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

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 513
the upper strata. From this general result it became evident
that the library doubtless continued to exist in some
form or another at the old site through the last two thousand
years of Babylonian history, but it also followed that
the large mass of tablets was already covered under rubbish
at the close of the third millennium. The period in which
the older library fell into disuse could be fixed even more
accurately. A small jar of baked case tablets dated in the
reigns of members of the first
dynasty of Babylon was unearthed
at a higher level than the body of those ancient
"clay books." This seemed to indicate that the tabletfilled
rooms and corridors beneath it were in ruins before
Hammurabi ascended the throne of Babylon, and, more
than this, that there must have been a sudden break in
the continuity of the history of the
temple library of Nippur.
How can this apparently natural inference be substantiated
by other facts ?
It is
impossible to assume that the burying of those thousands
of tablets was the result of an ordinary though specially
disastrous conflagration. The peculiar condition in
which the larger part of the contents of the library was found
speaks decidedly against it. The tablets occurred in a stratum
from one foot to four feet thick at an average depth of
twenty to twenty-four feet below the surface. They frequently
were badly mutilated and chipped off, and lay in all
possible positions on the floor of the ruined chambers, upon
low fragmentary clay ledges extending along the walls, and
in the rubbish that filled the corridors and open courts of
the vast building. In some of the rooms which produced
especially large numbers of tablets, they were found in clusters,
" interlacing, overlapping, lying flatwise, edgewise, endwise,
two, three, four deep," 1 so that it was very apparent
1
This is the only statement in Haynes' diary which attempts to throw
any light upon the position in which the tablets were found " in one of the
rooms" (Feb. 16, 1900).