244 OLD BABYLONIAN INSCRIPTIONS 



small mound at Tello, 1 by which the true character of our building is determined be- 

 yond question. The French explorer was more fortunate than Mr. Haynes in finding 

 his archive undisturbed, but it will always remain a serious loss to science that the 

 contents of the archive of Tello could not have been saved and kept together. 2 



The vault of Nippur had been robbed by barbarians of the third millennium before 

 Christ, as I infer from the following facts and indications : 



1. Nearly all the objects above referred to were excavated from a well-defined 

 stratum in the neighborhood of this storeroom. From the position in which they were 

 found, from the fact that none, except door-sockets in diorite, were whole, and from the 

 extraordinarily small size of most fragments, it becomes evident that the contents of 

 the archive were broken and scattered intentionally, as previously stated. 



2. Three of the rulers of the dynasty of Isin built at the temple of Nippur, 3 and 

 an inscribed brick of Ur-Ninib was found among the fragments recovered from this 

 stratum. • It is therefore clear that the destruction of the vases, brick stamps, etc., did 

 not antedate Ur-Ninib's government. As no document later than his time has been 

 rescued from this stratum, it is also manifest that the deplorable disaster occurred not 

 too long after the overthrow of his dynasty. 



3. The archive existed however as late as the second dynasty of Ur. For Bur- 

 Sin II wrote his name on an unhewn block of diorite, presented to Bel many centuries 

 before by Lugal-kigub-nidudu, a pre-Sargonic 4 king of Ur and Erech, and turned it into 

 a door-socket for his own shrine in Nippur. That the archive could not have been de- 

 stroyed in the brief interval between Ur-Ninib and Bur-Sin II, so that the latter 

 might have rescued his block from the ruins, results from a study of the general his- 

 tory of that period, however scanty our sources, and of the history of the c\tj of Nip- 

 pur at the time of Ine-Sin, Bur-Sin II and Gimil (Kat)-Sin" in particular. All the 



1 Cf. Heuzey, Revue d' Assyriologie III, pp. 65-68. The description of this archive chamber excavated in Tello 

 may find a place here : *' Ces plaquettes de terre cuite, regulierernent superposees sur cinq ou six rangs d'epaisseur, 

 remplissaient des galeries 6troites, se coupant a angle droit, construites en briques crus et garnies des deux cotes de 

 banquettes, sur lesquelles s'etendaient d'autre couches de semblables monuments. Les galeries formaient deux 

 groupes distincts, mais voisins l'un de l'autre." 



2 The thievish Arabs seem to have scattered their rich harvest everywhere. So far, I have examined about 2000 of 

 these tablets myself. But not less than c. 10,000 have been offered to me for sale by dealers of Asia, Europe and 

 America within the last year. They all come from Tello. Cf. Ililprecht, Recent Research in Bible Lands, p. 80. 



3 Cf. Part I, pp. 27 f. and above, p. 230, note 1. 



4 For the proof of this statement cf. below. 



6 Cf. PI. 13, No. 21, and Part I, "Table of Contents," p. 49. Bur-Sin II repeated only what had been done by 

 Sargon I long before. Cf. Part I, "Table of Contents," p. 47 (No. 1), and below. 



6 That Gimil-Sin was the direct successor of Bur-Sin II follows from PI. 58, No. 127, and that Ine-Sin was the im- 

 mediate predecessor of Bur-Sin was inferred by Scheil from a contract tablet (Recueil XVII, p. 38, note 3). The men- 

 tion of the devastation of Shashru on this Tello tablet is only of secondary importance in itself, as the same event 



