ower and sanctuaries stood, was a suburb of
the great city of Babylon itself, which lay directly opposite on the
east side of the Euphrates. The scope of the excavations continued to
grow almost from year to year, and while new mounds were being attacked
in the south, those in the north, especially Koujunjik, continued to be
the subject of attention.

Rassam, who has just been mentioned, was in a favorable position,
through his long residence as English consul at Mosul, for extracting
new finds from the mounds in this vicinity. Besides adding more than a
thousand tablets from the royal library discovered by Layard, his most
noteworthy discoveries were the unearthing of a magnificent temple at
Nimrud, and the finding of a large bronze gate at Balawat, a few miles
to the northeast of Nimrud. Rassam and Rawlinson were afterwards joined
by George Smith of the British Museum, who, instituting a further search
through the ruins of Koujunjik, Nimrud, Kalah-Shergat, and elsewhere,
made many valuable additions to the English collections, until his
unfortunate death in 1876, during his third visit to the mounds, cut him
off in the prime of a brilliant and most useful career. The English
explorers extended their labors to the mounds in the south. Here it was,
principally at Abu-Habba, that they set their forces to work. The
finding of another temple dedicated to the sun-god rewarded their
efforts. The foundation records showed that the edifice was one of great
antiquity, which was permitted to fall into decay and was then restored
by a ruler whose date can be fixed at the middle of the ninth century
B.C. The ancient name of the place was shown to be Sippar, and the fame
of the temple was such, that subsequent monarchs vied with one another
in adding to its grandeur. It is estimated that the temple contained no
less than three hundred chambers and halls for the archives and for the
accommodation of the large body of priests attached to this temple. In
the archives many thousands of little clay tablets were again found,
not, however, of a literary, but of a legal character, containing
records of commercial transactions conducted in ancient Sippar, such as
sales of houses, of fields, of produce, of stuffs, money loans,
receipts, contracts for work, marriage settlements, and the like. The
execution of the laws being in the hands of priests in ancient
Mesopotamia, the temples were the natural depositories for the official
documents of