggested then that originally these glass plaques would have been mounted in bronze frames and would have been hammered on to various types of furniture as decoration. Further research, however, indicates that it may be possible to suggest a more specific use for these plaques.A survey of glass plaques with rosettes reveals that there were two different types in circulation in the ancient Near East. First, there are large blue glass plaques where the rosette design is recessed into the surface and filled with what is now (where it survives) opaque white glass. A characteristic of plaques made in this way is that the inlaid rosettes are visible only from one side. Barag comments that “the petals were probably pressed into the blue matrix while both were in a viscous state” (1985: 72), but in the view of von Saldern (1966: 632–3) “the shallow depressions in the tiles to receive the white fillings were cut [my italics] into the blue glass.”

British Museum Excavations at Nimrud and Balawat in 1989

In autumn 1989 a team from the British Museum worked at Nimrud and Balawat, resuming an association of the Museum with these two sites reaching back nearly a century and a half. At Nimrud work was confined to the excavation of a single room in Fort Shalmaneser (T20), while at Balawat a small trench was opened in that part of the mound where Hormuzd Rassam is believed to have found the two sets of Assyrian bronze gates in 1878. Originally it was intended that a report on the work at Nimrud would be held over until it could be presented in final form after the excavation of Room T20 was completed. In view of the present political situation, however, it is uncertain when operations will be able to resume. Therefore, we have decided to publish a report now.This work would not have been possible without the co-operation and assistance of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, to whom we owe a considerable debt of gratitude. In particular, we should like to mention Dr. Mu'ayyad Sa'id Damerji, the Director-General, and Sd Manhl Jabr, the Superintendent of the Northern Region. Both did everything in their power to facilitate our work. Our representative from the Directorate was Sd Fadhil Abbas Hamdani, who tolerated with great forbearance our ageing Land Rover and the logistical problems caused by working simultaneously at two sites. At Nimrud we also received help from Sd Muzahim Mahmud, in charge of the excavation and restoration work in the North-West Palace, and the discoverer of the immensely rich tombs of the Assyrian queens, and Sd Abd al-Salaam, the representative attached to the Italian mission also working at Nimrud. Throughout the season we stayed at the Nineveh dig-house in Mosul, commuting daily to Nimrud and Balawat. There, we had the good fortune to share quarters with the Italian team from the University of Turin. As well as good comradeship, we are much indebted to them for help with transport arrangements and for liberally sharing with us the fruits of their excellent cuisine. In particular, we should mention the Director of the Italian mission, Paolo Fiorina, and the field director, Angelo Ghiroldi.

Recent British Museum Excavations in Assyria

It is a great honour for me to be asked to give the Richard Barnett memorial lecture. I knew Richard Barnett well, and had the privilege of working with him at the British Museum for three years before his retirement. He was a great source of inspiration, and I and many others owe him a considerable debt of gratitude. I have chosen as my subject recent British Museum excavations in Assyria, partly because I believe this would have been of some slight interest to Dr Barnett. Both the British Museum and Assyria were close to his heart. He worked in the Museum for more than 40 years, and from 1955 to 1974 was Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. Throughout this time Assyria was a special interest, and Dr Barnett did some of his most important work on Nimrud ivories, the Assyrian reliefs and the Balawat Gates. Inevitably, the role of the British Museum in making these pioneering discoveries in the nineteenth century held a particular fascination for him.

The British Museum Excavations at Adulis, 1868

In 1868, during the British military expedition to Magdala in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), an archaeological excavation was undertaken, under the auspices of R. Holmes, a representative of the British Museum, at the ancient port-city of Adulis a few kilometres from the Red Sea coast. The excavation, of which some details were reported in a War Office Publication of 1870, was one of the earliest undertaken in Africa south of the Sahara. As a result an ancient church was discovered and cleared. Among the finds were a number of items of ecclesiastical furniture, some apparently imported in a prefabricated state from the Roman eastern Mediterranean. Some of these pieces, now lodged in the British Museum, are here published for the first time.

Cosmetic Sets from Late Iron Age and Roman Britain

In 1980, during British Museum excavations at Stonea Grange, Cambs., a group of metal finds collected over a number of years in the fields surrounding the site, were shown to the writer. They included two examples (FIG. 1) of an enigmatic class of small cast bronze object first discussed more than sixty years ago by Reginald Smith. They are still ill-understood, but not uncommon; the present catalogue, certainly incomplete, contains 99 examples.

Iron Currency Bars in Britain

This study of iron currency bars began as a note, prepared at the request of the late Professor Sir Ian Richmond, for inclusion in his publication of the British Museum excavations at Hod Hill. It was intended to accompany a similar account of the Celtic coins found at Hod Hill, for which he had previously asked. Hod Hill is the only site where coins and bars have been found in comparable numbers. However, as one thing led to another, the original note grew out of scale for a contribution to an excavation report; hence this separate paper. A summary will be included in Mr J. W. Brailsford's volume on Hod Hill.The term ‘iron currency bar’ has long been in use to describe certain elongated iron objects found in late iron age sites in Britain. The earliest records are of a hoard found at Meon Hill, Warwickshire, in 1824. Bars became well known after the discovery of an important hoard at Salmonsbury, Gloucestershire, in 1860. The first serious study was made by Charles Roach Smith, when in 1864 he published an earlier hoard of bars from Hod Hill. The classical account of them was given by Reginald Smith in 1905 and developed in a number of subsequent articles, which have been the basis of nearly all that has been written since. It is the theories of Reginald Smith which require reconsideration today.Between 1,100 and 1,500 iron bars relevant to this study have been found at more than 20 sites in Britain. Whether they are all iron currency bars depends on the definition of currency bar adopted. The first task was to trace as many bars as possible; I have found examples in more than 30 collections and there are, no doubt, more which I have failed to find. What has come to light, however, summarized in the Appendix, has been enough to show that the surviving material needs to be analyzed on fresh lines.

Fragments of Historical Texts from Nineveh: Ashurbanipal

Many important texts from the last series of British Museum excavations at Nineveh were made available in R. Campbell Thompson's paper ‘A Selection from the Cuneiform Historical Texts from Nineveh (1927–32)’, published in Iraq 7 (1940). Mention is made therein of other fragments, said to be mosdy ‘well-known duplicates’. However, among these unedited pieces have been found a number that are worthy of publication as they usefully augment the repertory of Assyrian historical sources. They have been identified during the compilation of a supplementary catalogue of texts from Nineveh on behalf of the Trustees of the British Museum. Thanks are due to the Trustees and to the Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities for permission to publish these manuscripts.The majority of the pieces in the collection are from the reign of Ashurbanipal, so they are presented here as a homogeneous group. It is hoped to make the other texts known in due course. Although the Annals of Ashurbanipal are familiar, several Editions are so poorly preserved that any new material is welcome, and these texts, together with those from Nimrud studied by E. E. Knudsen, and the promised edition of the Chicago collection by H. Tadmor, will prepare the way for a complete reconstruction of some of them. In this situation, the present study attempts to introduce the new evidence in the context of the previously available texts.

Impressions of the Past

The collection of over 1,100 cylinder seals and impressions on clay, now housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is, after that of the British Museum, the richest of the kind in England. Here we have memories of Oxford Worthies beginning with the Reverend Greville Chester, who a hundred years ago travelled afar and brought home many antiquities. But it is appropriate that the first seal to be illustrated in this comprehensive catalogue is a boldly carved, prehistoric specimen purchased in Aleppo, in 1913, by T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, friend and protCgC of D. G. Hogarth who was then Keeper of the Museum. To these two men we must add a third, no less famous, namely Leonard Woolley who was then directing the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish: the extensive travels of this trio not only in north Syria, but also throughout the Levant, enabled them to acquire from the peasantry these delectable little souvenirs of personal identity. Carved cylinder seals, sometimes worn as amulets, were often made for the purpose of registering ownership to property. There must have been much competition to acquire them, for Lawrence writing from Carchemish in a letter dated ‘End of February [1913]’ says to Hogarth: ‘Seriously, this last half-dozen, bought by me on the fringe of Abu Galgal, is very good. I rushed back, and have not been down again, because some villains began a dig at Deve Hüyük.… I got some good fibulae which are yours, and not Kenyon's this time at all events…’. Nonetheless, the British Museum was not forgotten and was moreover acquiring some share of the spoils from Carchemish (PL. XXXII).

The Coins from the Ephesian Artemision Reconsidered

In 1904–5 the British Museum excavations at Ephesos were resumed under D. G. Hogarth, and resulted in the discovery of what he held to be the foundations of earlier buildings beneath the great Artemision of the Croesus period unearthed by Wood. In these earlier buildings Hogarth distinguished three successive stages:A. A Central Basis, faced with green schist, standing on virgin sand, and joined in the middle of its west side by a narrow jetty to a second rectangular platform, both of limestone; the whole built, in his view, about 700 B.C., and lasting until it was destroyed by the Kimmerians about 660.B. A rebuilding and enlargement of the same about 650, the resulting temple lasting till about 600.C. A further building and enlargement finally superseded by the Croesus temple about 550.Hogarth's chronology has met with strong criticism, notably from Löwy, who regarded all remains as belonging to the foundations of the Croesus temple.

British Museum Excavations in Northern Syria

SOME further details of finds of the British Museum archaeological expeditions to northern Syria under Sir Leonard Woolley and Mr. M. E. L. Mallowan in 1938 are given in the official summaries (Brit. Museum Quarterly, 13, 1; 1939). The most important objects found within the palace at Atchana, in the opinion of Sir Leonard Woolley, are the clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform in the Akkadian language, from which it has been possible to learn not only the name of the place—Alalakh—but also the names of several of its rulers. One of these was contemporary with Saush-satar, a king of Mitanni, already known as a leading potentate in western Asia in the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. Among the small objects the most interesting is a steatite roundel engraved on both surfaces with formal patterns surrounding a middle ring, which encloses characters of the Hittite hieroglyphic writing. At Tall Brak Mr. Mallowan found the great palace to be a building of Naram Sin of Agade, bricks being stamped with his name, and tablets being found of the Agade period of about 2500 B.C. The south-west corner of the palace proved to be built over the ruins of a great mud-brick tower, probably part of a temple, belonging to the Jemdet Nasr period, more than five hundred years earlier. It rested on a clay platform, under which was buried a great number of votive objects. Most of them were in underground chambers, which had been visited by robbers in antiquity. Apart from a large collection of beads, there were many amulets of two principal kinds, the first being stamp seals in the form of animals, or animal heads, and secondly little stone ‘idols’ found in large numbers, which though classed as amulets, are of unknown significance. They vary little in style; but some show as many as three pairs of eyes side by side, while one or two seem to portray mother and child. Many sherds of prehistoric painted ware were found, especially of the Tell Halaf style.

The British Museum Excavations at Tall Chager Bazar, 1935

The British Museum Excavations at Tall Chager Bazar, 1935

The British Museum Excavations at Nineveh, 1931–32. By R. Campbell Thompson and M. E. L. Mallowan. (From the Annals of Archœlogy and Anthropology, Liverpool University Press, vol. xx, Nos. 1–4.) 10¼ × 7¼, pp. 116, pls. xxxv–cvi. Liverpool, 1933. £1 1s.

The British Museum Excavations at Nineveh, 1931–32. By R. Campbell Thompson and M. E. L. Mallowan. (From the <i>Annals of Archœlogy and Anthropology</i>, Liverpool University Press, vol. xx, Nos. 1–4.) 10¼ × 7¼, pp. 116, pls. xxxv–cvi. Liverpool, 1933. £1 1<i>s</i>.

The British Museum Excavations on the Temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, 1930–31. University of Liverpool, Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, vol. xix. By R. Campbell Thompson and R. W. Hamilton. 10½ × 7¼, pp. 62, pls. xlvi–xcii. Liverpool: University Press, 1932. 6s.

The British Museum Excavations on the Temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, 1930–31. University of Liverpool, Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, vol. xix. By R. Campbell Thompson and R. W. Hamilton. 10½ × 7¼, pp. 62, pls. xlvi–xcii. Liverpool: University Press, 1932. 6s. - Volume 66 Issue 2

The British Museum Excavations at Nineveh, 1931–2

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Ur and Eridu: The British Museum Excavations of 1919

Ur and Eridu: The British Museum Excavations of 1919

The British Museum Excavations at Abu Shahrain in Mesopotamia in 1918. By R. Campbell Thompson, Esq., M.A., F.S.A. From Archæologia, vol. lxx. 11½ × 9½ pp. 101–144, 6 plates.

The British Museum Excavations at Abu Shahrain in Mesopotamia in 1918. By R. Campbell Thompson, Esq., M.A., F.S.A. From <i>Archæologia</i>, vol. lxx. 11½ × 9½ pp. 101–144, 6 plates.