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

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 511
were not unfrequently found even in the central part of the
ruins, where they are sometimes accompanied by terra-cotta
drains and wells l
descending far into the lower strata.
Altogether about four hundred tombs, coffins and
burial
urns of different sizes and shapes were opened in the course
of the sixteen weeks during which
excavations were carried
on in "Tablet Hill." The two vaulted brick tombs seen
in the illustration facing this page evidently represented
family vaults, for the one contained six,
the other two skeletons.
Unfortunately both were rifled in ancient times,
since they could easily be reached by robbers, situated, as
they were, directly on a public street, whence a narrow inclined
paved way led to the door of each tomb.
More than four thousand cuneiform tablets had been
discovered in the upper twenty feet of accumulated debris
at Mound IV during our excavations of 1889 and 1890. 2
They included several hundred contract tablets and temple
lists
written at the time of the Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian
rulers (about 700-400 b. a), a few fragments of neo-
Babylonian hymns, letters and syllabaries, a considerable
number of business documents, dated in the reigns of the
kings of the first dynasty of Babylon (about 2300-2100
b. a), and more than twenty-five hundred literary fragments
of the third pre-Christian millennium generally half effaced
or otherwise damaged. I consequently had reached the
conclusion that either there were two distinct libraries buried
in "Tablet Hill," — an earlier more important, and a
comparatively insignificant one
later
lying on the top of the former,
— or the mound concealed the remains of but one
library continuously occupied and repeatedly restored, which
contained documents of many periods in the same rooms.
For apart from other considerations, the lists of Cassite
1
Comp. nos. 4 and 5 on the plan of the " Northeast Portion of the Temple
Library at Nippur," on p. 523, and the illustration facing p. 362, above.
2
Comp. pp. 309, seqq., and 341, seq.