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

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 389
upper one was composed of enormous bricks of uniform
size and mould, 15^ to 16% inches square and 3^ inches
thick. Several of them were stamped with the brief legend :
" Shargani-shar-ali (the original fuller name of Sargon 1 ),
king
of Agade, builder of (at) the temple of Bel " ; others bore
the words "
: Naram-Sin, builder of (at) the temple of Bel,"
while still others were without any inscription. The bricks
of Naram-Sin were more numerous than those of his father,
the ratio between them being about three to one. Haynes
adds the interesting observation that some of these bricks
were colored red when he
found them, but that their color
faded slowly whenever they were exposed to the air and
the sunlight. The lower course contained only imperfect
bricks of both Sargon and his son and many plano-convex
bricks with a thumb-mark on their upper (convex) side.
It became evident at once that these peculiar plano-convex
bricks, 1 1 by 7 by 1 inches in size, represent an earlier
(pre-Sargonic) period, and that the pavement itself was
originally laid by Sargon and relaid by Naram-Sin, both
of them utilizing older material in connection with their
own bricks.
The same intermingling of earlier bricks with those of the
Sargon dynasty was noticed in
connection with several fragments
of narrow watercourses, which
Haynes found at the
level of Naram-Sin's pavement, but, as it seems, disconnected
with it. His notes at our disposal are very meagre,
and refer only to one of these conduits, which came from
the middle of the open court and very perceptibly sloped
down towards the angle formed by the front face of the
ziggurrat and the two parallel walls representing part of
its entrance. This meandering section, which was traced
for twenty-five feet, consisted of nine joints of trough-
1
Comp. my discussion on this question in "The Bab. Exp. of the U.
of Pa.," series A, vol. i, part 1
(1893), pp. 16, seqq., and part 2 (1896),
pp. 19, seq.