The late Assyrian, neo-Babylonian and Persian periods are also well represented in the enormous accumulation of cuneiform tablets recovered from this site, among the most interesting of which are the “Murashû Tablets,” seven hundred or more of which were unearthed in a ruined building some twenty feet below the surface. The care with which these tablets had been made, and the numerous seal-impressions which they bore, at once attracted Hilprecht’s attention. They proved to belong to the business archives of Murashû Sons, brokers and bankers at Nippur, who flourished in the time of the Persian kings, Artaxerxes I (464-424 B.C.) and Darius II (423-405 B.C.). But apart from ordinary banking business, the firm acted as an agent for the Persian kings. Apparently the kings of Persia were in the habit of farming out the taxes like the Roman emperors of later days, and Murashû Sons undertook to levy the king’s taxes from their Babylonian subjects in Nippur and elsewhere. The interest of these tablets is not however confined to the information which they afford us in regard to the mode of conducting business at that period; but they are of even greater value for the insight which they give us into the ordinary life of the people.
It was during the last expedition that the city-walls were carefully examined, and also those which enclosed the temple-area, the name of the former being Nîmit-Marduk and the name of the latter Imgur-Marduk. Access to the temple was gained by a gate in the southern wall, which was at all events as old as the time of Shar-Gâni-sharri of Agade. The “Abullu Rabu,” the great gate of the city, was situated to the north-east of the Temple; its length is 35 feet, by which we know that that was the thickness of the wall itself, though unfortunately nothing remains of the old city-wall at this point, the crude bricks of which it was composed having been removed and used for building materials in the later Nippur structures. The gateway itself consisted of a central road some 13 feet wide used for ordinary traffic, on either side of which was a raised passage for pedestrians, while the whole structure was built of thumb-marked bricks, and is therefore pre-Sargonic. Under the central roadway a foundation consisting of massive blocks of stone laid in bitumen was discovered. Some distance north of this gate a large part of the old city wall was discovered, belonging in the main to the times of Narâm-Sin and Ur-Engur respectively, the work of the latter king being of course superimposed on that of Narâm-Sin. Traces of some hundred feet of the wall of Narâm-Sin are still visible, and also a water-conduit consisting of baked bricks laid in bitumen. The wall was rebuilt by Ur-Engur, who adorned its outer face with a series of panels 11 feet in width, and placed at intervals of 30 feet, of which some seventeen were found in their original positions; the excavators were unable to ascertain the thickness of the wall, but in one place it was found preserved to the thickness of over 25 feet. Into the inner face of this later wall were built a number of small chambers in which were found relics of varying interest; a description of the later Parthian fortress, and of the little Parthian palace discovered on the other side of the Shatt-en-Nîl Canal, would treat of a period with which this volume does not profess to deal, and the reader must accordingly refer to the standard works of some of the excavators themselves (Peters, Hilprecht or Fisher) for information concerning these later buildings, as also for details regarding all the structures and discoveries at Nippur. Sufficient however has perhaps been recounted to indicate the extraordinary importance with which the American expeditions to Nippur have been fraught, though even to-day we are not in a position to adequately appreciate the full value of the self-sacrificing labours of the excavators, and the ample results with which those labours have been and are daily being attended.
Meanwhile, the Turks themselves, alive to the importance of the monuments and relics recovered from the ruined mounds which ever since Rassam’s departure from Baghdad in 1882 had been exploited with considerable success by the agents of antiquity-dealers, determined to send out an expedition of their own. The expedition was placed under the directorship of Father Scheil, a young French Assyriologist, and Bedri Bey, the Ottoman Inspector of Antiquities, who commenced operations in the spring of 1894 at Abû Habba (Sippar), the site which had been the particular hunting ground of the dealers, and which therefore was calculated to be worth scientifically exploring. The most important result of the expedition was the discovery of about seven hundred tablets, mostly letters or contracts belonging to the time of the first Babylonian dynasty, and especially to the reign of Samsu-iluna, the son and successor of Khammurabi. In 1891 Dr. Wallis Budge excavated the neighbouring mound of Dêr and recovered many texts, etc.; these are now in the British Museum.
On March 26th, 1899, Dr. Koldewey, whose excavations at El-Hibba and Surghul had been more than successful, commenced operations on the Ḳasr mound at Babylon, the mound which marks the site of the world-famed palace of Nebuchadnezzar.
The German excavations at Babylon undertaken by Koldewey, Meissner, Andrae and M. L. Meyer, have not indeed yielded so rich a harvest as was expected from the important part which that city played in the history of the country, from the time of Khammurabi onwards, for Sennacherib’s destruction of the city in 689 B.C. had been carried out with such rigour that little was left to tell the tale of Babylon’s greatness before his time, that little consisting chiefly of contract-tablets belonging to the time of the First Dynasty, and a number of pot-burials belonging to a yet earlier period. But however greatly we must regret the dearth of material yielded by Babylon’s ruined mounds, for the reconstruction of her earlier history, of the period during which she was at the height of her power,—the period of the great king Nebuchadnezzar (604-561 B.C.)—the German excavations have afforded us much valuable information. The Ḳasr mound which was found to conceal the remains of Nebuchadnezzar’s famous palace, the palace in which he lived during the greater part of his reign and the same one in which Alexander the Great died, seems to have been a new suburb of Babylon, and contained nothing earlier than the seventh century. The massive city-wall, which in all was found to be some 136 feet in thickness, was discovered, and the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in part excavated, but the two most important discoveries of the summer of 1899 were a stele of dolerite and a sandstone bas-relief. The stele of dolerite is 4 feet 2 inches high, and on the smooth side of it the figure of a Hittite god is depicted, while the reverse contains a Hittite inscription. The god has his two arms raised and brandishes a trident in one hand, a large hammer in the other, while a sword hangs from his side. A long plait of hair hangs down his back, his head-gear being a Phrygian cap, his footwear the pointed shoes so characteristically Hittite, and his tunic, decorated with a fringe, reaches just to the knees. The second discovery consisted in a sandstone slab rather over 4 feet long and about 4-1/2 feet in height, showing in relief a group of figures of which the two most noteworthy are the god Adad, armed with two flashes of lightning in either hand, and the goddess Ishtar.
In the following year Koldewey was able to give more detailed information regarding the general plan and arrangement of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. The palace contained a great number of rooms, arranged around larger central courts. The walls of the various buildings rest upon a massive foundation composed of bricks and fragments. Upon this foundation-platform a rampart-wall running east to west, over 56 feet thick and pierced with a single gateway, was discovered, while at the corner of this wall, another building, older than the wall itself, was brought to light. This building was made of burnt brick and asphalt, the bricks themselves bearing an Aramaic inscription and a walking lion.
On the east front of the Ḳasr in Babylon the paving-stones of the street are made of white limestone, or red and white breccia, but the only part of the street paving found in its original position is the layer of burnt bricks covered with asphalt which served as a foundation for the stone pavement above. The enormous limestone blocks measure over 3 feet square and about 13-1/2 inches thick. On some of these limestone blocks an inscription was found giving Nebuchadnezzar’s name, and stating that he had paved the Babel street for the procession of the great lord Marduk with “mountain-stone” slabs. The breccia slabs, none of which have been recovered complete, were apparently of more modest dimensions, being only about 26 inches square and 8 inches thick. There is no doubt that these are the paving-stones wherewith Nebuchadnezzar paved the “Processional street of Marduk” the locus of which is now certain. Breccia had been used for building purposes before the time of Nebuchadnezzar: thus we know that Nabopolassar, the founder of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, had used it for paving the processional street, while at the Amran mound a block of breccia was found bearing an inscription of Sennacherib.
The discovery of the processional street of Marduk was of the greatest importance in regard to the topography of ancient Babylon, while the confirmation of the theory held by Delitzsch and others—hitherto based chiefly on inferences drawn from Nebuchadnezzar’s texts—in the identification of Marduk’s temple, E-sagila, with the old Babylonian building concealed within the Amran mound, during the excavations of May 1900, was of even greater moment.
Koldewey was further fortunate enough to discover a temple erected in honour of the goddess Nin-makh (Great Lady), who was at all events in later times identified with Ishtar.[27] The importance of the discovery lay in the completeness of the building, and not in the magnitude of its dimensions, for it is quite small. During the excavation of this temple a well-preserved Assyrian cylinder was found, on which Ashur-bani-pal records that he has newly built Nin-makh’s temple in Babylon, in return for which act of piety he clearly expected a rich reward, for he begs the “sublime Nin-makh to look down compassionately” on his pious deeds, to pronounce his prosperity daily before Bêl and Bêlit, to prescribe a “life of many days as his fate,” and to establish his government firmly.
Another interesting discovery was that of a terra-cotta figure of a naked goddess, doubtless a relic of the Nin-makh-cult (cf. Fig. [86]).