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This article seeks to demonstrate that the correct arrangement of the bronze bands on the Shalmaneser III gates from Balawat can be established by comparing the position of the nail holes on the ends of the bands with those on the edging strips that were fixed to the edges of the doors and partly overlap the ends of the bands. This new approach confirms the order previously proposed by Curtis and Tallis for the bands on the left-hand gate, but a new arrangement is suggested for the four lower bands on the right-hand gate.

Frederick Charles Cooper accompanied Austen Henry Layard on his second expedition to Assyria (1849–1850) and recorded the excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh, and expeditions to other sites. The British Museum recently purchased twenty-eight of Cooper's drawings that were previously unknown. Six of them are published here because of their particular archaeological interest, and they can be linked to entries by Cooper in his diary, now also in the British Museum.

The proposal to develop an Iraqi-British project to protect and promote cultural heritage in Southern Iraq was first mooted at a lunch in the British Museum on 24 September 2007, involving Major-General Barney White-Spunner, Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, and John Curtis, Keeper of the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. The lunch had been arranged to provide Major-General White-Spunner with recent information about the state of the Iraqi cultural heritage, as he was due to be deployed to Iraq in February 2008 as Commander-in-Chief of British troops and General Officer Commanding the Multi-National Division South-East. At the lunch, it was suggested that the greatest need would be to arrange for the inspection of archaeological sites and, if necessary, to arrange for the protection of them, and also to consider facilitating the reopening of some provincial museums. It is known that archaeological sites particularly in Southern Iraq suffered grievously from looting, particularly after the Second Gulf War, and most provincial museums were sacked following the First Gulf War in 1991 and again in 2003. Major-General White-Spunner immediately recognised the importance of these proposals and appointed a project manager, Major Hugo Clarke, to work up a scheme with John Curtis. The project has been made possible by a generous grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, that has covered all costs except those incurred in Iraq, which have been met by the British Army.

The current study was a multilevel investigation of resilience, emotion regulation, and hemispheric electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry in a sample of maltreated and nonmaltreated school age children. It was predicted that the positive emotionality and increased emotion regulatory ability associated with resilient functioning would be associated with relatively greater left frontal EEG activity. The study also investigated differences in pathways to resilience between maltreated and nonmaltreated children. The findings indicated that EEG asymmetry across central cortical regions distinguished between resilient and nonresilient children, with greater left hemisphere activity characterizing those who were resilient. In addition, nonmaltreated children showed greater left hemisphere EEG activity across parietal cortical regions. There was also a significant interaction between resilience, maltreatment status, and gender for asymmetry at anterior frontal electrodes, where nonmaltreated resilient females had greater relative left frontal activity compared to more right frontal activity exhibited by resilient maltreated females. An observational measure of emotion regulation significantly contributed to the prediction of resilience in the maltreated and nonmaltreated children, but EEG asymmetry in central cortical regions independently predicted resilience only in the maltreated group. The findings are discussed in terms of their meaning for the development of resilient functioning.

The purpose of the present note is to alert scholars to the fact that following a cleaning programme undertaken in the late 1960s certain iconographic details apparently visible on the decorated face of the monument known as the Broken Obelisk should be treated with caution.As recounted by C. J. Gadd, the Broken Obelisk was found by Hormuzd Rassam in August 1853 at Nineveh, about halfway between Sennacherib's Palace and Ashurbanipal's Palace (Gadd 1936: 123; Rassam 1897: 9). It was probably in or near the Ishtar Temple (ibid.; Reade 2005: 373). The Obelisk was drawn on site (Fig. 1), either by Charles Hodder (Gadd 1936: 123) or by William Boucher, who arrived at Nineveh in March 1854 in order to help Rassam record some of the important sculptures he had found at Kouyunyik (Barnett 1975: 22; Rassam 1897: 37). Gadd describes how the obelisk was shipped with other sculptures from Basra to Bombay in the steam-frigate Acbar in March 1854, and from Bombay to London in the ship Merchantman, arriving in February 1855 (Gadd 1936: 123). It now has the British Museum number 118898 (56-9-9, 59).It is known as the Broken Obelisk because it is the upper part only of an obelisk with a stepped top. At the bottom it measures 65 × 41 cm, and it has an overall surviving height of 63 cm. There is a lengthy cuneiform inscription on three of the four sides (the short left side is blank) and on one of the long sides there is, in addition to the cuneiform inscription, a panel of carved decoration showing a king holding a rod and ring or (more likely) a mace and a coil of rope. In front of the king are two pairs of prisoners roped together. In the field above the prisoners, and in front of the king, are five divine symbols, comprising a horned cap, a crescent, a winged disc from which emerge two hands, one of them holding a bow, a bolt of lightning, and a rosette. The text (Grayson 1991: 99–105) recounts the achievements of a king who is thought to be Ashur-bel-kala (1073–1056 BC). It is usually inferred from the text that the obelisk was originally set up at Ashur.

Wildlife managers must consider the public's preferences for wildlife population levels when determining management policies. In 1996, Maryland farmers, hunters and the general public were surveyed to determine their preferences for increasing, maintaining, or decreasing deer population numbers. Using a random utility theoretic framework with an ordered response probit model, the factors that explain preferences such as residential location, socioeconomic characteristics, landscape damage, agricultural yield loss and vehicle accidents were analyzed.

It is well-known that close contacts between Greece and the Near East were already being forged in the Geometric Period (c. 1100–750 BC) and this resulted in objects of Near Eastern origin being imported into Greece well before the mid-8th century, for example ivories and metal bowls. It is assumed these Oriental goods and influences were transmitted to Greece and the islands via the Phoenician ports on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and to a lesser extent overland through Anatolia. In the subsequent Archaic Period (c. 750–500 BC), particularly in the so-called Early Orientalizing Period, these contacts were intensified and the importation of Near Eastern luxury goods is attested by the presence of ivory plaques for furniture, bowls, cauldrons, weapons and jewellery. In this period, too, Oriental forms and motifs were copied or adapted to produce objects in a so-called Orientalizing style. The problem is therefore twofold. The first difficulty is to distinguish between objects imported from the Near East and those produced locally but deriving their inspiration from the Near East (Oriental versus Orientalizing). The second problem is to decide, if an object is Oriental, which part of the Near East it comes from. It is clear that many different cultures are represented: as well as Assyrian and Babylonian, there are also Phoenician, Syrian, Neo-Hittite, Urartian, Phrygian, Iranian, Caucasian and Egyptian. It is often difficult to distinguish between the products of these cultures, even when the material is found in the Near East where there was considerable interchange of goods particularly in the early 1st millennium BC, and it is even more difficult when it is found in Greece. Pierre Demargne took a particularly pessimistic view. He wrote:“It is hard to classify the Oriental objects found in Greece. Our knowledge of them is still too meagre for us to distinguish with any certainty between ‘Oriental’ or ‘Orientalizing’ or to plot out a chronological and geographical distribution of objects according to their more or less Orientalizing nature. Nor have we any reliable means of tracing these objects to specific workshops in the East. We can only assume that the art centres whence they came were numerous” (Demargne 1964, p. 329).

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 excavations I am going to describe began in 1983, renewing a tradition that stretches back to 1845 when Austin Henry Layard first began to dig at Nimrud. The opportunity for the British Museum to play once again an active role in Mesopotamian archaeology came with the construction of a new dam on the River Tigris about 40 km north-west of Mosul, putting under threat hundreds of archaeological sites in an area stretching almost as far as the frontier with Turkey and Syria. In an effort to ensure that as many of these sites as possible were investigated before being submerged under the lake that would form behind the dam, the Iraqi authorities invited various foreign missions to participate in the project known initially as the Eski Mosul Dam (later Saddam Dam)

The famous Assyrian bas-relief showing a dying lion, missing for many years, has recently been presented to the British Museum. It was excavated at Nineveh in the 1850s but its subsequent whereabouts has been the source of much speculation. A photograph of it was taken by Mansell and Co. in the last century (Plate XV) and this photograph continued to be available; it has been reproduced in many books, which accounts for the notoriety the relief now enjoys.The relief itself is cut down from a larger panel. It now measures 16·6 cm in height and 30·8 cm in length, and is 1·5–2·0 cm thick. At the back, on the right side, is a raised lip. The back itself is well-smoothed, but vertically scored lines are visible (Plate XVIa). On either side of the relief, there is clear evidence of saw marks where it has been cut down to size in modern times. It has probably been also cut along the bottom, but the evidence here is not quite so unequivocal. All along the top is a raised edge 0·5–0·8 cm wide that is probably the original top border of the relief; at any rate, it has the appearance of a finished edge with no signs of having been cut recently. At the bottom, the lion stands on a base line that does not quite extend the width of the slab. Probably in the last century the relief was set into a wooden frame (19·2 × 33·3 cm) with a walnut veneer (Plate XVIb). The frame is open at the back, but a vertical iron strip, held in position by four screws, keeps the relief in place.

Throughout his long and distinguished career Dr. R. D. Barnett has been greatly interested in metalwork of the 1st millennium B.C. and has made many important contributions to this subject. Naturally these have tended to concentrate on the collections with which he has been for so long associated, those of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum. They range from his studies of the Toprak Kale material to a recent article on the Nimrud bowls, and even include some thoughts on the bronze coffins which are the subject of this article (Barnett 1956, pp. 114–16). If the conclusions reached here are slightly different from his own, I hope he will forgive my temerity and accept this offering in the spirit in which it is intended, one of respect, affection, and also gratitude, for his learning and enthusiasm have ever been an inspiration to younger colleagues such as myself.The coffins under discussion here are square at one end and rounded at the other, and have high straight sides. They are made from two sheets of bronze hammered into shape and joined together in the middle of the long sides. The joins are concealed by vertical strips of bronze applied inside and out and held in position by rivets.