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The excavations made here by M. de Sarzec have brought to light temples and palaces, collections of clay books and carved stone statues, which go back to the early days of Babylonian history. The larger and better part of the monuments belong to Gudea, who seems to have spent most of his life in building and restoring the sanctuaries of the gods.
The systematic and thorough manner in which De Sarzec, with inexhaustible patience, explored the ancient city, has resulted in largely extending our knowledge of the most ancient period of Babylonian history as yet known to us. The Telloh finds were forwarded to the Louvre, which in this way secured a collection from the south that formed a worthy complement to the Khorsabad antiquities.
And before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago?
Written An-na, without the determinative for deity. De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pl. 37, no. 8. The second element may also be read dar. See Jensen, Keils Bibl. 3, 1, p. 24, note 1. Inscription B, col. ii. 19. See Hommel, Semitische Kulturen, p. 389. For the sacred character of the swine among the Semites, see W. Robertson Smith's The Religion of the Semites, pp. 201, 272, 332, 457.
In Rawlinson, ii. 58, no. 6, there is a list of some seventy names. Rawlinson, ii. 58, no. 6, 58. De Sarzec, pl. 8, col v. ll. 4-6. Keils Bibl. 3, 1, 80, note 3. Rawlinson, iv. 35, no. 2, 1. See a syllabary giving lists of gods, Rawlinson, ii. 60, 12. See Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 476-87. See Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 476-87. Perhaps the knob of a sceptre. Proc. Soc.
Here, we believe, M. de Sarzec is in error; the only refuges against the inflamed breath of the desert were the serdabs, the subterranean chambers with their scanty light and moistened walls, and the dark apartments of Assyrian palaces with their walls of prodigious thickness.
Soc. Bibl. Arch. vi. 279. Jensen, Kosmologie, p. 127, proposes to read Umun-pauddu. Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, i. 2, no. 93. The name also appears in syllabaries as Shul-pa-ud-du-a. For the element pa-udda, see p. 103. Jensen, Kosmologie, pp. 125, 126. See Journal Asiatique, September-October, 1895, p. 393. De Sarzec, pl. 8, col. v. ll. 8-12. IR. pl. 2, no. 4.
I can only mention the names of the Englishmen Taylor and Loftus; of the Frenchmen, Place and De Sarzec; and, later, the Americans, Peters, Hilprecht, and Haynes, who have so faithfully explored the extremely archaic mound of Niffer, which I had the honor to recommend for excavation after I had visited the mounds of Southern Babylonia in the winter of 1884-85.
And yet we are but at the beginning of discoveries. What has been found is but an earnest of the harvest that is yet in store. It is but two years since that the French excavator, de Sarzec, discovered a library of 30,000 tablets at Tello in southern Chaldæa, which had already been formed when Gudea ruled over the city in B.C. 2700, and was arranged in shelves one above the other.
A few fragments of basalt and diorite have certainly been found in their ruins, especially at Tello, recently excavated by M. de Sarzec; but we can easily tell from the appearance of these blocks that they played a very subordinate part in the buildings into which they were introduced.
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