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

418 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
1893 and 1895 respectively, at places and levels widely
apart from each other, and containing identical inscriptions
of Damiqilishu, a little-known " powerful king, king of
(N)isin, King of Shumer and Akkad," * who " restored the
great wall of (N)isin and called its name Damiqilishu-migir-
Ninib" (" D. is the favorite of the god Ninib ") ;
three, inscribed
unbaked clay prisms of the same period ;
a soapstone
tablet of Dungi of Ur recording his constructing a
temple to the goddess Damgalnunna in Nippur: 2 the
very ancient exquisite stele of Ur-Enlil, a high officer in
the service of Bel, 3 and several other valuable votive objects,
sculptured and inscribed. Most of them were gathered
in the loose earth, or in the rubbish which had accumulated
at the foot of the mounds and along the ancient
bed of the Shatt en-Nil. Haynes discovered even a brick
stamp of Naram-Sin and fragments of others, and one redcolored
stamped brick of the
same great ruler, of which he
speaks himself as not having been found in situ.
From the material before us it becomes certain that this
whole ridge must have been occupied from the earliest
times to the Christian period. The numerous slippershaped
coffins with their ordinary contents, a good many
Kuflc and Arsacide coins, Hebrew bowls, the fragments of
an egg-shell inscribed with Hebrew letters in
black ink, and
other antiquities taken by Haynes from rooms just beneath
the crest of the long-stretched hill belonged to the latest
inhabitants of Nippur in the first millennium of our era.
The last three thousand years of Babylonian history are
represented bv dated business documents found in crude
brick structures lying one above another. The age of these
houses can frequently be determined also from the different
sizes of bricks employed in them, which are familiar to us
1
Comp. p. 382, note 2.
2
Comp. Hilprecht, /. c, vol. i, part 2, no. 123.
3
Comp. the illustration on the previous page (417)-