64 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



that ill the ruins of Nippur inscriptions have been found not only 

 of Sargon I. and his successors, but of the d5masty of Ur of the 

 Chaldees. This would go to show that Nippur was subject first to 

 North Babylonia, then to South Babylonia. It was coveted as a 

 possession by the ruling dynasty because of its religious renown 

 and the dwelling place of the great god Bel. 



The first result, then, of even a superficial study of the Baby- 

 lonian monuments is the knowledge that at that period which was 

 long supposed to be the dawn of history a civilization existed in 

 Babylon which indicates clearly that millenniums of development 

 lay behind it. Seventeen centuries before Abraham left Ur of the 

 Chaldees there were scattered over Babylonia not only populous 

 cities, with all their complex human interests, but libraries, canals, 

 works of art and literature of a kind to stagger one in trying to es- 

 timate what length of time must have preceded. Hilprecht's 

 words in reference to a monument erected by Naram-Sin, the son 

 and successor of Sargon I., about 3750 B. C. are worth quoting : 

 " Although the monument is broken and the preserved fragment 

 defaced, yet it shows that the artisans of that very ancient time 

 were skilful in using hammer and chisel on the hardest materials. 

 We are faced with the strange but undeniable fact, which we also 

 find in studying the oldest stone vases and seal cylinders that Baby- 

 lonian art, 4000 B. C, shows a knowledge of human forms, an 

 observation of the laws of art, and a neatness and fineness of exe- 

 cution far beyond the products of later times. The flower of 

 Babylonian art, indeed, is found at the beginning of Babylonian 

 history. In the succeeding millenniums we find here and there a 

 renaissance, but on the whole the art of this entire period disports 

 itself in the grotesque and exaggerated ; it is only the degenerated 

 epigone of a brilliant but bygone time." In this connection it may 

 be noted that Sayc-e and others claim that there was a wealth of 

 literary culture in the islands and coastlands of the Eastern Medi- 

 terranean centuries before Homer told of its departed glories, and 

 that the art of classical Greece in the fifth century B. C. was as 

 much a renaissance as the JJuropean renaissance of the fifteenth 

 pentury, 



