At present, all the metalwork excavated at Nimrud by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq between 1949 and 1963 is being catalogued with a view to publication. As the amount of gold jewellery is relatively small, and because as a group it seems to form an easily separable entity, it has been decided to isolate it from the main corpus of metal objects and publish it independently. The authors are grateful to Professor Sir Max Mallowan for permission to publish this material, to Dr. Isa Salman, Director General of Antiquities and to Dr. Fawzi Rashid, Director of the Iraq Museum for permission to examine the gold jewellery now in Baghdad and for their unfailing help, when the work was undertaken in the Iraq Museum.

It must be stressed that this article is confined exclusively to gold jewellery. Apart from pieces of gold-leaf used in overlaying ivory, which were found in some quantity, a few other pieces of goldwork were excavated, which cannot be recognised as jewellery and will appear in the main corpus of metal objects. Considering the extent of the excavations at Nimrud, it is immediately surprising that so few examples of gold jewellery were found: the only reasonable explanations for this paucity would seem to be firstly that Kalhu was very thoroughly ransacked in the years marking the end of the Neo-Assyrian empire, and secondly, that the communities settled on the mound after 612 B.C. were not sufficiently prosperous to have much enjoyed articles such as gold jewellery.