1907.] 



HAUPT— JONAH'S WHALE. 157 



For several centuries ivory was known as zchale's bone (not 

 zvhalehone!) . Shakespeare says: To sJiozc his teeth as zi'hite as 

 zvhale's hone} The comparison as zcJiite as z^'hale's bone is pro- 

 verbial in the old poets. Also the very hard (petrosal) parts of the 

 ear-bones of whales resembles ivory, just as the substance of the 

 ear-stones (otoIitJis) of fishes is called brain-ivory. 



In the second column of the obelisk recording the slaying of 

 a sperm-whale in the ^Mediterranean at the hands of Tiglathpileser 

 I (about 1 100 B. c.) Assur-nagir-pal (885-860) states that he placed 

 two blozvers of AD-BAR-stone at the gates of the palaces in the 

 ancient capital of Assyria, Assur; now known as Kileh Shergat^ 

 where the Germans have been conducting excavations during the 

 past four years under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesell- 

 schaft. According to No. 26 of the Mitteilungen of this Society 

 (Berlin, April i, 1905) p. 56, the ideogram ad-bar means basalt, 

 and on p. 53 of the same number the field-director of the German 

 excavations at Kileh Shergat reports that a great many basalt frag- 

 ments of sculptures have been found, but the restoration of the 

 figures has not been accomplished. Assyriologists did not know 

 that nakhiru,^ blower meant spenn-zi'hale. It is not impossible 

 that the two basalt cachalots of Kileh Shergat will eventually be 

 recovered. The general color of a sperm-whale is a very dark 



^ Cf. H. H. Furness' Variorum Shakespeare, Vol. XIV.: Love's 

 Labour's Lost (Philadelphia, 1904) p. 262. 



2 Arab. Kal'at Shergat; see Baedeker's Syrien and Paldstiua (1904) 

 p. 362, 1. 5. 



^Hommel, in his Gescliichte Bahyloniens iind Assyriens (Berlin, 1889) 

 p. 532, deemed it possible that the hlozver which Tiglathpileser I slew in the 

 northeastern part of the Mediterranean w^as a hippopotamus ! English 

 Assyriologists explained ndkhini to mean dolphin. But the blozver must 

 have been an exceptionally large and dangerous animal, and comparatively 

 rare in the Mediterranean; otherwise the slaying of this one animal would 

 not have been especially recorded. It seems to have been regarded as the 

 greatest achievement in Tiglathpileser's venatic record, for this feat is men- 

 tioned first, before the account of Tiglathpileser's hunting of wild oxen, 

 elephants, lions, &c. The hunting of a cachalot is a much more hazardous 

 undertaking than ordinary whaling. When aroused, the sperm-whales are 

 formidable adversaries. They can completely destroy a whaleboat by 

 crunching it with the teeth or striking with the tail, and by using the 

 enormous head as a ram they can sink small vessels like the ships of Arvad 

 on which Tiglathpileser I embarked. 



