IN the years immediately before the last war the late Sir Aurel Stein carried out archaeological surveys in Northern 'Iraq, a preliminary report of which appeared in this Journal.1 During the summer months of the last two years I have been privileged to continue and extend this undertaking, with the aid of Stein's own unpublished material, and of grants from the Stein-Arnold Fund of the British Academy. I must express my gratitude to the Council of the Academy and the trustees of the Fund for their generous support, and also to the British School of Archaeology and the Directorate-General of Antiquities in 'Iraq * for unfailing assistance in the field. This paper summarizes a lecture delivered before the British Academy, giving an interim report on the work, the problems it presents and the manner in which they may be solved. It deals largely in generalities, for two reasons: the two centuries of Roman occupation were a mere episode in the history of the country itself, and cannot be adequately studied without a knowledge of the limitations which three thousand years of civilization imposed upon the newcomers; and secondly, the territory forms no natural part of the Roman Empire, and if we are to understand the reason or the technique of its occupation, we must take account of contemporary geographical and political considerations. Northern 'Iraq is geographically the centre of the Middle East, and it is only necessary to visit Mosul, its modern capital, and hear four native languages spoken in the streets, to realize the complexity of its inheritance. It was also one of the great original centres of civilization and, in its maturity, the reservoir of wealth and manpower which, for six centuries, fed the Assyrian Empire, centred about the great cities of Assur, Nineveh and Nimrud. But the very greatness of the Assyrian capitals tempts us to think of Assyria in terms of cities, and to ignore the country? side, the network of towns and villages, of minor roads and great highways, from which their power was drawn. It is perhaps unnecessary to labour the point that an ancient city ultimately depended for its luxury in peace and its strength in war not, like a modern state, on its industries, but on the land and peasantry outside its gates; and it is interesting to calculate the vast area that was necessary to support a population of 60,000 at Nimrud or twice as many at Nineveh.2 But the prosperity of the countryside was not equally dependent on the existence of its cities; provided that there was some authority to save it from the perils of anarchy, it was probably better that the authority should not maintain its courts and recruit its armies near at hand. In fact, accustomed as we are to regard the fall of Nineveh in 612 b.c. as the cataclysm that ended an era, we forget that it may have been, in local terms, the killing of the white elephant. Very probably there were periods of anarchy and destructive invasion. PostAssyrian settlement on sites such as Nimrud is discontinuous, but there is consider? able evidence that the pattern of the countryside established in Assyrian times continued without significant change down to, and even after, the Islamic conquest. The great cities were, it is true, deprived of their artificial importance and assumed the status that their local position justified. Nimrud became quite a small town, though large enough to inspire Xenophon to ask its name in passing 3; the great * Under the direction of H. E. Dr. Naji al Asil.