DISCOVERIES IN MESOPOTAMIA. 541 



feet loiio- tind jihout ?>h feet wide. On it .stood the reninants of u lar<rc 

 saeritieal altai-. mude of bricks and measuring 30 feet square. P>ehind 

 the altar, in the wall of this room, a door opened leading to a smaller 

 room, and Kassam, as a result of experience gained in the Assyrian 

 mound of Balawat. at once surmised that the temple archives had' been 

 here jjreserved. But though at Balawat the corner-stone documents 

 of the builder of the temple were found in a stone chest, nothing 

 similar was here discovered. On the other hand, the asphalt pavement 

 attracted Kassam's attention, and he therefoi'c^ sunk a shaft in the tioor, 

 when, behold, scarcely had he broken through the cement laver when 

 a clay chest appeared containing a beautiful artistically inscribed 

 alabaster tablet, in six columns, decorated at the top with a carefully 

 executed l)as-relief. In this holy of holies a god with a long-tlowing 

 beard, in his hand a ring and short staff, was seated upon a throne 

 decorated with cheru])im. A king followed by two priests approaches 

 the god in adoi-ation, while two other men are raising the sun disk 

 with ropes upon the roof of the holy of holies. Certainly a valuable 

 and admirable tind in itself, but much more so because this document 

 also revealed the name of the building and of the city Avhich was thus 

 rediscovered. "Image of the sun god, the great lord, who dwells in 

 the temple El)a))l)ara in the city of Sippar." Thus reads the explanatory 

 legend of the ])as-relief. One of the oldest Babylonian cities has been 

 found — Sippar, in which Noah-Xisuthros, by the command of the god 

 Kroiios. was ordered to bury the documents of antediluvian times; the 

 sun temple, which since its foundation in the fourth millennium until 

 long after the time of the last Chaldean king, Nabonaid (538 B. C), 

 was the center of worship for Babylonia and the object of concern of 

 all Babylonian kings, was rediscovered. This sun temple in the course 

 of thousands of years, through revenues and donations, came in posses- 

 sion of untold riches in mone}' and land. 



The forty to iifty thousand inscribed tablets that since 1881 have 

 been flowing from Abu Habba as from an inexhaustible source into the 

 occidental museums, above all into the British Museum, give an insight 

 not only into the cult of the sun god and the deities worshiped l)eside 

 him, into the division, oljligations, and prerogatives of the several 

 priest classes, Init also into the system of the temph; revenues and 

 their application. From the temple archives of the sun god is 

 derived a great mass of tablets, which, after the fashion of conuner- 

 cial bookkeeping, record the temple revenues in money and other 

 commodities, the expenses in salaries, wages, etc., and the investment 

 and emplovment of the temple property in loans, real estate, rents, 

 etc. If to these l)e added the numerous so-called contract tablets from 

 Babylonia, Tell Sifr. and other places, with their vaded contents, 

 purchase and sale of slaves, marriage documents, acts of lawsuits 

 testaments, and the letters of the time of Hammurabi or Amraphel 

 SM 1!*00 38 



