tes, which now lies far to the west. But in
antiquity the stream flowed through the centre of the city, along the
dry bed of the Shatt en-Nil, which divides the mounds into an eastern
and a western group. The latter covers the remains of the city proper
and was occupied in part by the great business-houses and bazaars. Here
more than thirty thousand contracts and accounts, dating from the fourth
millennium to the fifth century B.C., were found in houses along the
former river-bank. In the eastern half of the city was Enlil's great
temple Ekur, with its temple-tower Imkharsag rising in successive stages
beside it. The huge temple-enclosure contained not only the sacrificial
shrines, but also the priests' apartments, store-chambers, and
temple-magazines. Outside its enclosing wall, to the south-west, a large
triangular mound, christened "Tablet Hill" by the excavators, yielded
a further supply of records. In addition to business-documents of the
First Dynasty of Babylon and of the later Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian,
and Persian periods, between two and three thousand literary texts and
fragments were discovered here, many of them dating from the Sumerian
period. And it is possible that some of the early literary texts that
have been published were obtained in other parts of the city.

No less than twenty-one different strata, representing separate periods
of occupation, have been noted by the American excavators at various
levels within the Nippur mounds,(1) the earliest descending to virgin
soil some twenty feet below the present level of the surrounding plain.
The remote date of Nippur's foundation as a city and cult-centre
is attested by the fact that the pavement laid by Naram-Sin in the
south-eastern temple-court lies thirty feet above virgin soil, while
only thirty-six feet of superimposed _debris_ represent the succeeding
millennia of occupation down to Sassanian and early Arab times. In
the period of the Hebrew captivity the city still ranked as a great
commercial market and as one of the most sacred repositories of
Babylonian religious tradition. We know that not far off was Tel-abib,
the seat of one of the colonies of Jewish exiles, for that lay "by the
river of Chebar",(2) which we may identify with the Kabaru Canal in
Nippur's immediate neighbourhood. It was "among the captives by the
river Chebar" that Ezekiel lived and prophesied, and it was on Chebar's
banks that he saw his first vision of the Cherubim.(3) He an