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

530 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
rooms in the course of our next expedition. From the catchlines
and colophons frequently occurring at the end of tablets
we can infer with safety that there were works which
consisted of several " volumes," sometimes even of a whole
They doubtless were kept together on the
series of tablets.
same shelf.
Hundreds of very large crumbling tablets, mostly religious
and mythological in character, have not yet been
•\V. •# v: „ '*W.V > >l
Astronomical Tablet from the Temple Library
deciphered. They need careful repairing before they can
be handled with safety. From a mere glance at Bezold's
" Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection
of the British Museum " 1 (five volumes), we learn
that Ashurbanapal's scribes copied chiefly religious, astronomical
and astrological texts for the royal library in Nineveh
from the originals at Nippur. Representative tablets
of the classes mentioned must therefore have existed at Bel's
temple even in those later days, though the large body of
the earlier library had been buried in
the ruins beneath their
feet for more than fifteen hundred years. With the limited
1
Comp., e. g., K. 7787, K. 8668, K. 10826 ; Sm. 1117 ; 80-7-19,
64 ; Bu. 88-5-12, 1 1, etc.