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The fire burned the upper wooden walls of the city, and it fell in ruins, but under those ruins, covered by that ashes, were preserved for two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years uninjured, the choicest sculpture and the most precious records of ancient nations, retained beyond the reach of vandal hands, until scholarship had grown wise enough to ask questions of forgotten history, and had sent Layard and Schliemann and De Sarzec and Evans and a hundred other men to dig with their competitive spades.
With the death of M. de Sarzec, which occurred in his sixty-fifth year, on May 31, 1901, the wonderfully successful series of excavations which he had carried out at Telloh was brought to an end. In consequence it was feared at the time that the French diggings on this site might be interrupted for a considerable period.
This very probable and sane explanation has been fully corroborated by subsequent excavations, particularly those that were carried out at Telloh in Southern Babylonia by the late M. de Sarzec.
In the ruins of the ancient royal city recovered by M. de Sarzec at Tello the traces of similar precautions have everywhere been found. In the centre of each cube there was a cavity 27 centimetres long by 12 wide and 35 deep. In each case this hollow contained a small bronze statuette packed, as it were, in an impalpable dust.
De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, pl. 3. On the stele of vultures, the dead are naked. See p. 512. Such sacrifices are pictured on the stele of vultures. IIIR. 43, col. iv. l. 20; Belser, Beiträge zur Assyriologie, ll. 175, 18; Pinches, Babylonian Texts, p. 18. For this custom see Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, p. 25; Peters' Nippur, ii. 202, 203.
In similar tombs discovered by M. de Sarzec at Sirtella, in the same region, a tablet of stone and a bronze statuette, differing in no important particular from those deposited in foundation stones, were found. The texts engraved upon them leave no doubt as to their great antiquity.
M. de Sarzec refers us in his paper to a plan which has not yet been laid before the Academy. We regret very much that its publication should have been so long delayed, as we have been prevented from making as much use as we should have wished of M. de Sarzec's architectural discoveries.
Finally, M. de Sarzec, the French consul at Bassorah, to whom we owe the curious series of Chaldæan objects which have lately increased the riches of the Louvre, was enabled to explore the same region through the friendship of a powerful Arab chief. It is much to be desired that he should give us a complete account of his sojourn and of the searches he carried on.
Now both at Warka and at Mugheir one corner of a building is always turned towards the true north. The same arrangement is to be found in the palace excavated by M. de Sarzec at Tello. Most of the Assyrian architects did likewise. Its circumvallation incloses an almost exact square, the diagonals of which point to the north, south, east and west respectively.
At the foot of the tell he found a copper helmet like those represented on the famous Stele of Vultures discovered by M. de Sarzec, and among the tablets here recovered was one with an inscription of the time of Urukagina, which records the complete destruction of the city of Shirpurla during his reign, and will be described in greater detail later on in this chapter.
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