Photograph from Prof. Albert T. Clay 



THE RUINS OF A LIBRARY BUILDING 4,000 YEARS OLD: NIPPUR 



This library yielded to the pick and shovel of the explorer thousands of tablets written 

 in days antedating the era of Abraham. More than seven hundred contract tablets were 

 discovered in one building at a depth of 20 feet below the surface. The great care with 

 which they had been made, the exceptionally pure and soft clay chosen, and the large number 

 of fine seal impressions exhibited by them attracted the attention of the decipherer at once. 

 Upon closer examination, they proved to belong to the business archives of a great Baby- 

 lonian firm, Murashu Sons, bankers and brokers at Nippur, who lived in the time of Arta- 

 xerxes I and Darius II. This banking-house was to the Persian kings what the house of 

 Rothschilds has been to England and that of Morgan to the United States. 



with hepatoscopy and astrology, the two 

 chief systems used by . the Babylonian 

 priest or "inspector" (baru) — that is, 

 they divined the future by the inspection 

 of the liver of the sacrificial animal and 

 by the observation of the starry heavens. 

 The Babylonians, as also many other 

 ancient and in fact even modern nations, 

 believed that the liver represents the seat 

 of the soul ; and since, according to their 

 notions, the soul included the mind as 

 well as the heart, the inspection of the 

 liver in the case of an animal that had 

 become sacred by being offered to a deity 

 furnished a means of ascertaining what 

 the deity himself had in mind to do. 



The observation of the heavens and the 

 interpretation of unusual astronomical 

 and meteorological phenomena also en- 

 abled them to determine the will of the 

 deity. This method of divining seems to 

 have been introduced into Babylonia later 

 than liver divination. 



One of the important results of cunei- 

 form research is the new historical geog- 

 raphy which has been reconstructed with 

 its thousands of data. Hundreds of im- 

 portant cities have been identified among 

 the partially inhabited or wholly deserted 

 ruin hills of western Asia. An inscribed 

 brick or a dated tablet, or perchance an 

 inscribed cylinder found at a particular 



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