Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA. AND BABYLONIA 199
Qoyunjuk. Compared with former expeditions the excavations
of Smith furnished but little on the subject of art and
architecture. This cannot surprise us, for he was sent out
not to find sculptures and palaces, but to search for those
small fragments of inscriptions which others had neglected
to extract from their trenches.
After his return to England in June, 1874, George Smith
was occupied for some time with a renewed
examination of
the Qoyunjuk collection of tablets, in order to gather and
to translate all those texts which dealt with the earliest
Babylonian
legends, and through their frequent remarkable
coincidence with similar stories in the Old Testament were
likely to throw new light upon the first
chapters of the Pentateuch,
and to illustrate the origin and development of
ancient Hebrew traditions. In rapid succession he published
his "Assyrian Discoveries" (London, 1875), which
gave the historv and principal results of his two expeditions,
and "The Chaldean Account of Genesis" (London,
1876), containing the translations of Babylonian legends
and tables from the cuneiform inscriptions discovered by
Layard, Rassam, and himself. Both books were received
enthusiastically by the public, the latter witnessing no less
than five editions within a few months. It was doubtless
in no small part due to this great popularity, which the researches
of Smith found again in
consequence of their bearing
upon the Bible, that, in the fall of 1875, the British
Museum decided to resume its excavations at Nineveh. In
March, 1876, after the necessary firman had been granted
again, Smith could start for the East a third time. A collection
of antiquities unearthed by the Arabs at Jumjuma
the previous winter, and offered for sale to Rawlinson, led
him at first to Baghdad. But on his arrival he found himself
seriouslv embarrassed. The whole population was in a
state of great excitement.
Cholera and plague had appeared
and played terrible havoc among the inhabitants of the