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

574 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
Ottoman Museum.
authorities in
Abu Habba, as was well known to the
Constantinople, proved an especially rich and
almost inexhaustible mine for the illegal traffic. It was
therefore decided to apply the imperial fund to a renewed
examination of the ruins of Sippar, especially as brief but
successful excavations had been conducted there
previously
(1889) by the Civil Cabinet under the control of the governor
of Baghdad. 1
The carrying out of this scientific project
was entrusted to Father Scheil, a young and energetic
French Assyriologist, who had rendered valuable services
to the Stambul museum in
connection with the organization
of the Egyptian and Babylonian sections, and to Bedry Bey,
a well-known Turkish commissioner, who had gained no
small experience in the trenches of Tello and Nuffar. In
the beginning of 1894 this Ottoman commission reached the
place of its destination. Strongly supported by the officials
of the vilayet, and confining their work chiefly to a search
for inscribed monuments, the two men were able to execute
their task satisfactorily in the brief space of two months, at
the end of which their limited means were exhausted. No
complete report of these excavations having yet appeared,
we can only sketch the principal results obtained on the
basis of Scheil's notes published in Maspero's journal, 2 and
1
Most of the antiquities discovered were lost to the museum in Constantinople.
Among the few which were sent are the interesting archaic stone
fragment published in Hilprecht, " Old Babylonian Inscriptions, chiefly from
Nippur," part 1, Philadelphia, 1893,
plates vi-viii (comp. also, Scheil in
Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a P Arch'eologie egyptiennes et
assyriennes, vol. xxii (1900), pp. 29, seqq.), and the brick from a well constructed
by Nebuchadrezzar, published ibidem, part 2, Philadelphia, 1896,
pi. 70.
2
Comp. Recueil de Travaux relatif a la Philologie et a
/' Arch'eologie
egyptiennes et assyriennes, vol. xvi (1894), pp. 90-92, 184, seqq., vol. xvii
(1895), pp. 184, seqq., and the following numbers of the same journal.
According to a communication from Prof. Scheil, a book on his work at Abu
Habba will appear in the course of 1892 in Cairo, under the title Une saison