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

456 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
pletely by this process. Both the ashes and the bones had
afterwards been gathered, and with food and drink placed
in this jar were buried in the sacred ground around the ziggurrat.
The ash-bed unearthed at the northeast side of the
stage-tower represented the place where another body had
been cremated, apparently that of a man, perhaps a warrior,
as the fragments of a sword found in
the ashes suggested.
In the light of this discovery and Haynes' previously
reported pre-Sargonic burial (pp. 403 seq.)> of all the ashbeds
and their characteristic objects, so often mentioned but
completely misunderstood by him, 1 it was a comparatively
easy task for me to trace the outlines of a number of
other urns, though even more injured. I also secured a
good many tolerably well-preserved cups and dishes, or large
fragments of the same, from the debris that filled
the whole
ground from the undisturbed soil deep below the ancient
plain level to the pavement of Naram-Sin, far above the
latter. In short, I gathered sufficient evidence to show that
all these ash-beds occurring in a stratum twenty-five to thirty
feet deep on all the four sides of the ziggurrat are to be
regarded as places where human bodies had been cremated.
The thousands of urns discovered above and below them,
and as a rule badly crushed, but in some cases well preserved,
are funeral vases, in which the ashes and
bones left
by the cremation, together with objects once dear to the person,
besides food and drink, were placed and buried.
The
fragments of unbaked walls and rooms repeatedly met with
in these lowest strata, 2 and always containing whole or broken
urns, are remains of tombs, so-called funeral chambers. The
large number of terra-cotta pipes composed of several (often
perforated) rings, and descending eight, ten, and even more
feet from the surface of the ancient plain and from higher
1
Comp. pp. 402, seqq., 419 above.
2
In two instances the rooms had been vaulted, and were constructed of
baked plano-convex bricks.