Notes on the Excavations of 1919 at Muqayyar, el-‘Obeid, and Abu Shahrein

Extract

It was before the Eoyal Asiatic Society that seventy years ago (on 8th July, 1854, to be precise) Mr. J. E. Taylor, H.B.M.'s Consul at Basrah in Turkey-in-Asia, read his paper on his excavations for the British Museum at Ur. Nearly a year later, on 5th May, 1855, after a further season's work in the land of the Muntefik, Mr. Taylor read his paper on Eridu and other sites in the neighbourhood. The first paper, “Notes on the Ruins of Mugeyer, by J. E. Taylor, Esq.,” will be found printed on p. 260 ff. of Vol. XV of the Journal, published in 1855; the second paper, “Notes on Abu Shahrein and Tel el Lahm,” on p. 404 ff. of the same volume. Both articles were illustrated by the quaint woodcuts of the time, in which first the draughtsman and then the engraver combined successively to deform the (originally probably rather poor) sketches or notes of the actual observer into something that can have borne but a faint resemblance to the original. One notices this in Taylor's sketch of the ziggurrat of Ur on p. 262, which is of the severely diagrammatic kind, as befits a learned publication. For the florid and romantic style of the period one may turn to the picture of the same ziggurrat opposite p. 129 of Loftus's “Travels and Researches in Chaldeæa and Susiana”, published three years later (reproduced in Plate XII, Fig. 1).