The disappearance and weakening of the Late Bronze Age territorial empires in the Eastern Mediterranean shortly after 1200 BC is traditionally held to be followed by a so-called Dark Age of around 300 years, characterized by a lack of written sources. However, new sources are appearing, mainly in the medium of Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions, which help us to understand events and, more importantly, political and geographical power constellations during the period. The new sources are briefly situated within the framework of the current debates, with special regard given to the territories of Karkamish and Palistin. Emphasis is laid on the apparent continuation of local idioms for the articulation of power, largely persisting from the Hittite Empire, in spite of any changes in population, social structure, or political institutions that may have occurred.

A shaft-like room at the Middle Bronze Age site of Büklükale in central Turkey preserved a rich archaeobotanical assemblage of charred and mineralised plant remains, dominated by fruits, spices and nuts mixed with probable bread and wood charcoals. The remains were recovered in association with numerous ceramic vessels, jewellery, and exotic artefacts. We combine identification and analysis of the seeds and wood charcoals contained in this deposit with studies of Old Assyrian and Hittite textual records to investigate the circumstances of the assemblage's formation and its significance for further understanding trade and plant consumption in Bronze Age Anatolia. We present the earliest archaeobotanical example in the region of rare and exotic plant species being consumed in the context of one or more social gatherings, including those possibly linked to ceremonial or ritual events. This offers new insights into the role of plants in the economic and social life of the southwest Asian Bronze Age, as well as the role of commensality and feasting in early states.

This issue of IRAQ brings with it what has now become a usual healthy mixture of scholarship from both younger and older researchers, spanning the Chalcolithic through to the Parthian periods. The results of new projects sit easily beside fresh looks at older excavations. New texts are published from the British Museum, from the museum in Slemani in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and from recent excavations in southern Iraq, while older texts are also revisited for clarification and re-interpretation. We have been very impressed by our colleagues' productivity during the 18 months of pandemic and hope that the gradual lifting of restrictions on travel and close research collaboration will bring great rewards to us all.We are very pleased to be receiving a steady stream of articles by Iraqi colleagues, and hope that this will continue. In particular we are indebted to Dr Abdul Razzak Aboudi of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, who has provided excellent and tireless translation and mediation during the publication process over the past year. In the hope that further Iraqi colleagues will feel encouraged to submit to the journal, we are planning to put an Arabic-language version of the Instructions for Contributors on the CUP website. Here we are very indebted to our colleague Dr Jacob Jawdat, co-editor of the journal Sumer at the SBAH, who has provided us with a draft translation.In the last editorial we reported that SOAS, University of London, had just announced that it was closing down cuneiform studies, specifically instruction in the languages of the cuneiform world. Due to an extraordinary anonymous donation, which was secured by the efforts of Professor Eleanor Robson, it has proven possible to employ Mark Weeden, one of the co-editors of this journal and formerly of SOAS, in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London, from where he will be able to collaborate with other departments, particularly Hebrew and Jewish Studies, in the teaching of the languages of the cuneiform world. Hopefully this will be part of a new beginning that can put the subject on a firmer footing in London.As in previous years, we owe enormous thanks to our many anonymous peer reviewers for their careful and helpful suggestions, to the journal Editorial Board for support, to Saadi al-Tamimi for Arabic translations of article abstracts, and to the CUP team, especially Craig Baxter, for rapid and efficient article processing.

This essay reviews the evidence concerning the Tabalian king Wasusarma and his father Tuwati, who appear in Neo-Assyrian and Urartian annals. The context for the removal of Wasusarma ( Uassurme) from power by the Assyrian king is assumed to have lain in the events depicted in the large inscription of TOPADA. The historical and geographical import of this inscription is explored through a close reading of its historical portion, concluding that its background is set in a local struggle for power over north-western Cappadocia.The Neo-Hittite king Uassurme appears in the annals of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III for the years 738 and 732 bc as king of Tabal, and is attested in inscriptions from central Anatolia as king Wasusarma, son of Tuwati.2 The following article attempts a review and consolidation of the evidence concerning this king and his father, and is presented with special regard to new excavation projects, which may well soon present us with new data to work with. The main work on Wasusarma and Tuwati has previously been done by J. D. Hawkins over many years, and this essay relies heavily on his work as well as on discussions with him personally.3 I am sure that he will appreciate any slight disagreements as a gesture of the very high respect in which I hold him. Before looking at the main historical document from the reign of Wasusarma, the inscription of TOPADA, we will review the evidence from sources external to Anatolia, and introduce some of the geographical and archaeological background. The focus of this collection of evidence is placed on identifying the geo-political and historical framework in which Wasusarma and Tuwati operated in Anatolia, especially with reference to the Assyrian empire.

This article focuses on cuneiform and scribal education in Anatolia. It attempts to trace some of the developments in the corpus of knowledge and training when it let the confines of its initial area of relevance and was received in Anatolia by the Hittites and to draw inferences about the semiotic and sociological context of the wholesale import of a large-scale technocratic apparatus from one culture into another. It discusses the institutional and social context of scribal education in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and suggests that class composition among the Anatolian elite was not necessarily the same as that in Mesopotamia.

The question of influence between literatures should be subjected to some critical review. To speak of one literature associated with one area influencing the literature of another area might carry the assumption that there is an imbalance of power between the two in some respect, that may be expressed in terms of prestige, social domination or colonisation.According to colonial-style thought the literature that delivers the influence might be thought of as active and originating, while the one that receives the influence is supposed to be passive and receptive. "Influence" is thus a concept that one needs to treat with care, along with the closely related concepts of core and periphery, which presuppose in their most unreflected forms a unidirectional processing of information from a culturally high-standing core area towards a culturally low-standing periphery, where the message and content of the material is in some sense diluted or misunderstood.One methodological precaution that can be taken to prevent falling into traps associated with the notion of influence is to look at the way people have worked with literary material first and foremost from the perspective of local cultural norms, to try to understand specific literary forms on their own terms before appealing to explanations that invoke an outside agency or a derivation from an august tradition hallowed by its ancient sanctity. This involves looking at the use of literature as a social activity, embedded in a particular society at a particular time and place, perpetrated by particular agents with specific group interests which are hardly ever to be defined in terms of ethnic categories. It also involves recognising that all literature, as indeed all social activity, is in some sense hybrid, and that a pure type that is essentially characteristic of the people who lived in a particular area at the same time is unlikely to be found, even if the literature of the place and time specifically invokes such thematic categories as its derivation from ancient tradition and its preservation and transmission of special knowledge that is peculiar to a specific group of people. For an entry to theoretical consideration of ideas related to hybridity and influence, albeit applied to very different areas of research, the reader is referred in tokenistic fashion to the work of Homi Bhabha (e.g. 1994, 110-112) and Monica Fludernik (1998); for hybridity in literature and This is the version of the chapter accepted for publication in A companion to ancient Near Eastern languages published by Wiley.

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This essay presents a partial report of surveys on the Karacadağ (Konya), which have been carried out since 2016 due to the find of a fragment of a hieroglyphic Luwian inscription from the 13th century BC at the village of Karaören. The results of the survey allow a holistic understanding of the material and topographic conditions which led to the writing, re-use and then find of the inscription. The inscription is presented and a possible historical-geographical framework both of this and of other related texts is explained, whereby it seems probable that there was an important military-strategic border here. The survey and associated ethnographic research established the importance of the freshwater springs on the Karacadağ, as well as the continuous re-use of stones attesting a profound cultural memory that runs from the Hittite period through a populous Byzantine occupation up until modern applications by the inhabitants of the Karacadağ.