, had been excavating at
Tello, the ancient Lagash, and bringing to light monuments of the
pre-Semitic age, which included the diorite statues of Gudea now in the
Louvre, the stone of which, according to the inscriptions upon them, had
been brought from Magan, the Sinaitic peninsula. The subsequent excavations
of de Sarzec in Tello and its neighbourhood carried the history of the city
back to at least 4000 B.C., and a collection of more than 30,000 tablets
has been found, which were arranged on shelves in the time of Gudea (_c._
2700 B.C.). In 1886-1887 a German expedition under Dr Koldewey explored the
cemetery of El Hibba (immediately to the south of Tello), and for the first
time made us acquainted with the burial customs of ancient Babylonia.
Another German expedition, on a large scale, was despatched by the
_Orientgesellschaft_ in 1899 with the object of exploring the ruins of
Babylon; the palace of Nebuchadrezzar and the great processional road were
laid bare, and Dr W. Andrae subsequently conducted excavations at Qal`at
Sherqat, the site of Assur. Even the Turkish government has not held aloof
from the work of exploration, and the Museum at Constantinople is filled
with the tablets discovered by Dr V. Scheil in 1897 on the site of Sippara.
J. de Morgan's exceptionally important work at Susa lies outside the limits
of Babylonia; not so, however, the American excavations (1903-1904) under
E. J. Banks at Bismya (Udab), and those of the university of Pennsylvania
at Niffer (see NIPPUR) first begun in 1889, where Mr J. H. Haynes has
systematically and patiently uncovered the remains of the great temple of
El-lil, removing layer after layer of debris and cutting sections in the
ruins down to the virgin soil. Midway in the mound is a platform of large
bricks stamped with the names of Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin
(3800 B.C.); as the debris above them is 34 ft. thick, the topmost stratum
being not later than the Parthian era (H. V. Hilprecht, _The Babylonian
Expedition_, i. 2, p. 23), it is calculated that the debris underneath the
pavement, 30 ft. thick, must represent a period of about 3000 years, more
especially as older constructions had to be levelled before the pavement
was laid. In the deepest part of the excavations, however, inscribed clay
tablets and fragments of stone vases are still found, though the cuneiform
characters upon them are of a very archaic type, and sometimes even retain
their primitive pict