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

328 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
mental question, there remained nothing but either to acquiesce
in Peters' view, which, however, ignored essential
facts brought to light by the previous excavations, and was
contrary to certain established laws of Babvlonian architecture,
or to regard the famous sanctuary of Bel as a hopeless
mass of crumbling walls, fragmentary platforms, broken
drains, and numerous wells, reported by Haynes to exist
at widely separated levels, often in very strange places and
without any apparent connection with each other.
What were the new features developed at this " perplexing
mound " in the course of the second campaign ? By
engaging a maximum force of four hundred Arab laborers,
half from Hilla and Jumjuma, half from the 'Afej tribes
around Nuffar, and by placing the greater part of his men
at the temple mounds, the director was able to attack the
problem more vigorously and to remove such an enormous
mass of rubbish that at the end of his work he could
boast
"that in cubic feet of earth excavated, and size and depth
of trenches," his excavations "far surpassed any others ever
undertaken in Babylonia," and that De Sarzec's work of
several seasons at Tello " was probably not even the tenth
part as large as our work of as many months." But this
difference was due to various causes, and not the least to
the difference of methods pursued by the two explorers,
quite aside from the fact that the amount of rubbish extracted
from a ruin can never be used as a standard by
which the success or failure of an archaeological mission is
to be judged. Peters himself characterizes his manner of
excavating as follows "
: We sank small well-shafts or deep
narrow trenches, in many cases to the depth of fifty feet or
more, and pierced innumerable small tunnels (one of them
1 20 feet in length) after the native method." 1 In other
words, he examined the mounds prettv much as the Arab
peasants did at Babvlon, El-Birs, and other places, only on
1
Comp. Peters, /. c, vol. ii, pp. ill, seq.