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

336 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
when another catastrophe befel Nippur. Several other
"jeweller's shops" of the
Parthian period excavated by our
expedition at different sections of the ruins established the
And
correctness of this interpretation beyond any doubt.
when in May, 1900, I spent a few days with the expedition
at Babylon, Koldewey had found a similar shop in the
mound of 'C)(A)mran ibn 'All, which, besides purely Parthian
antiquities, contained several more ancient objects
from various Babylonian ruins, and for this reason proved
particularly instructive.
No sooner had the German explorer
submitted the inscribed objects of this shop to me for examination,
than I recognized and pointed out to him a
number of Cassite objects, which, according to their material,
forms, and inscriptions belonged originally to the temple
at Nippur, illustrating in an excellent way how the trade in
" useful
" antiquities flourished in Babylonia even two thousand
years before our own time.
An even more far-reaching discovery, the real significance
of which lies in its bearing upon the topography of ancient
Nippur, but again unfortunately not
recognized by Peters,
was made a little to the northwest of these booths. This
was a shrine of Bur-Sin I, 1 the walls of which were built
of baked brick laid in bitumen, and were still seven to fourteen
courses high. Consisting of two rooms, it stood upon
a platform of the same material and faced inward toward
the entrance to the court of the ziggurrat. According to
the legends inscribed on the bricks and on two doorsockets
found in situ, it had been dedicated to Bel himself
about 2600 b. c. A pair of clasped hands from a dolerite
statue similar to those excavated at Tello, a number of inscribed
fragments of bas-reliefs, and
an archaic mortar dec-
1
As Thureau-Dangin has recently shown that there was only one dynasty
of Ur in the third pre-Christian millennium, Bur-Sin of Nisin, hitherto classified
as Bur-Sin I, must henceforth be called Bur-Sin II, while Bur-Sin of Ur
takes the first place.