Editors' Preface

Editors’ Preface When the three of us first approached colleagues with view to convening a Festschrift for Nicholas Postgate, the response was overwhelming. Messages poured in enthusing over Nicho- las’ intellectual and human qualities in the warmest terms, and it is no surprise that the final product has needed two volumes to fit everybody in (and that’s after we limited the project to contributors who had worked directly with the jubilar!). It has always been a feature of Nicholas’ scholarship and teaching that, unlike most Meso- potamianists, he is equally comfortable with Archaeology and Philology, and indeed sees the two as indissoluble parts of the same intellectual enterprise. We have therefore arranged the contributions alphabetically, to allow the most unexpected combinations of topics to appear side by side, as is characteristic of Nicholas’ own publication list (see pp. xiiiff.). Nicholas is the most modest and unassuming of scholars, and he probably shudders at the idea of both a Festschrift, and, even more, a preface to it. Yet, not least owing to our indebted- ness to him as Doktorkinder, we cannot resist the urge to pen a few words on him and his career. It is a story with many exciting moments, and we hope Nicholas will indulge us in presenting it before readers to whom it is new. Nicholas first arrived in Cambridge in 1963, to read Classics, having previously attended his father’s preparatory school and Winchester College. In truth, harbingers of his future interests were not entirely absent: as a member of the Winchester Archaeological Society, he had invited Oliver Gurney to address the school on The Hittites (disappointingly receiving instead a lecture on the decipherment of cuneiform). But the real impetus towards Mesopotamia came from David Oates, Nicholas’ mentor at Trinity College, who, with the famous words It’s never too late to give up Classics, kick-started a meteoric career that would run for the next half-century and on, changing the fields of both Near Eastern Archaeology and Assyriology. Another dictum from David Oates, indeed an altogether surprising one, was that during one’s Undergraduate studies one should concentrate on languages, since one could always “gen up on different sword types” in the Long Vacation. And so Nicholas rapidly switched from Clas- sics to Oriental Studies, reading for a degree in Akkadian and Hebrew. His contemporaries in the Faculty of Oriental Studies included Stephanie Dalley (née Page) and Julian Reade. Akkadian was taught by James Kinnier Wilson, and the History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East by Margaret Munn-Rankin. Nicholas spent part of his third Undergraduate year in Münster at the feet of Wolfram von Soden, studying Akkadian and working on the Akka- disches Handwörterbuch, but also attending Sumerian classes with Joachim Krecher. Nicholas the Undergraduate also excavated at Mycenae with Lord William Taylour, and in Turkey: Kültepe- Kaneš with Tahsin Özgüç, and Can Hasan with David French. Graduating with a starred 1st in 1967, Nicholas took up a position as Assistant Lecturer in Akkadian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where alongside Donald Wiseman and David Hawkins he taught Akkadian and Sumerian to classes which included Bar- bara Parker, Michael Roaf, and John Curtis. Feeling that their staff should have experience of the modern regions of the world that they studied, in Autumn 1968 SOAS provided Nicholas with a VW beetle and said that they ix x Editors’ Preface would see him twelve months hence. In an unusual form of honeymoon, Nicholas and Carolyn drove out overland across Europe and Turkey into Iran, from where they entered Mesopotamia from the east. With a base at the British School at 90/1 Karradet Mariam, overlooking the Ti- gris in Baghdad, Nicholas worked in the Iraq Museum on the tablets from Nimrud, but also visited much of the country, including working with David and Joan Oates at Tell al-Rimah in the north. In 1970, Trinity College elected Nicholas as Fellow for Research in Assyriology, on the strength of a work which was later to be published as Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire. The Fellowship continued until 1974, but in 1972 Nicholas was appointed as Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. The post required a move to Baghdad, and so from 1972 to 1980 Nicholas and family lived in Iraq, acquiring the fluent Arabic that would later be matched by fluent Turkish. While conducting routine duties such as overseeing the School’s hostel, guests, and li- brary, Nicholas decided that he wanted to excavate a Sumerian city. An ideal candidate was the 50-hectare site of Abu Ṣalabikh (16 km northwest of Nippur), first investigated in 1963–65 by Vaughn Crawford and Donald P. Hansen of the Chicago Oriental Institute. From a sounding in the Early Dynastic mound, Crawford and Hansen had recovered around 500 Old Sumerian inscriptions rich in lexical and literary material. Nicholas was attracted by the idea of using writ- ten documentation to elucidate the all-too-sketchy picture of Early Dynastic Sumerian archaeology: excavation at Abu Ṣalabikh would make it possible “to describe life in a small Sumerian city-state through the eyes of a visiting social anthropologist” (Postgate 1992–93: 410), and to match “the record in the ground and the record on the cuneiform tablet” (W. Matthews and Postgate 1994: 171). Meanwhile, diplomatic entanglements of pantomimical proportions between the Iraqi government and various foreign institutions led to the closure of the British School and to its re-opening under the different name of British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, with Nicho- las as Director. It was under the banner of this new institution that excavations at Abu Ṣalabikh began in 1975, a survey having been conducted in 1973. The team was led by Nicholas, assisted by Jane Moon and Roger Matthews as field director in different years. Excavations lasted until Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. A wide variety of interdisciplinary techniques — zoo-archaeological, botanical, micromor- phological and micro-stratigraphic — were successfully employed at the site, many of them for the first time in southern Iraq. A particularly noteworthy “first” was the technique of surface scraping. The Abu Ṣalabikh team quickly realized that even a decade of full excavation would uncover less than 2% of the site, so another approach was needed to provide a wider scale of understanding. As the remains of the 3rd-millennium city were very close to the surface, to expose clearly visible layers and wall lines it sufficed to scrape away a shallow layer of loose soil. By this method, one could quickly generate a site plan of the Early Dynastic city. The technique was applied to wide areas of the West, South, and the Main mounds, giving a broad view of the internal layout of the city, the lattice of streets, and blocks of urban housing. Abu Ṣalabikh is far from being Nicholas’ only excavation during his Baghdad years. At this time, the Iraqi authorities were starting a long series of rescue projects in advance of dam con- structions. The BAEI’s first site was the Ubaid mound of Tell Madhhur in the Hamrin region, Editors’ Preface xi and Nicholas began the work there before handing over to Michael Roaf, who had become As- sistant Director of the BAEI in 1979. In 1981, on the retirement of his old teacher, Margaret Munn-Rankin, Nicholas returned to Cambridge, initially as University Lecturer in the History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, and Fellow of Trinity College. On the retirement of James Kinnier Wilson in 1989 he moved sideways into the language post, while the History and Archaeology were taken on by Joan Oates. With the introduction of an MPhil in addition to the four year Undergraduate course in Assyriology, they had a busy teaching schedule. There was an ‘open door’ policy of extending Mesopotamian teaching to interested sitters- in, many of whom went on to secure academic positions in which they consolidated their Mes- opotamian interests. Such “visitors” included Peter Williams, Guy Deutscher, Naoíse Mac Swee- ney, Johannes Haubold, Cyprian Broodbank, and Kate Spence. At the same time, Nicholas was of course supervising a considerable number of his own PhD students, here listed in chronological order to the present day: Donald M. Matthews, Roger Matthews, Wendy Matthews (née Knight), John MacGinnis, Tina Breckwoldt, Chikako Watanabe, Graham Cunningham, David Brown, Simon Sherwin, Leyla Umur, Lauren Ristvet, Martin Worthington, Xianhua Wang, T. Emre Şerifoğlu, Rachel Fenton, Yaǧmur Heffron (née Sarıoǧlu), Adam Stone, Johanna Tudeau, and Olga Vinnichenko. He also served twice as Faculty Chairman, and was instrumental in establishing the Cambridge Central Asia Forum. All the while, archaeological excavation continued. Though fieldwork in Iraq had become impossible, in 1993 David French urged the British Institute at Ankara to undertake rescue excavations at Kilise Tepe (Göksu Valley, southern Turkey), which found itself within the pro- posed flood zone of the Kayraktepe Dam, and had once been within the boundaries of the As- syrian empire. In partnership with the Silifke Museum — represented first by Şinasi Başal, and then by İlhame Öztürk, one of the project’s most valuable allies — Nicholas undertook rescue excavations there in 1994–1998, leading the team together with field director Caroline Steele. Situated at a crucial nodal point between Cilicia and the Konya plain, Kilise Tepe turned out to be an especially rewarding site, opening a window onto the pre-Classical history of a region poor in archaeological documentation for the Late Bronze Age. Accordingly, even after it had become clear that the site would not be submerged after all, Nicholas returned for a renewed phase of excavations in 2007–2012, this time jointly with the University of Newcastle, Mark Jackson acting as co-director for the Byzantine levels.

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