256 



DISCOVERY 



out to carry on the work, Captain Thompson having 

 returned home on leave. Mr. Hall also worked at 

 Shahrein, but devoted most of his attention to Ur and 

 a subsidiary mound, about four miles off, known by 

 the names of Tell el-Ma'abed {" Mound of the Place 

 of \\'orship "), Tell el-'Abd (" Mound of the Slave "), 

 or Tell el-'Obeid ; the last name is that most generally 

 used. It was at Tell el-'Obeid that the chief discovery 

 of the expedition of igi:g was made, in the shape of 

 a small L-shaped building of very early "plano- 

 convex " bricks, apart from which, at the south end, 

 was found a cache of copper figures of the early 



knowledge of ancient Sumerian ' art and to the collec- 

 tion of the British Museum. 



At El-'Obeid, as at Shahrein, much was gleaned 

 from the surface of the desert that is undoubtedly of 

 pre-Sumerian age, consisting of stone objects of various 

 kinds, including flakes and celts of obsidian crystal 

 and chert that are considered to belong to the latest 

 Stone Age or the Chalcolithic period, and fragments of 

 the characteristic prehistoric Babylonian pottery, made 

 before the invention of the quick wheel, and decorated 

 not only with geometrical but also with frankly 

 naturalistic designs (not so stylised as at Susa) in 





Fig. i.-GENER.'U, VIEW OF E-XUN-MAKH, IK : 1953. 

 By courtesy of ihc British Museum. 



Sumerian period (about 3000 B.C.) : lions and small 

 bulls'of copper with bitumen within (like the figure of 

 Bel in the Book of Daniel, that was " brass without 

 and clay within "), a copper relief, 8 ft. long, of a 

 lion-headed eagle (the emblem of the city of Lagash) 

 grasping two stags by their tails, a gold bull's-horn, 

 a stone figure (torso) with a very archaic inscription 

 commemorating a certain Kur-lil, keeper of the granary 

 of the city of Erech, a squatting stone figure (complete), 

 probably of the same person and certainly of the same 

 period (Fig. 3) ; besides various other antiquities, 

 such as pottery, flower-decoration for walls with 

 stone petals fastened by copper wire ; all of the same 

 period, and forming an important addition to our 



black and occasionalh' in red. This pottery is iden- 

 tical with that found by Pezard at Bushire recently, 

 and is related to that discovered by de Morgan at 

 Susa and Tepe Musyan in Persia and that found by 

 Herzfeld at Samarra in 'Irak. It has been described 

 and illustrated by Thompson in his publication of the 

 work of 1918 at Shahrein in Archceologia, vol. Ixx, 

 1920, and by Hall in the Journal of Egyptian Archce- 

 ology, vol. viii, 1922. It is found also at Ur here 

 and there. This style of pottery-decoration of the 

 primitive period is found in Turkestan, at Anau 



1 Tlie Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia is a less known 

 but even earlier civilisation than that of the ancient E9;>ji- 

 tians. 



