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

410 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
time when Ezra and Nehemiah led the descendants of Nebuchadrezzar's
exiled Jews from these very plains to Palestine,
were unfolded vividly before our eyes. We were enabled to
confirm and supplement what the Greeks tell us about the
large number of Persians settled in the various provinces of
the vast empire. We became acquainted with the names and
titles of the different officers — among them the databari>
known from Daniel 3
: 2, seq. — who were stationed all over
the fertile
country between the lower Euphrates and Tigris,
to look after the interests of their government.
From earlv days Babylonia was a land of many tongues,
but at no other period of its varied history are we so impressed
with the great proportion of the foreign
element in
this rich alluvial plain as during the centuries following the
fall of Babvlon, 538
b. c. The population of Babylonia at
the time of Artaxerxes I and Darius II appears about as
thoroughly mixed as that of the United States in our own
time. And as the emigrants from Europe and Asia brought
their customs and religions, their languages and the local
and personal names of their native lands to their new settlements
in the New World, so Persians and Medians, Arameans
and Sabeans, Judeans and Edomites, etc., transplanted
those of their former abodes, from which they often had
been carried awav by the vicissitudes of war, to ancient
Babylonia.
Very numerous are Persian and Aramean personal
proper names in these documents. Unusually large
is the number of Jewish names known from the Old Testament,
especially from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
There can be no doubt that a considerable number ol the
Jewish prisoners carried
away by Nebuchadrezzar were settled
in Nippur and its neighborhood, where many of their
descendants continued to live as long as the city existed
(about 900 a. i).), to judge from the many inscribed Hebrew
bowls excavated everywhere in the upper strata of
its ruins. The Talmudic tradition which identifies Nippur