220 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 



government. Commerce is already a prime factor in the evolution of Hiiman 

 Brotherhood. Progress towards that ideal may be gauged as well by the price 

 of a banana or a piece of chocolate as by the number of sermons preached on 

 the subject; the sea, is already free, made so mainly by British perseverance 

 in clearing it of pirates ; it only remains to make navigable rivers equally fi^ee, 

 and the opposition comes mainly from those who have talked most loudly about 

 'the freedom of the seas.' But 'the freedom of the seas' does not mean that 

 war is to be removed only from that element on which land power is weak, while 

 the land power may still block access to th^e free sea by the natural avenue— 

 the navigable river. 



The following Papers were then read : — 



1. Three Years ivitli tlio SiafJ and T>rn Moiiihs' Excavation in Meso- 

 potamia. By E. Campbell Thompson, M.A., F.S.A., late 

 Captain, Special Service Officer with Intelligence, G.H.Q. Staff, 

 Mesopotamia. 



The object of the present paper is, first, to describe briefly the result of 

 excavations, particularly at Abu Shahrain, and the examination of certain 

 other ancient mounds in Lower Mesopotamia undertaken in the spring of 

 1918. After three years' service with H.Q. Staff during the war in Meso- 

 potamia, Mr. (then Captain) R. Campbell Thompson was ordered by the War 

 Office, at the instance of the Trustees of the British Museum (who proposed 

 to carry on the ^Museum traditions of excavations in Babylonia as soon as the 

 conditions of war would allow), to conduct these explorations. The present 

 description of these diggings is a resume, of a paper read before the Society 

 of Antiquaries last January (quoted in the Times of January 31), and the 

 author's thanks are due to them for their courtesy in allowing him to repeat 

 the main points of the discoveries described in his paper before their publication 

 of the complete account. 



The district in which these explorations were made is the area to the S.W., 

 S., and iS.E. of Nasiriyah, which lies about 100 miles W.N.W. of Basrah. This 

 area, which may be described as Southern Babylonia, contains the ancient 

 mounds of Ur of the Chaldees (Mnqayyar), Eridu (Abu Shahrain), and several 

 smaller mounds, including Tell-el-Lahm, Tell Tuwaiyil, ]\Iurajib, Abu Rasain, 

 Tell Jabarah, Tell Judaidah, and another unnamed. Test trenches were dug in 

 Ur (Mnqayyar), but the greater part of the digging, lasting nearly a month, 

 was carried on at Abu Shahrain. 



Abu Shahrain lies twenty miles distant from Nasiriyah to the iS.W., out 

 in the desert, and at this time outside the ' protected area,' but fortunately 

 the local Shaikh Hamud of the Dh.nfir was friendly, and on the ninth of April 

 Captain Thompson started for tlie mound, with his Irish orderly, Pte. Thomas 

 HietiinR (one of the old ' Contemptibles '), fiftv Arabs, and the Shaikh. All 

 food, of course, had to be transported thither on camel-back from the nearest 

 station ten miles away ; there were wells within two miles of the mound 

 containing enough water for the expedition, which camped just below the 

 ancient mound. 



This mou7id, Abu Shahrain (the ancient Eridu), has always been held to 

 be one of the most interesting remains in Mesopotamia on account of the 

 tradition of its high antiquity. It rises abruptly out of the flat, saline desert, 

 the top of its slopes being about forty feet above the plain, and the perimeter 

 about 1,100 yards. The ancient zigiirrat, or temple-tower, crowns the N.W. 

 portion, and rises another forty feet or more. The mound had been partly 

 excavated by J. E. Taylor in the middle of last century, but the limitations 

 of archaeological science in those days prevented him from making the most 

 of his discoveries. 



The results of the present excavations are of the greatest importance for the 

 pre-histoi-y of Mesopotamia. Hitherto the two peoples known to have occupied 

 nncient Babylonia about the third millennium B.C. were the Semites (Akkadians) 

 in the north, and the Sumerians in the south. But a quantity of fragments 



