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

form ;
DURING 10 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 423
a few were made of wood, which generally had crumbled
to dust. Nearly fifty representative urns and coffins
were saved and sent to Constantinople. One gray slippershaped
coffin
was decorated with " a male figure with sword
and short tunic over a long shirt, four times repeated in as
many panels." Another richly ornamented and blue enamelled
but fragmentary sarcophagus of the same type showed
" six human-headed bulls in two long, narrow panels." By
far the greatest number of the enamelled slipper-shaped
Blue Enamelled Slipper-Shaped Coffin with Conventional Female Figures
coffins were decorated with a conventional female figure, a
pattern seemingly reserved for the burial of women.
The northwest mound of the eastern half of the ruins
yielded a few unbaked tablets of the neo-Babylonian and
Assyrian periods, a stray stamped brick of Dungi, and the
largest uninscribed baked brick hitherto discovered at Nuffar,
measuring no less than 10 inches square. In the upper
strata of the low mounds which lie about midway between
the temple of Bel and the Shatt en-Nil, Haynes unearthed
a peculiar building originally covered
with a dome, " in the
style of the ziarets or holy tombs of India, Persia, and
Turkey." Its ruined walls, which formed a square 32 feet