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

214 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
ants of the alluvial plain in the South, where from the
earliest times clay evidently took the place of stone. The
tentative excavations of Loftus and Taylor in ancient Chaldea
had indeed been of fundamental importance. They
gave us a first glimpse of the long and varied history, and
of the peculiar and interesting civilization of a country of
which we knew very little before ; they even revealed to us
in Babvlonian soil the existence of antiquities considerably
older than those which had been unearthed at Nimrud and
Qal'at Shirgat ; but, on the whole, they had been unproductive
of those striking artistic remains which without
any comment from the learned appeal directly to the mind
of intelligent people. The decided failure of Lavard's
attempts at Babylon and Nuffar, and the widely felt disappointment
with regard to the tangible results of the French
excavations under Fresnel and Oppert did not tend to
raise the Babylonian mounds in the public estimation, or to
induce governments and private individuals to send new
expeditions into a country half under water, half covered
with the sand of the desert, and completely in the control of
lawless and ignorant tribes.
But however seriously these and similar considerations
at first must have affected the plans and decisions of other
explorers, the chief obstacle to the commencement of
methodical excavations in Babylonian ruins was doubtless
the brilliant success of Botta, Layard, and Rassam in the
North, which for a long while distracted the general attention
from ancient Chaldea. Moreover, the epoch-making
discovery of the royal library of Nineveh provided such a
vast mass of choice cuneiform texts, written in an extremely
neat and regular script on well-prepared and carefully baked
(Eridu) situated in a depression of the Arabian desert, where stone apparently
was as easily obtained as clay. Comp. pp. 178, seqq.> above. In the
Seleucidan and Parthian periods under foreign influence, stone was used considerably
more all over Babylonia.