CHIEFLY PROM XIPPUR. i 



copies made by the hand, and to employ photographs from the objects themselves only 

 occasionally, to enable the Assyriologist to verify the copies and to perceive the 

 archaeological character of the inscribed objects. 



The first volume, whose first part I publish herewith, contains only inscriptions 

 in old Babylonian which have been found on vases, door sockets, stone tablets, votive 

 axes, bricks, stamps, clay cylinders, and similar objects of a monumental character. 

 As the most of them belong to that period of Babylonian history of which our 

 knowledge is very defective, the most painstaking care has been applied to auto- 

 graphically reproducing the originals with the utmost faithfulness. The editor has 

 kept in view, not only the making fresh and important materials accessible to 

 students of Assyriology, but also the doing his part in placing Babylonian paleography 

 on a better foundation. For this end every text has been reproduced in its actual 

 size and form — that is, so as to show all the peculiarities of the scribes, not only as 

 to the dimensions, shape and position of every character and group of such, but also 

 their distance from one another, as was so admirably done by Sir Henry Rawlinson 

 and Edwin Norris in the first volume of The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. 

 The investigations and collections I have made since the year 1883, and my lec- 

 tures regularly held since 1886 on "The Development of Cuneiform Writing in 

 Babylonia and Assyria," have led me to conclude that the size and relative position 

 of individual cuneiform characters, and certain combinations in which they frequently 

 occur, have been a factor of importance in the development of the stereotyped forms 

 of later date. The detailed proof of this I must reserve for the present until more 

 urgent matters have been disposed of. At any rate, careful editions of texts, and 

 a faithful reproduction of the peculiarities of the individual Babylonian scribe, have 

 become a pressing necessity for the progress of Assyriology, if we are to attain in 

 this field anything like the results which Euting has achieved in other departments 

 of Semitic paleography, and which are so necessary in determining the age of frag- 

 mentary and undated inscriptions. In spite of the scantiness of representative old 

 Babylonian texts of which the Assyriologists could make use, it would not have 

 been possible for them to have differed by 500, 1000 or even 2000 years as to the date 

 of inscriptions, if such texts had always been reproduced carefully for their use. 



It is to be expected that the excavations still proceeding at Nuffar will supply 

 the completion of texts here given in fragmentary shape, and that several finds will 

 make their way into various European and American museums by reason of the 

 thievishness of the Arabs employed in them, who also may carry on excavations on 

 their own account.* For this reason I have shown as exactly as possible the fracture 



* Cf. my note in Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie IV, p. 282 seq. Sayce, Records of the Past 2 , Vol. Ill, pp. x, note 

 3, XV. 



