d other of
the Jewish exiles may perhaps have mingled with the motley crowd that
once thronged the streets of Nippur, and they may often have gazed on
the huge temple-tower which rose above the city's flat roofs. We know
that the later population of Nippur itself included a considerable
Jewish element, for the upper strata of the mounds have yielded numerous
clay bowls with Hebrew, Mandaean, and Syriac magical inscriptions;(4)
and not the least interesting of the objects recovered was the wooden
box of a Jewish scribe, containing his pen and ink-vessel and a little
scrap of crumbling parchment inscribed with a few Hebrew characters.(5)

(1) See Hilprecht, _Explorations in Bible Lands_, pp. 289
ff., 540 ff.; and Fisher, _Excavations at Nippur_, Pt. I
(1905), Pt. II (1906).

(2) Ezek. iii. 15.

(3) Ezek. i. 1, 3; iii. 23; and cf. x. 15, 20, 22, and
xliii. 3.

(4) See J. A. Montgomery, _Aramaic Incantation Texts from
Nippur_, 1913

(5) Hilprecht, _Explorations_, p. 555 f.

Of the many thousands of inscribed clay tablets which were found in
the course of the expeditions, some were kept at Constantinople, while
others were presented by the Sultan Abdul Hamid to the excavators, who
had them conveyed to America. Since that time a large number have been
published. The work was necessarily slow, for many of the texts were
found to be in an extremely bad state of preservation. So it happened
that a great number of the boxes containing tablets remained until
recently still packed up in the store-rooms of the Pennsylvania Museum.
But under the present energetic Director of the Museum, Dr. G. B.
Gordon, the process of arranging and publishing the mass of literary
material has been "speeded up". A staff of skilled workmen has been
employed on the laborious task of cleaning the broken tablets and
fitting the fragments together. At the same time the help of several
Assyriologists was welcomed in the further task of running over and
sorting the collections as they were prepared for study. Professor Clay,
Professor Barton, Dr. Langdon, Dr. Edward Chiera, and Dr. Arno Poebel
have all participated in the work. But the lion's share has fallen to
the last-named scholar, who was given leave of absence by John
Hopkins University in order to take up a temporary appointment at the
Pennsylvania Museum. The result of his labours was published by the
Museum at the end of 1914.(1) The texts thus m