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

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 379
2700 b. a). The layer of rubbish and earth which covered
the pavement deserves our special attention, as it
yielded more inscribed antiquities than anv other part of
the temple enclosure hitherto examined. Over six hundred
fragments of vases, statues, slabs,
brick-stamps, and a number
of doorsockets were gathered by the different expeditions
in this remarkable stratum, doubly remarkable as most
of the objects obtained from it did not belong to Ur-Gur
and his successors, as at first might be expected, but to
kings and high officials whom, on the basis of strong palaeographic
evidence and for various other reasons, I was forced
to ascribe to the earliest phase of Babylonian history antedating
Sargon I (about 3800 b. c.) by several centuries.
As practically nothing but heavy door-sockets in dolerite
and some shapeless blocks of veined marble (technically
known as calcite stalagmite) were found whole ; as most of
the fragments were extraordinarily small in size, and as,
moreover, portions of the same vases repeatedly were discovered
at places widely distant from each
other, we cannot
avoid the conclusion that these precious antiquities had
been broken and scattered on purpose ;
in other words, that
these numerous inscribed vases and more than fifty brickstamps
with the names of Sargon and Naram-Sin upon
them, which had been scrupulously preserved and handed
down from generation to generation, must have been stored
somewhere within the precincts of the court of the ziggurrat,
until they were rudely destroyed by somebody who lived
between the reigns of Ur-Gur of Ur, and Ur-Ninib of
(N)isin. Apart from a brick of Ur-Ninib, the latest inscribed
monument recovered from this well-defined stratum
is a door-socket of Bur-Sin of Ur, or rather an inscribed
block of dolerite, presented to Bel by Lugalkigubnidudu, a
very ancient king of Ur and Erech, and afterwards turned
into a door-socket and rededicated to the temple of Nippur
by Bur-Sin. Hence it follows that the last-mentioned