NUZI AND THE HURRIANS — PFEIFFER 541 



The method in the disposal of the bodies of these infants cannot 

 be inferred with absolute certainty from the finds. For though it 

 is obvious that the bones, belonging in one instance to as many as 

 11 children, were dry and fleshless when placed inside the urns, the 

 same cannot be asserted with equal assurance for the funerary bowls. 

 It would have been possible to force a corpse immediately after death 

 into one of the bowls and the actual condition of the finds is not 

 inconsistent with this procedure, but it is rather difficult to conceive 

 the presence of such bowls filled with decaying flesh on the floor of 

 an inhabited house. The rooms containing funerary bowls belong 

 to private dwellings, never to the palace or temples, and were not 

 the rooms commonly lived in; they were, however, easily accessible. 

 Nothing indicates that these rooms were domestic shrines. Few of 

 the private dwellings had such mortuary chambers, and hardly any 

 contained more than 1 burial jar; a few houses had 3, one 4, and 

 one, S397, 20. 



The natural assumption that these burials represent infant sacri- 

 fices, nay foundation sacrifices, cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt 

 by means of the available evidence at Nuzi and elsewhere. In 

 Palestine, for instance, the infant jar burials in the foundations of 

 walls at Gezer and Megiddo may have been actual foundation sacri- 

 fices, but there is no literary evidence for this practice, for Joshua 

 6 : 26 and I Kings 16 : 34 are irrelevant in this connection. In any 

 case, numerous other jar burials at Taanach, at Gezer, and at Car- 

 thage, like most of the Nuzi burials, bear no relation whatsoever to 

 the foundations of walls. At Nuzi most of the funerary bowls were 

 placed inside of inhabited houses ; moreover, four Nuzi burial bowls 

 came to light at Kudish Zaghir, where no houses had been erected 

 for centuries. Though foundation sacrifices are unknown at Nuzi, 

 it is not improbable that many of these children were sacrificed, but 

 without the sanction of the official religion. If infant sacrifice were 

 practiced, this barbarous rite probably originated in prehistoric 

 times (for infant jar burials were found, as we have seen, in the 

 aeneolithic levels) , and savored of superstitious magic. It had either 

 an apotropaic purpose (protection from evil influences) or, as the 

 downward opening of the bowls and urns indicates, served as a 

 propitiation to chthonian (i. e., subterranean) deities in the under- 

 world. In any case the spirit of the deceased was to be barred from 

 the land of the living. 



THE TEMPLES 



The excavations in the temple area have brought to light a series 

 of seven sanctuaries, built or restored on the same site, during the 

 period of a millennium (approximately 2500-1500 B. C). The two 



