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

466 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
a " house of the tomb(s)." In view of what has just been
stated in the briefest way possible, it will not surprise us
that in the cuneiform literature Ekur sometimes is used as
a synonym of " heaven," ' and sometimes stands in parallelism
with Gigunu and Aralul 1
The tower of Bel at Nippur appears to us as a place of
residence for the gods, as a place of worship for man, and as
a place of rest for the dead — a grand conception for a sanctuary
in the earliest historical period of Babvlonia, which
has continued even to the present time. For the hundreds
and thousands of Christian churches, which contain tombs
within their confines or are surrounded by a graveyard, practically
express the same idea. As to a certain degree most
of the other Babylonian temples were modelled more or less
after the great national sanctuary of Bel at
Nippur, we must
expect, a priori^ that excavations at E!-Hibba, Fara, Larsa,
Muqayyar, and other pre-Sargonic ruins, will likewise disclose
extensive cemeteries around their ziggurrats.
interesting to observe how certain religious
But it is
ideas of the Semitic
conquerors, possibly in connection with considerations
similar to those which led to a transfer of the cemeteries from
the environments of the churches to districts outside the
cities in our own davs, seem finally to have brought about
a radical change of the ancient burial customs in Babylonia.
With regard to Nippur, this change can be traced to about
the period of Sargon I, after whose government no more
burials occur in the sacred precinct of Ekur. As remarked
above, there are comparatively few among the 2500 post-
Sargonic tombs thus far examined at Nuffar that can be
with certainty assigned to the long interval between Sargon
I and the Seleucidan occupation. Nearly all those
reported by Peters and Haynes as being true Babylonian
are Parthian, Sassanian, and Arabic. 3 In fact we do not
1
Comp. ii R. 54, no. 4.
- Comp. iv R. 24, 3-8 ; 2 _ , 26, 27 a.
3
Comp. pp. 154, seq., 233, note 3, above.