With the exception of the Procession Street and a few streets in other quarters, such as to the south of the Ninib temple, the streets are usually unpaved. Remains of systems of drainage, such as those to the south of the “great house” of Merkes, are rare.
The smaller temples, “Z,” the Ninib temple, and the temple of Ishtar of Agade to the north of our excavations in Merkes, lay in the midst of the bustle of the houses, except that in front of the latter the street widened somewhat on its southern façade.
At the south end of the excavations in Merkes, on the street which broadens at that place, there is a quadrilateral block of mud-brick building, which in default of a better explanation might be regarded as the altar. On three sides it has broad ornamental grooves, and on the west side it has two narrow ones. Similar blocks, which perhaps were built for the same purpose, have been found in Telloh. There they consist of semicircular fillets (de Sarzec, Fouilles de Telloh), of which the elements, though they only project from the main building as semicircles, are in reality built completely round like pillars, for which they have been mistaken. The mouldings in the ruin called Wuswas in Warka are treated in the same way, with this difference, that there the working of one course is semicircular, and the succeeding one is round.
XLIII
THE SMALL OBJECTS, PRINCIPALLY FROM MERKES
Among the small objects, the tablets take the first place. Our predecessors merely turned over the upper layers, the middle and more especially the lower ones were untouched. Of the inscriptions found we shall learn more of the contents when they have been worked through by experts. The most ancient, those of the time of Hammurabi, consist, as do many of the middle and upper levels, of business documents (Fig. [157]). Letters also are frequently found still in the clay cases which, by some, are regarded as the equivalents of our envelopes; if this be right, it is extraordinary to observe how very large a percentage of these letters can never have been opened in ancient days. There were also numerous specimens of omen-literature. According to Weber (Literatur der Babylonier und Assyrer, p. 189), these include “all texts that had for their object the observation and meaning of signs, of whatever nature they might be, which were sent to men by the gods as indications of their wishes, and form perhaps the most extensive group of cuneiform texts that still exists.” To the same class we must certainly ascribe some of our tablets, which bear curious groups of linear scroll-work interspersed with script (Fig. 158). A series of designs on tablets of horses and chariots, fights between wild beasts (Fig. [159]), etc., and some charming reliefs are interesting from an artistic point of view.
Fig. 157.—Tablets of the first dynasty.
Fig. 158.—Labyrinthine lines on a tablet.
When these tablets were found in their original position they were in jars, which appears to have been the usual method of storing tablets that were not too large (Fig. [160]). In Fara, in a room of a house that was destroyed by fire, there was a number of larger tablets lying together in disorder, not on the floor-level but on a heap of rubbish, so that their original storage-place could not be identified with certainty. It appeared that they were lying above the fragments of the ruined ceiling of the room, and that they had fallen from the storey above, or from the roof, on which they may perhaps have been laid out to dry at the time when the house was burnt down.