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IV.—The British Museum Excavations at Abu Shahrain in Mesopotamia in 1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

R. Campbell Thompson
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Extract

In March 1918, after the end of my third year of service with the Intelligence of G.H.Q. Staff in Mesopotamia, I was ordered through the War Office to explore archaeologically the region south and south-east of Nasiriyah on the Euphrates on behalf of the British Museum. This district, which lies south of the broad Euphrates marshes, includes several ancient mounds, of which three are of great interest, Abu Shahrain (the ancient Eridu), Muqaiyar (Ur of the Chaldees), and Tell el-Lahm. Previous excavations had been made in this district by J. E. Taylor in the middle of the last century, and described by him, but now that these ancient lands had come within our jurisdiction, the British Museum wished to set further exploration afoot with the possible view of larger undertakings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 70 , 1920 , pp. 101 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1920

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References

page 101 note 1 ‘Notes on the Ruins of Muqeyer,’ a paper by Taylor, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv, 1855, pp. 260–76Google Scholar ; ‘Notes on Abu Shahrein and Tel el Lahm,’ ibid., pp. 404-15.

page 101 note 2 I am greatly indebted to the Trustees of the British Museum for allowing me to publish the results of this expedition, and would here gratefully express my thanks to them and to Sir Frederic Kenyon, K.C.B., D.Litt., the Director of the British Museum.

page 102 note 1 See Appendix V and fig. i.

page 103 note 1 1 After my return home my friend, Dr. H. R. Hall, was sent out by the British Museum to Mesopotamia and made such notable discoveries at El-'Ubaid, near Ur, that Tell el-Lahm fades into insignificance by comparison.

page 105 note 1 Loc. cit., p. 406. Some chambers were discovered by Taylor in the south-east corner, their walls being composed of sun-dried brick, and the floor of beaten clay, resting on a bed of sand. He describes the walls as having been covered with a fine plaster rudely painted with the figure of a man holding a bird on his wrist with a smaller figure near him, in red paint.

page 106 note 1 Taylor gives an incorrect impression by these words which he uses (p. 404).

page 106 note 2 Pinches, , J.R.A.S., 1891, p. 400 ff.Google Scholar

page 106 note 3 I must cry touché to Albright's remark in A.J.S.L., xxxv, 1919, p. 194Google Scholar, that I am ‘guilty of an extraordinary slip in admitting that [the astragalus, with which I had formerly identified kiskanu] might grow in the swamps near Eridu’. Certainly I noticed nothing of the kind near. I might add, for the benefit of those interested, that while at Abu Shahrain I collected the following few plants which Mr. A. B. Rendle, of the Natural History Museum, kindly had identified for me in his department: Fam. Cruciferae: Savignya aegyptiaca and Malcolmia africana, L.; Fam. Plantaginaceae: Plantago ovata, Forsk.; Fam. Compositae: Gymnarrhena micrantha, Desf., and Scorzonera, ? species.

page 107 note 1 The rest of this legend will be found in L. W. King's Babylonian Religion, p. 188; Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, p. 659; and in my forthcoming volume, Semitic Mythology (Marshall Jones Co.) in the series, ‘The Mythology of all Races’.

page 107 note 2 De Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée, p. xxxvii; Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions, p. 19. Possibly this is the period when the early plano-convex bricks discovered by Taylor were made.

page 107 note 3 See King, History of Sutner, p. 148.

page 107 note 4 King, op. cit., p. 166; Thureau-Dangin, op. cit., p. 55.

page 107 note 5 See Thureau-Dangin, Les Cylindres de Goudéa; Les Inscriptions de Sutner et d'Akkad, p. 135.

page 107 note 6 Les Cylindres, p. 7, 1. I.

page 107 note 7 Ibid., 1. 16.

page 107 note 8 Ibid., p. 39, 1. 17.

page 108 note 1 Les Cylindres, p. 45, 11. 15, 16.

page 108 note 2 Ibid., p. 69, 1. 5.

page 108 note 3 Ibid., col. iv, 1. 3.

page 108 note 4 Deimel, Panthéon, p. 201.

page 108 note 5 Paffrath, Gotterlehre, p. 187.

page 108 note 6 Les Cylindres, p. 77, col. viii, 1. 10 ff. Cf. also the ‘Ass of Eridu’, col. ix, 1. 18.

page 108 note 7 Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions, p. 107, col. iv, 1. 7. The ‘pure place’ certainly at times implies the desert: cf. my Semitic Magic, p. 199, and also the Sumerian poem published by Langdon, Le Poeme Sumérien, p. 61, where the home of Enki is described as a ‘pure place’, where, according to one explanation of the lines which follow, there are no creatures.

page 108 note 8 See fig. 6.

page 108 note 9 King, Chronicles of Early Babylonian Kings, vol. ii, p. 11; History of Sumer, p. 282.

page 108 note 10 For his brick-inscription see fig. 6.

page 108 note 11 Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions, p. 336, note 1.

page 108 note 12 For these references see King, History of Babylon, 134, 147; Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions pp. 291, 293.

page 109 note 1 See Prologue to the Code of Hammurabi.

page 109 note 2 It should be noted that unless the provenance is otherwise indicated, the objects were found on the surface. Objects found in the excavations are indicated by the number of trench and pit, followed by the depth in feet.

page 111 note 1 See p. 139, and Mittheil. der Deutsch. Orientgesellsch., Nos. 15, 17.

page 111 note 2 See p. 142.

page 111 note 3 Fig. 4, nos. 2, 3, 4, 7.

page 111 note 4 Fig. 3, no. 4, and fig. 4, no. 10.

page 111 note 5 Fig. 3, no. 3, and fig. 4, no. 8. Cf. the goblet in the hand of the worshipper before a Sumerian deity (from Susa, De Morgan, Dèlèg., i, p. 102).

page 111 note 6 Fig. 4, no. 1.

page 111 note 7 Fig. 4, no. 5, and pl. X, A, 4.

page 111 note 8 Fig. 4, no. 15.

page 111 note 9 Memnon, vol. i, p. 94. He regards this mound as showing prehistoric traces.

page 112 note 1 See Jastrow, Bildermappe, pp. 81 and 84.

page 112 note 2 Of course, spouted pots occur in the earlier ‘geometrical’ types, and some of the spouts picked up, which were crudely painted with a black band, may be intermediate Sumerian.

page 116 note 1 There is a shorter text given in W. A. I., I, 3, xii, 2 and C. T., xxi, 24, said to have come from Abu Shahrain, but I did not notice any of the kind there.

page 117 note 1 A contract from Telloh, written on a plano-convex brick containing the name of the patesi Eannatum (c. 2900), gives us a certain date for this class of brick (Cros, loc. cit., p. 220).

page 118 note 1 I have gone into this subject more fully in my forthcoming book on Semitic Mythology, published by Messrs. Marshall Jones. I must here acknowledge my indebtedness to Messrs. Leroux for permission to reproduce some of De Morgan's illustrations for comparative purposes.

page 119 note 1 I am indebted to Mr. Reginald Smith for this explanation. Many prehistoric objects similar o t these in I-IO were found and duly noted by Taylor, for whose diggings here I rhould like to say that I have the greatest admiration.

page 124 note 1 ‘Very common,’ Deleg., vol. viii, p. 88, fig. 118.

page 124 note 2 Ibid., ‘bored for suspension, and must have been employed as amulets’ I did not notice any bored specimens out of the profuse quantity found at Abu Shahrain. At the same time, the later Sumerians used inscribed clay ‘nails’ as amulets in walls (almost always straight, but cf. one of Gudea, , Déleg., vol. i, p. 314).Google Scholar

page 138 note 1 According to Taylor, loc cit., ‘round the top’ 2,946 yards, and the length 1,056. I paced it round the base. He is right in explaining Muqaiyar as meaning ‘the bitumened’, from the bitumen used as mortar in the zigurrat.