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

DURING 19 CENTURA: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 415
on the slopes of the mounds, — these and many other facts
and considerations which cannot be set forth here in detail
afford positive proof for the correctness of my theory.
Some of the houses seem to have covered a considerable
area. Haynes calls them palace-like buildings. It is, therefore,
the more to be regretted that the unscientific method of
excavating introduced by Peters and continued by Haynes
especially in this section, where confessedly they endeavored
to secure the largest possible amount of inscribed material
at the least possible outlay of time and money, has thus far
deprived me of the possibility
of restoring the ground plan
and describing the inner arrangement of even a single real
Babylonian business house. In several instances "the archives
were found in the very position in which they had
been left when the building was destroyed." The tablets
Ellipsoidal Label. Dated in the Reign of
King Ammisadugga
were "placed on their edges
reclining against each other like
a shelf of leaning books in an
ill-kept library of to-day." As
a rule, however, they lay
broken and in great confusion
on the ground, or they were
bur j ed between the lavers of
rubbish which covered the
floor. Some of the tablets, particularly those of the
Cassite period, must have been of an enormous size.
Restored on the basis of excavated fragments, the largest unbaked
tablet was 10 by 14 by 3 inches and the largest baked,
16 bv 12 by 3
J /2 inches. As most of the tablets discovered
were unbaked or baked insufficiently, they not only are
badlv broken and chipped off everywhere, but they have
suffered exceedinglv from the humidity of the Soil in which
they lav. In many cases the salts of nitre contained in the
clay had crystallized and caused the gradual disintegration
of complete documents, or at least, the flaking off of the