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The three essays contained in this study are intimately related to the work of the Iraq Expedition, in which their author has taken an active part from its inception. The first embodies the results of an investigation undertaken by Dr. Jacobsen in 1930, to determine which form of the ancient name of Tell Asmar had the best claim to be adopted by us. In the second essay Dr. Jacobsen publishes an important discovery made in the otherwise unimportant upper strata of an area excavated in the season of 1931/32. It proves incidentally the correctness of a thesis which he had propounded during the previous summer at the 13th International Congress of Orientalists in Leyden. The third essay deals with a letter found at Tell Asmar in 1930. It was treated separately from the other documents of its class, because Dr. Jacobsen considered it evidence that by the end of the 3rd millennium B.C. Eshnunna was adhering in legal matters more closely to Assyrian than to Babylonian usage.

This study aptly exemplifies a characteristic of the Oriental Institute's work in Iraq, namely the intimate correlation of literary and material remains, of philology and archeology, in the reconstruction of its ancient history.

• Assyriological Studies 6
• Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934
• Pp. xiv + 35; 3 figures
• Out of Print