اراضي الشرق الادنى

06 '0312_
ABSTRACT
ARCHAEOLOGY IN NEAR EASTERN LANDS
by
Dragomir Obradovid
Chairman: Carl Coffman,
HERITAGE ROOM
James White Library
ANDREWS UNIVERSITY
MI 49104
DigitizedBerrien
by theSprings,
Center for
Adventist Research
ABSTRACT OF GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH

Project
Andrews University
Archaeology 'and Hi story of Antiquity
Title: ARCHAEOLOGY IN NEAR EASTERN LANDS

Name of researcher: Dragomir Obradovid
Name and degree of faculty adviser: William H. Shea, Ph.D.
Date completed: December 1982
Importance of the Study

The following outline and guide for a survey study to
Archaeology in Near Eastern Lands designed for undergraduate students
has grown out of the author's own needs. The area of concentration
has proven to be so vast that it has been felt some outline, which
would break down the massive scope of Near Eastern Archaeology into
teaching units, would facilitate the presentation of the materials of
the course for both student and teacher. It was the purpose of the
Digitized by the Center for Adventist Research
present study to stimulate interest of an undergraduate student in

acquiring basic knowledge of Near Eastern Archaeology.
Methodology
The plan was primarily to examine the general scholarly
literature of the archaeology in Near Eastern lands on a survey basis
in order to establish some kind of text for use in the classroom as
a guide. The major portion of the project, then, involves examination
and analysis of the Mesopotamian area and a brief look at selected
sites in the land of the pharaohs - Egypt.
Division and Scope of the Study

This survey study outline is designed to meet the needs of a
one-semester course, meeting three times a week for a total of three

semester hours of lower division credit.
There is a total of seven chapters of varying length, divided,
for purposes of convenience, into three main sections, each scope
indicated as follows:
Part One - The Origin and Development of Archaeology
Part Two - A Survey of Significant Sites and Finds in
Mesopotamian Area
Part Three - In the Land of Pharaohs
Archaeology in Near Eastern Lands should make the beginning,
rather than the end, of an interest in the subject.
0
S9s
ANDREWS UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
PROJECT
PRESENTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
BY
DRAGOMIR OBRADOVI t
DECEMBER
1982
HERITAGE ROOM
James White Library
ANDREWS UNIVERSITY
Berrien Springs, MI 49104
Copyright 1982, Dragomir Obradovid
O
0
A Project
Presented in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
Dragomir Obradovid
APPROVAL BY:
Chairman: M. rogram
Carl Coffman, Jr.
Date approved
0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION
PART I. THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Chapter
ARCHAEOLOGY - A KEY TO THE PAST . 4
C-)
What is Archaeology?
The Birth of Near Eastern Archaeology
The Discovery of the Archaeological Keys
The Purpose of Archaeology
The Sources of Information
PART II. A STUDY OF SIGNIFICANT SITES AND
FINDS IN MESOPOTAMIAN AREA
MESOPOTAMIA - THE LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS . . . . 12
Civilization Began in Mesopotamia
The Development of Mesopotamian Archaeology
Early Travellers and Diplomats
The First Excavators
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES IN ASSYRIA
22
Archaelogical Sites Individually Considered

Khorsabad
Nimrud
Nineveh
Ashur
Nuzi
Mari
Haran
Carchemish
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES IN BABYLONIA 42
Ur of the Chaldees
Nippur
Uruk
iii
Kish
The Greatness that was Babylon
The City of Babylon
A Brief History of the City
To 605 B.C.
From 605 B.C. to the Present
Herodotus on Babylon
The City: Herodotus and Supporting Data
Conclusion
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES IN PERSIA
71
Ecbatana
Susa '
Pasargade
Persepolis
Behistun
PART III. IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
THE LAND OF THE EGYPTIANS
84
Natural Features and Geography

The Two Egypts
The Egypt of Antiquity
History of Egyptian Archaeology
DISCOVERIES IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS 95
Tell el-Amarna
The Amarna Tablets and the Invasion of Canaan
The Merneptah Stele
Thebes
Aramaic Papyri from Elephantine
APPENDIX
112
120
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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iv
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure
Map
66
The Ruins of Babylon
113
The Rosetta Stone
Darius Inscription at Behistun
114
The Pioneers of Near Eastern Archaeology . 115
116
The Black Obelisk
117
The Merneptah Stele
118
Tell el-Amarna Tablets
British Museum Amarna Tablets . . 119
Mesopotamia
11
Nineveh and Its Environs Seventh Century B.C. . 28
Babylon
52
53
Tablet with Babylonian World Map
Babylon and Its Environs Sixth Century B C 63
83
Ancient Egypt
INTRODUCTION
The interest for the study of archaeology of ancient Near

East has been the desire of the writer for many years. Archaeology
in Near Eastern lands remains a theme of unending fascination. The
ancient Near East teemed with the life of rich and complex
civilizations that show both change and continuity in how people
lived in that part of our planet across a span of several thousand
years. The study of the physical remains and of the innumerable
inscriptions from the ancient Near Eastern world is itself a complex
and many sided task.
The spade of archaeologist has thrown much light on the
ancient past allowing us to reconstruct to a large extent the history
of antiquity. Hundreds of scholars engaged in this field of scientific
endeavor have worked in the ruined cities of the Orient. They have
dug up ruins and towns, deciphered dead languages and scripts,
copied innumerable ancient texts, and written thousands of books and
articles setting forth the results of their archeological work.
Numerous full-length works have dealt with individual
countries or areas, but there is no brief treatment that introduces
the student to archaeological work in the lands of ancient Near
East within the confines of one brief volume.
O
The basic material presented in this study is intended to

furnish a simple and usable text for the instruction of college
students who have had no previous training in archaeology of
ancient Near East.
Archaeology in Near Eastern Lands should mark the
1
beginning, rather than the end, of an interest in the subject.
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PART ONE
THE ORIGINS AND GROW 11-1 OF
r.
ARCHAEOLOGY
CHAPTER I
ARCHAEOLOGY - A KEY TO THE PAST
What is Archaeology?
Like the names of most sciences, the term Archaeology is
derived from the language of the fathers of Western thought, the
ancient Greeks. According to the Century Dictionary, archaeology,
Greek apxaloAoyla (archaios, old, and logos, knowledge or study),
1
is "the science of antiquities," but the term has come to signify
much more than that. It is the scientific study of material remains

of past human life and activities, the study and historical
interpretation of all the material remains that vanished civilizations
have left in the ground, an examination of ancient things men made and
did, in order that their whole way of life may be understood.
Reducing to a single sentence, archaeology may be simply defined as the
systematic study of antiquities as a means of reconstructing the past.
The Birth of Near Eastern Archaeoloa

Near. Eastern Archaeology; in general may be said to have been
born only a little more than a century and a half ago when the
1
Agnes Allen, The Story of Archaeology, (London: Faber and
Faber, 1956), p. 15.
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investigations into the history of this world began in the lands
where the earliest civilizations had flourished - the valley of the

Nile and of the Euphrates and Tigris. Its visible ruins have been
explored, numerous cities, tombs, monuments, temples, and palaces,
buried by the debris and sand of many centuries, have been unearthed.
Strange scripts, used by the ancients, but forgotten for long ages,
have been deciphdred, and long-lost languages recovered. A great
work of excavation and surface exploration has been carried on in
peaceful competition by scholars belonging to many different
countries.
The exploration of the Near East began in Egypt, the land that
has fulfilled the dream of all archaeologists, because it possesses a

great number of impressive ruins above ground, and through its dry
climate has preserved much of the ancient perishable material buried
for many years.
The Discovery of the Archaeological Keys

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, quite apart from its
military and political importance, had important and long-term
consequences for Egyptian archaeology. The invasion force included
120 scholars and artists w-ose purpose was to look at and record
the topography and monuments of Egypt and in this event is a very
clear beginning for Egyptian archaeology.. In 1799 one of Napoleon's
officers, by name Boussard, and quite by chance, unearthed at
Rashid, near Alexandria, a black basalt stone - the stone now famous
as the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stolle, containing a decree issued in honor of king

Ptolemy V in 196 B.C., is inscribed in three languages and scripts,
(1) Hieroglyphic Egyptian, the most ancient form of script used in
Egypt, (2) demotic Egyptian, the people's script that came into use
several centuries before the Christian Eta, and (3) Greek. After this
stone had become known and its hieroglyphics had been published,
scholars in different countries worked on their decipherment.
Several attempts were made by different men, but they did not go
beyond the correct decipherment of a few signs. It was Jean Francois
Champollion (1790-1832) who revealed to an astonished scholarly world
in 1822 that he had succeeded in deciphering the script of the ancient
Egyptians. This trilingual inscription provided the key to the
multitude of hieroglyphic inscriptions on the monuments of ancient
Egypt. When the French withdrew from Egypt in 1801, the collection
fell into British hands and the Rosetta stone and all the other
1
antiquities ended,up in the British Museum in London.
Archaeology's second impetus came in the mid-century, 1835,
when Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, an English officer attached to a
military mission with the Persian army, copied and deciphered another
famous trilingual inscription of a king of Persia, high up on the
Behistun (Bsitun) Rock, near Kermanshah. The inscription itself was
an imperial proclamation of Darius I of Persia (522-486 B.C.), who
employed this method of announcing his victories and achievements to
all the world - a most spectacular and enduring means of publicity.
1
James J. Hester, Introduction to Archaeology (New York:

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 10.
These inscriptions were trilingual, being written in (1) Old Persian,

(2) Elamite, (3) Akkadian (Babylonian). Each was written in cuneiform
characters. Rawlinson copied the Old Persian and Akkadian inscriptions
under very dangerous conditions.
Quite apart from the decipherment, the sheer difficulties of
copying the inscription have become a legend. It is carved in a rock
face 150 meters above the ground and is virtually inaccessible. To
insure that his inscription would not be defeaced by later generations,
Darius evidently had the ascent to the inscription sheared off after
the work was completed. To have produced a complete copy of the
inscription was in itself a very considerable achievement, but by 1846
he was also able to publish a complete translation of it. This newfound key to the language made possible the reading of the great
Assyro-Babylonian monuments and other literary remains of Mesopotamia.
These two great achievements opened up the historical records

and religious literature of the most ancient civilizations, and for
the first time, enabled scholars to throw light on some part of man's
past by the careful piecing together of evidence. From individual
discoveries, archaeologists hope better to understand culture and how
it developed. Sir Leonard Woolley, a brilliant excavator, puts the
matter succintly,
The importance of our archaeological material is that it throws
light on the history of men lik9 ourselves, on a civilization which
is bound up with that of today.
1
C.W. Ceram, The March of Archaeology (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1958), p. 204.
2
Sir Leonar Woolley, Digging up the Past (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1963), p. 15.
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The Purpose of Archaeology
Archaeology today uses all modern scientific methods to
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recover the material remains and meaning of the past, of ancient man
and his environment. In the fullest use of the term, those remains
include all kinds of ancient written documents as well as the objects
of everyday life from epochs and cultures that were without writing.
In endeavoring to reconstruct the past of ancient peoples, the
archaeologist will seek first to understand their environment.
Geographical, geological, and climatic factors will loom large in a
consideration of this nature. He will try to answer such questions as
was their life affected by nearness to great trade routes on land or
sea? Was the nation protected by natural barriers or were they sources
of inconvenience or disunity? Were natural resources abundant or
scarce, and what kinds were available? What bearing did the climate of
the area have upon water supply, clothing, or diet?
Secondly, the archaeologist must find out about the people
themselves. The type of houses they built, the forms of government or
social organization they constructed, the religious practices in which
they engaged, the tools they used, the art they portrayed, and by
interpretation of material finds, the very outlook on life which they
possessed - are all included in a well-rounded discussion of a people
1
of another area.
1
Glyn Daniel, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (New York:

Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968), p. 12.
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The Sources of Information
The archaeologist obtains his information from material
objects left behind by the people of those far-off days. They are to
be found in the ruined towns, graves, and inscriptions of the people.
Among the most significant of the finds in an excavation are
the written records, letters, coins, receipts, census lists, contracts,
and literary pieces. These may be written on stone, broken pottery,
clay tablets, leather or papyrus, parchments, etc. Material like
this has been found in caves, wrapped around mummies, laying about
in ruined buildings, or cast out on a rubbish heap. Inscriptions in
stone are likely to be found anywhere, and they may even consist of
scratches on the rock, painted on the wall of tombs, or marked in

carbon on a coffin or a wall. Although this type of written material
lacks popular appeal, it is possibly the most important of all the
information that can be recovered from an ancient civilization, for
it records the names of people and races and gives detailed information
1
of events, laws, and customs.
1
Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 25.
.
PART TWO
A STUDY OF SIGNIFICANT SITES AND FINDS IN MESOPOTAMEAN AREA
C,,
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,r)
CHAPTER II
MESOPOTAMIA
THE LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS
The word
MeaoTroTapia,
Mesopotamia
is derived from the Greek expression
meaning "the Land Between the Rivers." A term taken
over from the Hebrew plim niN ('cram
naharayim)
meaning high place
of two rivers, the land around and between the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers. James H. Breasted named this region "the Ferile Crescent."
The name Mesopotamia became known in Europe as a result of the
translation of the Bible (Gen. 24:10).
In the language of the Greek historian Polybius (ca. 208-126
B.C.) and of the geographer Strabo (first century A.D.) Mesopotamia
was the land extending southward from the Armenian highlands to modern
1
Baghdad.
In modern use, the name Mesopotamia applies to the entire
Tigris-Euphrates region from the mountains of Kurdistan in the north
and the marshes of the river delta in the south, between the steppes
and deserts in the west and the mountain slopes of Iran in the east.
As early as Sargon I or Naram-Sin ca. 2350 B.C. Lower Mesopotamia was
known as "Sumer and Akkad," Sumer being the territory north of Persian
1
Martin A. Beek, Atlas of Mesopotamia (London: Nelson, 1962),

p. y.
12
13
Gulf, and Akkad being the region around modern Baghdad. Later, when
the city-state of Babylon rose to prominence, Lower Mesopotamia became
known as "Babylonia." Modern Iraq occupies most of the territory of
ancient Mesopotamia, which streched some 1000 km. north and south and
500 km. east and west.
The great Rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, have their sources in
the mountains of Armenia in eastern Turkey, on opposite sides of the
same range of mountains about 30 km. apart. After breaking through
the last hills, the courses differ widely in direction and character.
The Euphrates is on the whole much more quiet and permits navigation
much further upstream. It flows along in majestic dignity, and
receiving many tributaries on its way while still in the mountains,
proceeds first in a westerly direction as though making directly for
the Mediterranean Sea but turns suddenly to the southeast, after which
it receives only a few tributaries until it is joined by the Tigris in
the extreem south. In this lower part of Mesopotamia some 85 km.
south of the present Baghdad, there once stood beside the Euphrates
a city which bore the proud name Bab-ilu.
Although the history of the
lower valley by no means began with this city, Babylon was so prominent
in many later periods that its name is attached permanently to the
region, and plain is known most familiarly as Babylonia.
Quite different is the course of the Tigris. When it leaves
the mountains it flows swiftly east and then southeast parallel to the
Zagros ranges, passing near Nineveh, Calah, and Ashur - all three
capitals of successive Assyrian empire. At one point the rivers are
four hundred and thirty-five kilometers apart, then they converge and
14
near Baghdad flow only forty kilometers apart. Before entering the
Persian. Gulf, the two rivers unite at Kurna, southwest of Basra, and
together pour their waters as one river, Shatt-el-Arab ("Arabic River")
into the Persian Gulf. Both rivers flood annually in the spring. The
Tigris is 1,750 6. long and is about forty meters wide at Baghdad.
The Euphrates meanders over a 2,600 km. path to the Persian Gulf. In
the middle section the river is some two hundred and fifty meters
across.
Through the centuries, both the Tigris and the Euphrates have
changed their courses. Aerial photography helps the modern
archaeologist to trace abandoned riverbeds and to note how great cities
were first bypassed by the river and then abandoned by a people that
1
needed water for subsistence.
Civilization Began in Mesopotamia

Some time before 3,500 B.C. the Age of Civilization began in
the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley, later known as Babylonia. The
southern part of Babylonia - at the head of the gulf - was called
Sumer, whereas the northern part of Babylonia, occupied by the earlier
settlers - around modern Baghdad - was called Akkad.
Sumer and Akkad together did not occupy an extensive territory,
but the fertility of the soil in this region made possible the support
of a large population. The plain was dotted with cities, agriculture,
trade, and industry were thriving, a knowledge of metal-working and
1
Marcel Brion, The World of Archaeology (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1962), p. 111.
15
writing was common, and monumental works of architecture were being

constructed.
In this age the city-state was the largest political division,
and each city-state constituted an independent nation. The principal
cities were Ur, Lagat', Erech (Uruk), Eridu, Nippur, Sippar, Umma, and
Akkad, but there were many others. They were often at war with one
1
another.
At the end of the third millennium B.C. a wave of Semitic
invaders, the Amorites, conquered all of Sumer and Akkad. The most
important of the Amorite kings, the famous Hammurabi (c. 1950 B.C.),
made the city of Babylon his capital, and the old territory of Sumer
and Akkad was henceforth called Babylonia.
Under Hammurabi the civilization of the lower Tigris-Euphrates

Valley reached its peak. Politically, the whole area was unified.
The city of Babylon was not only the capital of this great realm, it
was also a center of cultural life. In the time of Hammurabi the
economic and social structure, technology, art, literature, religion,
intellectual outlook, laws, and the system of writing all were derived
from Sumerian origins. That being the case, these peoples deserve
much archaeological attention to see what yet can be learned about
2
the origins of civilization.
1
David and Joan Oates, The Rise of Civilization (Phaidon:
Elsevier, 1976), pp. 119-121.
2
Glyn Daniel, The First Civilizations: The Archaeology of
Their Origin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), pp. 70-72.
16
The Development of Mesopotamian Archaeology

One of archaeology's finest achievements is the knowledge of
the civilizations that, during the tousand of years, came to birth and
flowered in the lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The first true evidence for work that resembles archaeological
research comes from the city of Ur of the Chaldees in the sixth century
B.C. There, Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, excavated beneath
the temple of Shamash at Sippar and established a museum to house his
collection, which included a foundation stone laid by Naram-Sin, the
son of Sargon of Akkad, almost two thousand years previously.
Mesopotamia is the land of proud cities such as Nineveh,
Babylon and many others. These famous cities of the past have sunk
back into the earth and been buried beneath it, and most of them from
tells - slight humps in the ground barely distinguishable from the
1
surrounding plain.
Early Travellers and Diplomats

These heaps of ruins have attracted the attention of
travellers. One of the first
was
BENJAMIN BAR JONA of Tudela,
learned rabbi, from the kingdom of Navarre in Spain. Leaving home

about A.D. 1160, he travelled through Palestine, visited Mosul
opposite ancient Nineveh, and went southward to the site of Babylon.
1
Andre Parot, Discovering Buried Worlds (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1955), pp. 66-67.
17
He also saw the ruin of Birs Nimrud, ancient Borsippa, and believed
it to be the Tower of Babel.
After Benjamin of Tudela many others visited Mesopotamian
Valley and described what they saw. One of the most important was an
Italian nobleman, PIETRO DELLA VALLE, who visited Babylon in 1616 and
Ur in 1625. He also took away with him some square bricks on which
were writing in certain unknown characters and these, together with
copies of cuneiform inscriptions which he had made at Persepolis, were
of the first examples of cuneiform to reach Europe.
The Danish scholar, CARSTEN NIEBUHR published his account of
his travels in Copenhagen in 1788. He is much more precise in his
statements about Nineveh and Babylon than previous travellers. He
1
also made copies of Persepolis inscriptions in 1765.
The ABBE DE BEUCHAMP, papal vicar-general at Baghdad from
1780 to 1790 was the first to make a proper examination of the
trenches dug by the builders of Hillah in search of Babylonian bricks
collecting them together with other small antiquities which he brought
back to France. His accurate accounts were published in 1785 and
1790 in French.
So the end of the eighteenth century is reached with
Mesopotamia's great heritage of antiquities still safely bosomed in
her mounds, and their history only subject to conventional curiosity
among Europeans. Enthusiasm was particularly great in Britain, and
the East India Company ordered their Resident in Basrah to obtain
1
C.W. Ceram, The March of Archaeology (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1958), p. 180.
18
specimens of the inscribed bricks which the Abbe had seen at Babylon
and to send them, carefully packed, to London.
The first mentioned explorer and surveyor of Babylonian and
Assyrian ruins and rivers was CLAUDIUS JAMES RICH (1787-1820). At the
age of sixteen he became resident of the company in Baghdad. A
gifted liguist Rich possessed an extraordinary gift for Oriental
languages and was fluent in Turkish and Arabic. In his travels through
the region he visited the mound of Hillah (Babylon), Qouyunjiq
(Nineveh), and others. At Qouyunjiq he made some slight excavations,
and recorded many inscriptions. He died of Cholera Morbus, in Shiraz,
October 5, 1821 at the age of thirty-five, but his informative memoirs
on Babylon, Nineveh and other Mesopotamian tells, and the collection
of antiquities he accumulated for the British Museum aroused an

1
interest for excavation in Mesopotamia.
The First Excavators

In 1842 the French government created a vice-consulate at
Mosul on Upper Tigris, opposite the site of ancient Nineveh, and
appointed to the position PAUL EMILE BOTTA (1805-1870), who had served
as French consul at Alexandria in Egypt.
Botta's mission was made in part archaeological. When in
December 1842 he began digging in the mound of Qouyunjiq, the site
of ancient Nineveh, it was the start of the history of excavation in
Mesopotamia. After three months of fruitless digging, in March 1843,
1
C.W. Ceram, Hands on the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1966), p. 223.
19
he transfered his activities to a large mound on the River Khosr
called Khorsabad, twenty-three kilometers to the norhteast. Here he
discovered a palace filled with interesting inscribed bas-reliefs
made of alabaster, as well as a city with its 10-hectare (25-acre)
complex. Under the covers of the palace and under the city gates
were many inscribed cylinders of clay. The site proved to be the
palace and the city of Sargon II (722-705 B.C.), as his new capital.
He named it Dur-Sharukin, or Sargonsburg.
After two successful years,
Botta sent his extensive finds to the Louvre in Paris.

After this important beginning had been made in Mesopotamian
archaeology, there was an imediate outbreak of international rivalry,
1
which did, however, stimulated research.
One of the great British pioneers was AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD
(1817-1894). He began to excavate in 1845 at Nimrud, thirty kilometers
south of Nineveh on the Tigris, the mound of the city which is called
Calah in the Bible (Gen. 10. :12) and Kalhu in Assyrian literature.
Layard's efforts were crowned with success in 1846 when he
found the famous black Obelisk of King Shalmaneser III (859-825 B.C.),
who had erected this stele of victory in his palace to commemorate the
leading military events of his government. Sculpured on all four sides,
it shows twenty small bas-reliefs, and above, below, and between them
210 lines of cuneiform inscription, containing the interesting passage
above the second series of. reliefs,
1
Percy S. Handcock, Mesopotamian Archaeology (London:
Macmillan and Company, 1912), p. 43.
20
"I received the tribute of Jehu, son of Omri, silver, gold, a golden
1
bowl, a golden vase . . . ." He partially explored palaces of
Ashurbanipal I (Sennacherib's grandson), Adadnirari III, and

Esarhaddon at Calah. The excavations of Layard and his successors
also brought to light on this site of Nineveh one of the most
significant finds ever made, Ashurbanipal
library consisting of
his collection of more than 20,000 clay tablets with cuneiform texts.
This library contained every variety of Babylonian and Assyrian
literature, including dictionaries and grammatical exercises, it was
one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made.
His assistant Hormuzd Rassam came back in 1879 for a brief
excavation, at which time he unearthed a large collection of business
documents and the famous Cyrus Cylinder with Cyrus' account of his
conquest of Babylon.
As these excavations progressed, others were stimulated to
make minor explorations. In 1854, Sir Henry C. Rawlinson (1810-1895)
decipherer of cuneiform - examined the great ziggurat at Birs Nimrud
and found some important inscriptions dating to the reign of
Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 B.C.).
Also during this decade the Deutsche Oriental Gesellschaft
(German Oriental Society), had been formed in Berlin for the purpose
of excavation. In 1899 this society began the excavation of the great
1
James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd. ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 281.
2
Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology
(London: Martin Hopkinson and Company, Ltd., 1925), p. 82.
21
mound which covered the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. The
work was committed to the direction of Dr. ROBERT KOLDEWEY (1855-1925),
who carried it steadily forward until the Great War. Koldewey laid
bare on Babylon a number of the great works of king Nebuchadnezzar the magnificient walls with which he surrounded Babylon, and the palace
1
and temples with which he adorned it.
Under Koldewey's general direction, during the season of
1912-13, Dr. JULIUS JORDAN dug at ancient Uruk (Erech) modern Warka,
uncovering much of the great temple of Ishtar, part of the city wall,
many houses, and tablets.
An excavation at Ur, and at Tell el-Obeid was carried by Sir
C}) LEONARD WOOLLEY (1880-1960), who uncovered the temple of the moon-god
- pavements and walls - built by Nebuchadnezzar, and walls and
ziggurat constructed by kings of Ur, also he discovered a deposit
2
of jewerly and a statue of one of the rules of Lagash.
1
Anne Terry White, Lost Worlds: The Romance of Archaeology
(New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 224-227.
2
Charles Burney, The Ancient Near East (Ithaca: Cornell
University, 1977), pp. 86-90.
CHAPTER III
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES IN
ASSYRIA
Assyria is the name of ancient country whose inhabitants were

called Assyrians. The name was variously represented in other
languages. The Hebrew manuscripts give ITN and 11tH, Akkadian assur,
Egyptian 'Iswr, and Phoenician 'sr.
The English spelling is a
transliteration of the Greek 'Aaao6p.

Assyria proper was the country on the upper Tigris in the upper
Mesopotamian plain, bounded on the north and east by Urartu (modern
Armenia), on the west by the Syrian Desert, and on the south by the
1
Jebel Hamrin and Babylonia. The most fertile and densely populated
part of Assyria lay east of the central river Tigris. Assyria was
sometimes applied to those territories which were subject to the
control of its kings dwelling at Nineveh, Assur, and Calah, the
principal cities. At the height of its power, Assyria was for about
300 years (from 933 until shortly before 612 B.C.) the most powerful
nation on the earth. During this time the Assyrian empire covered
2
Media and south Anatolia, Cilicia, Syria, Egypt, Elam and Babylonia.
1
Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London: George Allen and
Unwin Ltd., 1964), pp. 20.21.
2
Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead
Civilization (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 166.
22
23
The Assyrians were Semites like the Babylonians and Arameans,

and spoke the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian, a language closely related
to Babylonian. They also used cuneiform script of the Babylonians
with some local modifications in the shape of characters.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century began the era
of the great expeditions, French, British, American and German. The
French started in 1842 in Nineveh, the British in 1847 in Khorsabad,
the Germans in Ashur from 1902 to 1914, the Americans in Nuzi (1923-34)
and some others.
After almost of 150 years of digging in the soil of Mesopotamia
there is still a lot to be done. The Iraq department of Antiquities
has records of over 6,500 tells in the country, well over 6,000 of
them are waiting the spade of archaeologists. Limits of this paper's
length and writer's time only a few sites have been selected.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES INDIVIDUALLY CONSIDERED
KHORSABAD
Khorsabad ("Town of Khosroes") was known in antiquity as
Dur-Sharukin ("Sargonsburg"), the residence of the Assyrian king
Sargon II (722-705 B.C.), who called the new capital after himself.
The town of Khorsabad was situated about 20 km. northeast of Nineveh,
on the left bank of the little river known as the Khosar which also
flows through Nineveh.
24
The first excavation at Khorsabad was carried by Paul Emile

Botta the French consul at Mosul who attempted excavation at Qouyunjiq
(Kuyunjik, Nineveh). On the first day of his work at Khorsabad he

immediately came upon the remains of walls covered with the large bas
reliefs and cuneiform inscriptions from the palace of Sargon II.
Reliefs from Khorsabad depict Assyrian warriors, including Sargon
himself, with bow and arrow, sword, and club. Khorsabad inscriptions
record the annals of Sargon in which he claimed for the fall of
Samaria and the deportation of its inhabitants. Of this he says,
I besieged and captured, carrying of 27,290 of the people
who dwelt therein. Fifty chariots I gathered from among them,
I caused others to take their portion, .I set my officers over
them and imposed upon them the tribute of the former king.'
In 1929 excavations at Khorsabad were resumed by Edward

Chiera under the auspicies of the Oriental Institute of the University
of Chicago. The remains of Sargon's palace were re-examined and an

important text was discovered known as "King list." This list has
been important in the establishment of the chronology of the Assyrian
monarchs. After Sargon's death in 705 B.C., Senacherib moved the
capital back to Nineveh.
Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 209.
25
NIMRUD
The Akkadian name for Assyrian city founded by Assur, a
follower of Nimrud (Gen. 10:11-12) is Kalhu and in Hebrew is t12 n.
If Sumerian etymology is accepted Ka-fah meaning "Holy Gate" - a
parallel to ka-dingir-ra = bab-ili, "gate of God" - is possible.
In later antiquity the city was known by its present name Nimrud.
Nimrud is located 40 km. south of modern Mosul and ancient
Nineveh on the eastern bank of the river Tigris, at the point where
the Great Zab River joins the Tigris. The Assyrian king
Ashurnasirpal II (884-859 B.C.) states that Calah was built by
Shalmaneser I (1274-1244 B.C.) and subsequently restored by
Ashurnasirpal. The inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II
mention their attacks on Israel and Judah launched from this Assyrian
military capital. Together with Nineveh, Assur, and Khorsabad, Calah
1
was one of four most important cities of Assyria. In 613 B.C. Calah
fell to the Medes and the Babylonians.
Excavations at the site were carried out by Henry Layard, the
pioneer of Asssyrian archaeology, between 1845 and 1850, the British
School of Archaeology in Iraq 1949-63 under the direction of M.E.L.
Mallowan, and the Iraqi government and Polish expeditions 1970-6.
The excavators have uncovered palaces built by Ashurnasirpal III,
1
M.E.L. Mallowan, Twenty-five Years of Mesopotamian Discovery
(London: The British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1956), p. 45.
O
26
Tiglath-pileser III, and Esarhaddon, and temples dedicated to Ninurta

and Nabu.
Layard's most significant discovery may well have been the
Black Obelisk (a kind of victory monument of Shalmaneser III) which
1
originally stood in the main square of Calah. It was a four-sided
pillar of black marble, 1,95 meter high, and tapering at the top. It
had twenty small bas-reliefs - five panels on each side - showing the
subject princes from five different countries bringing tribute to the
king. Above, below, and between the reliefs were 210 lines of
cuneiform inscription which briefly tell the story of the monarch's
achievements in war and peace during the first thirty-one years of
his reign. On the Obelisk Shalmaneser says,
In the eighteenth year of my rule, I crossed the Euphrates

for the sixteenth time.. Hazael of Damascus (Imerisu) put his
trust upon his numerous army and called up his troops in great
number, making the mountain Senir (Sa-ni-ru), a mountain facing
the Lebanon, to his fortress. I fought with him and inflicted
a defeat upon him, killing with the sword 16,000 of his
experienced soldiers. I took away from him 1,121 chariots, 470
riding horses as well as his camp.... I marched as far as
mountains of Ba i li-ra'si which is at the side of the sea and
erected there a stela with my image as king. At that time I
received the tribute of the inhabitants of Tyre, Sidon, and
of Jehu, son of Omri (la-u-a mar Hu-um-ri-i). 2
1
George Smith, Assyrian Discoveries (New York: Scribner,
1975), p. 10.
2
James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 280.
27
Layard realized the value of the Black Obelisk, therefore

carefully packed it and sent it to Rawlinson who carefully copied
all inscriptions, then sent it on to London, where it is now one of
the choicest possessions of the British Museum.
In 1951 Mallowan discovered a banquet stele now in the
Museum of Antiquity of Mosul. The king is depicted surrounded by
the symbols of his gods. The inscription notes the completition of
the palace and its surrounding parks and describes the celebration
banquet. From all parts of the empire guests arrived - 69,574 in
all - to celebrate for ten days. During that time they consumed
2,200 oxen, 16,000 sheep, 10,000 skins of wine, and 10,000 barrels
1
of beer.
NINEVEH
The native name Ninua goes back to an earlier Hittite form
Ninuwa, a rendering of the earlier Sumerian name Nina, a name of the
goddess Ishtar written with a sign depicting a fish inside an

2
enclosure. The ; Greek writers call the city Nlyos, after the legendary
hero by that name. The Hebrew name is
ni.rn
The city was situated on the eastern bank of the Tigris, at

the point where the Khosr joins the river, just opposite modern
Mosul 350 km. northwest of Baghdad.
1
M.E.L. Mallowan, Nimrud and Its Remains, vol. I (New York:

Dodd, Mead and Company, 1966), p. 59.
2
Henry Austen Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, vol. I
(New York: George P. Putnam, 1849), p. 181.
28
O
NINEVEH AND ITS ENVIRONS
(Khorsabod Dur Sharrukin
Tell
Toil
cr
r Bine
Arpochiyo
SEVENTH CENTURY B.C.

0
SCALE IN ENGLISH MILES

1
1/2
.8
KILOMETERS
1 1/2
2.4
1.6
1-16 City gates

16 A shurbanipol's Palace
17 Temple of Nabu
18 Temple of
Ishtar
19 Sennache rib's Palace

Mosul (insert)) is shown f or comparative
size of these two cities.

5 10 15

1
8 16 24
KILOMETERS
Outer
Fortifications
9 To Arbela
\\\
\\\
Modern
15
4111. 4MID
29
The ruins of Nineveh are marked primarily by two large mounds,
Quyunjiq (also spelled Kuyunjik) and Nebi Yunus. Quyunjiq is
unoccupied and the site of most of the archaeological work at Nineveh,
while Nebi Yunus has a village on top, so little excavation can be
done there.
Nineveh always held a place of prominence during the long
history of the many Assyrian dynasties who ruled from it and several
other cities for more than two thousand years. Along with Nimrud and
Ashur it was intermittently the palace-city of Early, Middle, and the
late Assyrian kings: Shalmaneser I (1265-1236 B.C.), Tiglath-pileser I
1116-1078), Adadnirari II (912-892), Tukulti-ninurta II (891-885),
and Ashurnasirpal II (884-860). Its splendour equalled that of Ashur
and of Nimrud and was not outdone by another royal city until Sargon
II (722-706) built by Dur Sharrukin (Khorsabad), an entirely new
1
palace-city. However, Sennacherib (705-682) soon restored it to
first place among Assyrian cities, making it a city of great splendour
and beauty.
The noteworthy successors of Sennacherib at Nineveh were
Esarhaddon (680-669) and his eldest son Ashurbanipal (669-627 B.C.).
Esarhaddon's palace was discovered during the brief excavations of
Layard at Nebi-Yunus. Ashurbanipal conducted many military campaigns
with success but he is remebered mainly for his cultural interests,
particularly for his great library.
John P. Newman, The Thrones and Palaces of Babylon and

(New
York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1876), p. 277.
Nineveh
0
30
The fall of the great city of Nineveh occured in August
612 B.C. The Babylonian Chronicle (known as B.M. 21909) tells how a
combined force of Medes, Babylonians and Scythians laid siege to the
city, which fell as a result of the breaches madelin the defences by
the flooding rivers.
Its spoils were divided among its conquerors.
Assyria with once mighty monarchs in once fabulous cities ceased to

exist.
Excavation was at first undertaken by Paul Emile Botta
(1842-3), but with little success, and he abandoned the site, went to
Khorsabad (16 km. to the north), the ancient Dur-Sharukin, and
excavated Sargon's palace city there, thinking that he had discovered
1
Nineveh. Austen Henry Layard, an Englishmen of Huguenot descent, was
among those whose interest and enthusiasm for Mesopotamian archaeology
had been inspired by Botta. He arrived at Mosul in 1845, sponsored by
a few friends he 'dug at Nimrud, ancient Calah, south of Mosul, along
the Tigris, also thinking that he was digging at old Nineveh. Both
men were mistaken. In the Spring of 1850 Layard and his assistant
Hormuzd Rassam turned their attention to Quyunjiq, to the very spot
that Botta had abandoned just a few years earlier. They made their
most significant find - temples and bas-reliefs from the palaces of
Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, and thousand of clay tablets representing
the library of Ashurbanipal. They originally had been collected by
Sargon and his successors but primarily were the work of Ashurbanipal,
who boasts that he was one of the few literate monarchs of antiquity.
1
Seton Lloyd, Ruined Cities of Iraq (London: Oxford
University Press, 1943), p. 37.
31
The majority of texts were originals collected in Babylonia or copied
1
in Nineveh by skilled scribes. They cover many genres of literature,
among which are the well-known epics of Enuma Elish (Babylonian
Creation account), and of Gilgamesh (Flood account). Legends, rituals,
religious literature of all kinds including hymns, prayers, and lists
of gods and temples, letters, historical texts of many kinds as well
as lexicographical and bilingual documents which have proved of great
use in furthering the understanding both of Akkadians and Sumerians.
The British Museum reopened excavations under G. Smith
(1873-6), E.A.W. Budge (1882-91), L.W. King (1903-5) and R. Cambell
Thompson (1927-32). The Iraqi Government has continued work at the
site (1963, 1966-74). The mound of Nebi Yunus covering the palace
of Esarhaddon has been as yet little excavated because it is still
inhabited.
Nineveh with its many reliefs and inscriptions, has done more
than any other Assyrian site to elucidate the ancient history of
Assyria and Babylonia, while the epics, histories, grammatical and
scientific texts and letters have made Assyrian literature better
known than that of any ancient Semitic peoples except the Hebrews.
Henry S. Robertson, Voices of the Past from Assyria and

Babylonia (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), pp. 1-3.
2
Morris Jastrow, Jr. The Civilization of Babylonia and
Assyria (London: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1915), p. 34.
32
ASHUR
Ashur was an early metropolis and first of the four capitals
of the mighty Assyrian empire. The city gave its name to the country
1
and empire, even as it took its own name from the national god Ashur.
The city of Ashur was located on the western bank of the Tigris above
its junction with the Little Zab River, about 100 km. south of
Nineveh in northern Iraq. Ashur (Tti) is first mentioned by name
on a cuneiform tablet from Nuzi written during the Old Akkadian period
(ca. 2350 B.C.). , Its modern name is Qala'at Sherqat.
The first to excavate there was Austen Henry Layard, who in
1847 discovered on the western side of the mound a life-size black
basalt statue covered on three sides with a cuneiform inscription of
Shamaneser II. In 1853 Hormuzd Rassam uncovered two cylinders of
Tiglath-pileser I (1113-1074 B.C.) which not only told of erection
of the temple 700 years earlier but also told of reconstruction and
repair by himself and the same inscription mentioned the city by name.
The Deutsches Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) under the
direction of Walter Andrae and Robert Koldewey excavated there from
1903 until the outbreak of the World War I in 1914. During those
years the excavators were able to plot the successive layers of the
city and study the plans of its palaces and temples.
Q.;
1
A.T. Olmstead, History of Assyria (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. 1.
0
33
Andrae's excavations at Ashur have revealed to us the nature of

Assyrian law. Two large tablets and a number of fragments dating from
the time of Tigleth-pileser I gave us a corpus of law which is about
one-quarter the length of the better known code of Hammurabi. The
laws themselves may go back to the fifteenth century B.C. The
penalties of the Assyrian code are more severe than those of their
1
Babylonian counterparts.
Among the literary discoveries, the excavators of Ashur
recovered an Assyrian version of the Mesopotamian creation epic.
While the Marduk, the god of Babylon, is exalted in the Enuma Elish
as the supreme diety, the god of Ashur is the hero of the Assyrian
account.
Ashur suffered a fate similar to that of the other capitals
of the Assyrian empire. The city was captured by Cyaxeres the Mede
and Nabopolassar of Babylon in 614 B.C., two years before the fall of
Nineveh.
NUZI
The name is always written in cuneiform as Nu-zi, or Nu-zu-e.
The name Nuzi (Nuzu) was in use during the Hurrian occupation of the
city. In the Old Akkadian period the city bore the name of Gasur.
When the Hurrians took it over they changed its name to Nuzi.
1
Percy S. Handcock, Mesopotamian Archaeology (London:
Macmillan and Company, 1912), pp. 144-147.
34
The remains of this small ancient city in Mesopotamia (Iraq)
were buried in the mound of Yorgan Tepe (also spelled Yorghan Tepe)
about 15 km. west of the modern town of Kirkuk in northern Mesopotamia
.
near the foothills of southern Kurdistan. This city flourished in the

middle centuries of the second Millennium B.C.
Excavation were begun at this city in 1925 by a joint
expedition of the. American School of Oriental Research, the University
Museum (University of Pennsylvania), the Harvard Semitic Museum and the
Iraq Museum. Professor Edward Chiera was the director. In the palace
and private homes more than 5,000 cuneiform tablets were found,
written in a local Hurrian dialect of Akkadian. A smaller number of
tablets of the same type have been found at neighbouring Kirkuk
(ancient Arrapkha) and at Tell er-Rimah (ancient Karana), which lies

1
about 185 km. northwest of Nuzi. The tablets were discovered from
both private ana public archives of the fifteenth and fourteenth
centuries B.C. They are records of transactions of sale, loan,
exchange, marriage, adoption and divorce, legal documents and court
proceedings. In each case they are witnissed and sealed. Some of
them provide records that cover four to five generations of the same
family.
- A large group of documents deal with inheritance.
Throughout the ancient Near East an eldest son received a larger
inheritance share than his brothers, though the exact proportion
varied.
1
Edward Chiera and Ephraim A. Speiser, "A New Factor in

the History of the Ancient East," AASOR 6 (1924):75-90.
35
Women are often entered into the negotiations of the Nuzi

documents. The right of daughter to inherit property is attested,
usually in the absence of sons, as in Babylonian contracts.
Among the Nuzi tablets there are many that relate to adoption.
A childless couple would adopt a free-born person or a slave to care
for them in old days, to provide a proper burial, and, eventually to
inherit the family property. At times a natural son is born to a
couple after they have adopted a child. Nuzi customs anticipated
this eventuality by decreeing that an adopted son would be
1
subordinate to a natural son in such instances.
Apart from adoption, the Nuzi texts mention three further
solutions for a childless marriage. The husband could remarry or
take a concubine or the wife could present her own slave-girl to
her husband.
Cyrus H. Gordon, The Living Past (New York: The John Day
Company, 1941), p. 159.
36
MARI
ki
Akkadian MA-RI- , Sumerian MA-ER.
Inscriptions found
during the excavations at the site of numerous ancient sites of

Mesopotamia bore reference to an important city by the name of Mari.
Its modern name is Te11-Hariri.
The ancient city of Mari has now been identified with Tell
Hariri and is located in southeast Syria near Iraqi border, about
12 km. northwest of Abu Kemal on the right bank of the Euphrates.
In ancient times the river flowed past the edge of the city, but the
mound is now over two kilometers west of the Euphrates. Mari was
the only major city of the middle Euphrates and as such controlled
the trade routes.
The first campaign at Mari was carried by Andre Parrot under
the auspices of the Louvre Museum during the winter months of 1933-34.
Before that Mari was one of the innumerable ghost towns of the Near
East. Excavations at the sites of other ancient cities of Mesopotamia
had yielded inscriptions of various kinds bearing references to the
city of Mari. The old Sumerian King-list preserved the tradition that
Mari was the site of the tenth dynasty of Mesopotamia after the flood,
but of the six kings who reigned 136 years, we have the name of only
one completely preserved, which was found after six campaigns of
excavation at Mari.
1
Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. 102.
37
The most important finds were: an ancient temple dedicated to
Ishtar (goddess of love and war), a ziggurat or temple tower, and the
large royal palace. The palace is one of the finest and certainly the
best preserved of any so far found in the Near East. It boasts 300
rooms, halls, courts and corridors, covering more that six acres.
Besides the private quarters for the royal family, there are
administrative offices, a scribal school, quarters for visiting
dignitaries, a royal chapel, a throne room and a reception chamber.
Mari's most valuable discovery is doubtless the royal
archives. More than 20,000 cuneiform tablets, written in Akkadian
language have been discovered from various rooms of the palace.
They are written in a very beautiful cuneiform script, indicating that
the very best scribes of the day were used in the king's offices, and
that they took pride in their calligraphy. The tablets provide firsthand historical information that Shamshi-adad I of Assyria and
Hammurabi of Babylon were for a time contemporaries.
The majority of documents are economic or administrative in nature,
dealing with the maintainance of the palace, official trade abroad,
and how goods and services were exchanged and the legal traditions
regulating such exchanges. Of a unique character are some of 1300
tablets containing lists of daily provisions for the palace, after
summarized by month. To date, only about 3000 of the Mari tablets
have been published. Their subject matter may be divided into
1
political-diplomatic, economic-administrative, legal, and literary.
1
Leo A. Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 96-110.
38
HARAN
The ancient name of the ancient city of Haran is the same as
its modern name, Haran. Its Hebrew name is
inn and Greek
xappay.
The name appears in Assyrian sources as Harran, in Akkadian as

Har-iranu, which means route, journey, caravan, or street. It may
have received this name because of its location on important ancient

crossroads between Babylonia and Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor.
Therefore it has never passed out of existence or been lost.
Haran was an important commercial center because of its
location. It was situated about 32 km. southeast of Urfa (Edessa),
Turkey, on the river Belikh, one of two tributaries of the Euphrates.
The site is mentioned frequently in cuneiform sources, especially the
Mari texts, during the third to the first Millennia B.C. and appears
1
in Hittite documents as well. Its continuous occupation confirmed
by archaeologists may be due to its strategic position at the crossroads of trade routes going between the major commercial centers of
that part of the world. It is mentioned in the prism inscription of
Tiglath-pileser I. It was a seat of worship of Sin, the moon-god,
from very ancient times. A temple was built there by Shalmaneser I I.
.
Haran rebelled against Assyria and was sacked in 763 B.C. The city
was restored by Sargon II, and the temple repaired and refurnished by
Esarhaddon (675 B.C.) and by Ashurbanipal who was crowned here with
1
Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past (Princeton:

39
the crown of Sin. At the temple repaired by Sargon II the mother of
Nabonidus was made the high pristess, and at the temple restored by
Ashurbanipal the daughter of Nabonidus was made the high pristess.
After the fall of Nineveh (612 B.C.) Haran became the last capital of
Assyria until its capture by Babylonians in 609 B.C.
Excavations begun in 1951 by the joint Anglo-Turkish
Expedition have recovered remains going back to the nineth century
1
B.C. Its modern population is very small but large-scale
excavations at Haran have not yet been possible.
In 1956 D.S. Rice excavated at Haran. The ruins of great
mosque are probably located at the site of the famous moon temple, as
indicated by the discovery of three inscribed stelae of Nabonidus
in this structure.
CARCHEMISH
The Akkadian and Hittite form of the name is Kargamish,
Karkamish, or Gargamish.
The Hebrew name is
ttonn -o,
and in Greek
is xappEls or Kapxaucts. In Egyptian records from Thutmose III in

the 18th Dynasty to that of Ramses III in the 20th Dynasty the name
is attested as Krkmsh.
Some sources suggest that the name means
"forth of the god Kemosh." The earliest occurence of the name is
in
an adjectival form, namely, Kar-Kamishu, occurs on Babylonian

tablets of the first dynasty, assuring us that Carchemish existed as
a city at least as early as 2,000 B.C. Its modern name is Jerablus.
1
W.F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity

(Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1942), p. 179.
40
Carchemish (Jerablus), an important Syro-Hittite city is

situated on the right bank of the upper Euphrates River about 100 km.
northeast of Aleppo, was for more than a thousand years the dominant
1
city of the upper Euphrates. The city came under Hittite influence,
and after the fall of Hittite empire (1200 B.C. ) became the most
.
important of the Hittite city-states, the Assyrians even regarded it

as the Hittite capital. In 609 B.C. Neco II of Egypt moved via
Megiddo to recapture the city, which was made a base from which his
army harassed the Babylonians. But 605 B.C. was a decisive year in
ancient Near Eastern history. Nebuchadnezzar II, crown prince of the
Neo-Babylonian empire, became commander-in-chief of the Babylonian
armies. His own court records detail subsequent events of that year
on the tablets of the Neo-Babylonian Chronicle (British Museum
Tablet no. 21946). In May-June of 605 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar II and his
C2)
Babylonian army fell upon the city in a surprise attack and utterly
defeated the Egyptians pursuing them to Hamath. Thereafter the city
2
declined rapidly.
Excavations were caried out at Carchemish for the British
Museum from 1876 to 1879 under the direction of Sir C.L. Woolley and
by T.E. Lawrence from 1912 to 1914 with great success. These have
brought to light many Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions and
sculptured monuments. One of the cuneiform inscriptions found in the
1
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, Carchemish, vol. I

(Oxford: The University Press, 1914), pp. 17-19.
2
D.J. Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldean Kings (626-556 B.C.)
in the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1956),
p. 25.
41
excavations containing the name Karkamis confirms the identification

1
of the ruins with Carchemish.
Excavations in 1912 and 1914 uncovered Hittite sculptures, a
lower palace area with an open palace (Bit-hilani), and evidence of
the battle and later Babylonian occupation.
The importance of Carchemish during and just after the
Amarna Age is becoming clarified by the royal Hittite archives found
at Ugarit. These texts show that for many administrational purposes,
vassal kingdoms in Syria (such as Ugarit) were subject to Carchemish
within the Hittite imperial system.
H.G. Guterbock, "Carchemish"

13 (1954):110.
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
41
excavations containing the name Karkamis confirms the identification

1
of the ruins with Carchemish.
Excavations in 1912 and 1914 uncovered Hittite sculptures, a
lower palace area with an open palace (Bit-hilani), and evidence of
the battle and later Babylonian occupation.
The importance of Carchemish during and just after the
Amarna Age is becoming clarified by the royal Hittite archives found
at Ugarit. These texts show that for many administrational purposes,
vassal kingdoms in Syria (such as Ugarit) were subject to Carchemish
within the Hittite imperial system.
H.G. Guterbock, "Carchemish" Journal of Near Eastern Studies

13 (1954):110.
CHAPTER IV
BABYLONIA
Babylonia took its name from its capital city of Babylon.

It was also called Shinar in the Bible (Gen. 10:10) and later, "the
Land of the Chaldeans" or "Chaldea," a term used for the whole century
after the rise of the "Chaldean" dynasty. In earlier antiquity it
bore the name of Akkad.
This small flat country of Babylonia covered the territory of
about 20,000 square km. in southern Mesopotamia (modern south Iraq)
and was bounded on the east by the Persian (Elamite) hills, to the
west by Syrian desert, and to the south by the Persian Gulf. The
principal sites of Babylon, Warka, (Uruk or Erech), Nippur, Ur, Eridu
1
and Lagash, were all located on or near the Euphrates.
The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, from the time when their
liguistic affinities become clear, are referred to successively as
Sumerians, Babylonians, Hurrians, and Chaldeans. Apart from them a
series of invaders are known, such as the Guti, the Amorites, and the
Kassites, who succeeded at one' time or another in ruling over parts of
Mesopotamia.
1
Georges Contenau, Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria
(London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1954), p. 27.
42
43
The first recorded inhabitants of this region, Sumerians,

spoke the language that shows no affinities with any other known
language, ancient or modern. Several local Semitic dialects appear
from about 2800 B.C., the most influental being the Old Babylonian,
which became the diplomatic Lingua Franca of the whole ancient Near
East. With the rise of the Chaldeans about 626 B.C. Aramaic was
clearly influencing the local Neo-Babylonian dialect. The Babylonian
dialect continued in use, with the cuneiform script for religious
1
purposes at Babylon, until the first century A.D. It was in this
region where civilization began. They were the first to develop the
city-state, writing, and law codes, the use of the wheel and much more.
The history of Babylonia is a very interesting one and it will
be discussed together with the history of the greatest city that once
was - Babylon. In order to comprehend the rise of Sumerian culture
better, we shall first turn uor attention to Nippur.
NIPPUR
Nippur, modern Niffar, is an ancient Mesopotamian city situated
150 km. south of Baghdad or 75 km. southeast of Babylon. The sections
of the ancient city were divided by Shatt-en-Nil (River Chebar).
Cuneiform tablets found at Nippar from the time of Artaxerxes I mention
this river by the name naru Kabaru, meaning "great river." It was
actually a cannal that branched off from the Euphrates near Babylon
and rejoined the main river near Uruk. The city was founded by the
1
H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon (New York:
The New American Library, 1968), pp. 52-56.
44
"Ubaid" people about 4000 B.C. Nippur was cultural and religious
center and one of the most important cities of the ancient Sumerians.
Here was the seat of Enlil, the chief god in the Sumerian pantheon,
and his temple the E-kur, the "Mountain House," was the leading
1
shrine of Sumer. In fact the Sumerian signs with which the name is
ki
written, EN.L11, , mean simply the "place of Enlil." As late as the
7th century B.C., Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, restored the temple
of Enlil.
Excavations were conducted in Nippur by American expeditions
in 1890, 1893-96, 1899-1900 and every other year from 1949 through
1958.
In the autumn of 1949, the Americans resumed their excavations
in Nippur. On the site where the temple to Enlil has stood, they
found the remains of five temples, one built on the top of the other,
all built to the same ground plan. Here, on the most sacred spot in
the whole of Sumer, it was obvious that nothing might be altered but
only restored. In the shrine of supreme god, Enlil, stood the throne
from which the kingship derived its authority.
Excavators found some 30-40,000 tablets and fragments at
Nippur, and about 4,000 of these were inscribed with Sumerian works.
With the decline of Sumerian power, however, Nippur lost its prestige
and by the time of Hammurabi, Babylon became the dominanant city in
Mesopotamia.
1
Thomas Fish, "The Sumerian city Nippur in the Period of the
Third Dinasty of Ur," Iraq 5 (1938), p. 157.
45
On the eastern side of the river the excavators found the

great temple area, ziggurat, or stage tower erected by the king of Ur.
One of the clay tablets from Nippur contains a map of the city, dated
1
to 1500 B.C. A small temple dedicated to unknown deity was also
discovered as well as large temple dedicated to the goddess Inanna
(Semitic Ishtar), and the houses of the scribal quarter of the city,
on the western banks of the river. Among the most important finds are
the votive inscriptions on vases, bowls, bricks, brick stamps, door
sockets, and tablets - all invaluable for the political history of
Sumer.
UR OF THE CHALDEES
The Assyrian-Babylonian name of Ur is uri and comes from
Sumerian urim.
Ur is an ancient city in Lower Mesopotamia (present
Iraq), called "Ur of the Chaldees" in the Bible (Hebrew 1:0"Tttn Inn
'Ur kasdim.
The main mound, called Tell el-Mugaiyar, meaning
"Mound of the Pitch," in the Arabic. Located in lower Iraq about 240
' km. southeast of old Babylon and about 240 km. northwest of the
Persian Gulf. The city was an important seat of the moon god sin,
and a center of culture, learning, and trade. Some of the kings
ruled over the whole country of the two rivers from this city.
Modern exploration of Ur began with the visit of W.K. Loftus
in 1850, on his way to Warka. In 1854 J.E. Taylor uncovered the
ziggurat and found cylinders of baked clay with cuneiform inscriptions
1
Percy S. Handcock, Mesopotamian Archaeology (London:.
Macmillan and Company, 1912), p. 76.
46
2
which demostrated that Tell el-Muclaiyar was truly Ur. The work on
the ziggurat spread over many years.
The major excavator of Ur was Sir Leonard Woolley, who began
series of excavations in 1922. One of Woolley's fascinating
discoveries was evidence of a tremendous flood. He believes that
twenty-five centimeter layer of clean clay, deposited by a great flood
is the evidence of the great flood described in the ancient Sumerians
and Babylonians, and in the Bible. The flood that deposited the
twenty-five centimeter of clay on Ur, destroyed not only this city but
all others of that country as well as the whole world and that its
records in the old Mesopotamian literature from the basis of the Bible
2
story as found in the book of Genesis.
Twelve full seasons of work were dedicated to the site
between 1922 and 1934. Although much'of the old city still remains
untouched, systematic excavation was carried out in the most strategic
areas. The bulk of the work concerned the sacred area, harbors, city
walls, palaces, cemetries, and scatered residental areas. Deep
soundings were made in the royal cemetery and other areas to examine
3
the stratigraphy.
The great ziggurat of Ur, which became a prototype for the
1 H.F.W. Saggs, "Ur of the Chaldees: A Problem of

Identification," Iraq 22 (1960):200.
2
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, Excavations at Ur (London:
Ernest Benn Limited, 1955), pp. 26-28.
3
Hans Baumann, In the Land of Ur (New York: Pantheon Books,
1969), pp. 71-73.
47
construction of later Mesopotamian temple towers, cuneiform tablets
found in the schools, bills of lading, invoices, court cases, and
tax records, demonstrate the prosperity and social and economic
advancement of the community in the city of Ur.
URUK
An ancient city of Mesopotamia known to the Sumerians as
k k k
and to the ancient Akkadians as Uruk, and to
UNU (g), URU , IRI
,
the Hebrews as 1Th, and to the Greeks as opcX and to the modern
Arabs as Warka.
It was one of the largest and most important cities
of Sumerian times.
The city is located about 6 km. east of the present course of
the Euphrates, 55 km. north of Tell el-Obeid, 65 km. northwest of
Ur and 240 km. south of Baghdad. It is now in the heart of a desert
region almost exactly in the middle of the land of Sumer.
Excavations show that the city has been one of the earliest
in the Mesopotamian valley. It is named in the Sumerian king list as
the seat of the second dynasty after the flood, one of whose kings
was Gilgamesh, who later became one of the great heroes of Sumerian
legend. Though the city continued in occupation during later periods,
it never surpassed its early importance. Its ruins, almost 10 km. in
circumference, compare in importance with those of Babylon. The
antiquity of the city is attested by (1) the number of names the city
bears in the inscriptions, (2) the mention of the city in a nonSemitic creation story, and (3) reference in Strabo, Ptolemy, and
Pliny. Uruk's chief deity was An, in earliest days was the king of
48
the Sumerian Pantheon. But Uruk's most beloved and celebrated deity
was the ambitious and agressive goddess of love, Inanna. According to
the Sumerian mythographers, it was Inanna who brought the "divine laws"
1
the ME's, from Eridu to Uruk, to make it Sumer's leading city.
Inanna, according to the theologians, married the god Dumuzi, to ensure
the fertility and prosperity of Sumer.
Earliest exploration of the site started in 1850 with W.K.
2
Loftus, but scientific excavations began at Uruk in 1912 by the
German Orient Society (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft) expeditions under
the direction of Julius Jordan. Interupted by World War I and II the
work resumed in 1928-39 and 1954-60. The results are of outstanding
3
importance for the early history of Mesopotamia. The excavated
area yielded, in addition to the temples, the remains of the buildings,

city walls, ten kilometers in circumference and two ziggurats, from
the late fourth and early third Millennia B.C. The Mesopotamian
ziggurat is first found at Uruk. From the same general period came
many seals and seal impressions and number of cuneiform clay tablets
inscribed in a crude pictographic script, which is evidently the direct
forerunner of the cuneiform syllabary which was used throughout the
Fertile Crescent until Persian time. These were Uruk's greatest
contributions to the history of civilization.
1
Robert North, "Status of the Warka Excavation," Orientalia 26

(1957) :185-187.
2
Seton Lloyd, Foundations in the Dust (London: Oxford
University Press, 1949), p. 147.
3
Andrae Walter, "The Story of Uruk," Antiquity 10 (1936):109.
49
KISH
Kish, Hebrew
and Greek Kis, is the name of a city-state
located about 20 km. southeast of Babylon where, according to Sumerian

king list, the first dynasty after the flood ruled. To modern Arabs
the site of ancient Kish is known as Tell el-Ukheimer (also spelled
Uhaimir) because of the red color of the soil. After crossing the
Shatt en-Nil cannal one approaches the ruins of Kish. Once it
extended over an area of about 15 square kilometers, into eastern and
western Kish by the River Euphrates and was considered as one of the
largest and most important cities of Sumer and Akkad.
Historically Kish was in the ascendancy from about 3200 to
3000 B.C. and it was a rival to Uruk. The legendary Etana was a
ruler of Kish. In the story of Gilgamesh and Agga we are told that
1
Agga of Kish presented an ultimatum to Gilgamesh of Uruk.
In 1914 a French expedition under direction of H. de
Genouillac excavated Kish, discovering ziggurat and a temple. Work
was stopped during World War I but resumed in 1923 under a joint
expedition sponsored by Oxford University (Ashmolean Museum) and the
Field Museum of Chicago from 1922 to 1933. The scientific director
of excavation was Stephen Langdon, professor of Assyriology at
Oxford, with his colleagues, E. Mackay and L.C. Watelin serving as
field directors. The excavation has been regarded as one of the
1
Sidney Smith, Early History of Assyria (New York: E.P.

Dutton and Company, 1927), p. 31.
50
outstanding romances of archaeology - "laborious in detail but
1
magnificient in planning and achievement."
The ancient ruins of Kish consist of two parts lying on either
side of an ancient river bed of the Euphrates, now dry. In the two
parts of the city there are three ziggurats, and in both are mounds
and towers representing huge temple areas.
The earlier site was at eastern Kish, and it is here that the
most complete excavations have been made. This eastern part of the
city is both larger and more impressive than the western. Its Sumerian
name means "The Mountain of the World." It has a huge cemetery, an
extensive temple area with two great towers, two ziggurats, and a
2
great palace of the early Sumerian kings.
The great ziggurat of Tell el-Ukheimer stands in western Kish.
The city walls, which many identify with the outer defences of Babylon
and which Nebuchadnezzar claims to have made, are so extensive and come
so close to Babylon, that even Herodotus appears to have confused them
with the walls of Babylon proper. At Kish the excavators found a well
preserved Babylonian temple of about 550 B.C., begun by Nebuchadnezzar
and continued by Nabonidus, but still unfinished. They also found a
bone stylus, which for the first time showed how cuneiform characters
were produced, along with boards of cuneiform tablets and other
objects of interest.
1
Sir J.A. Hammerton, Wonders of the Past (New York: Wise and
Company, 1941), p. 413.
2
Henry Field, The Field Museum - Oxford University Expedition
to Kish, Mesopotamia 1923-1929 (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural
History, 1929), p. 3.
THE GREATNESS THAT WAS BABYLON
The City of Babylon

The name of Babylon has a magic ring in the ears of every
student of archaeology and ancient history. Its Hebrew name is "nn,
and Greek BaINAwv.
These are renderings of the Babylonian Bab-ili,
plural Bab-ilani, which in turn translates the earlier Sumerian name

Ka-dingir-ra, "gate of god." The Egyptians wrote the name B-bi-r,
(=Bbr or Bbl) and the Achaemenids Old Persian Babirush.
Other common
names for the city in the Babylonian texts are Tin-tir(ki), "life of
the trees," explained by them as "seat of life" and eki "place of
1
canals.'!
Babylon is situated on the River Euphrates in central
Mesopotamia (in the land of Shinar, Gen. 10:10) some 75 km. south of
Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The city stood in the center of a
magnificient plantation of palms and was provided with a permanent
water supply. Moreover, it enjoyed an exceptionally favorable
situation on the trade route and main highway from the Persian Gulf to
the Mediterranean. Its general situation in Babylonia has never been
in dispute. The precise site now is marked by the ruin-mounds of
Babil, Qasr, Merkes and Homera and the modern village
of Jumjummah about ten kilometers northeast of the town of Hillah.
Albert Champdor, Babylon (London: Elek Books, 1958), p. 125.

AOVENTIST
SEWAGE CENTER
51
Jame White LIINetv

4NOREWS UNIVENSErf
52
O
53
Tablet with Babylonian World Map
0
54
On an old map of the world incised on a clay tablet now in the

British Museum (tablet No. 92687), Babylon quite naturally is placed
1
at the center of the universe.
A Brief History of the City

To 605 B.C.
In the Akkadian story of the creation, Babylon was built in
the beginning of time by the lesser celestial deities, as a dwellingplace for the great gods. When the work was completed there was great
rejoicing, and Marduk, creator and Lord of heaven and Earth, addressed
the assembled gods:. "This is Babylon, the place that is your home,
2
(places)."
its
broad
make merry in its precints, occupy
The archaeological evidence does not take us further back in
the history of the city than about 1800 B.C. due to the high water
table on the site.
The earliest mention of Babylon dates to the Akkad period
(ca. 2500 B.C.) and occurs in the date formula of king Shar-kaliSharri which commemorates the construction of temples to the goddess
Anunitum and the god Aba in Ka-dingir-ra-ki. Both this and Babylonian
tradition affirm the city's ancient origin. The area surrounding the
city, particularly that southward to the Persian Gulf, has commonly
been called Babylonia, deriving its name from the city.
1
E. Unger, Babylon: Die heilige Stadt nach der Bescheribung
der Babylonier (Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter and Company, 1970),
p. 89.
2
J.B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton:
55
The foremost period in the city's history prior to 605 B.C.

developed when the Ur III kings appointed governors over the city.
The Amorite invasion then led to the founding of the first (Semitic)
Dynasty of Babylon under Sumu-Abum (1894 B.C.) who restored the city
walls. Under Hammurabi, the best known king of the dynasty, sixth in
this line (1792-1750 B.C.), and his successors, the town was enlarged
and it flourished as capital of their realm until its overthrow by
the Hittites about 1595 B.C. (The famous Law Code named after
Hammurabi was discovered in Susa in 1902 where it had been carried in
1160 B.C. by Shutruck-nanhunte, an Elamite king, following a victory
over Babylon. It was in Esagila, the great temple of the city, that
Hammurabi set up the copy of his laws as a report to Marduk of his
stewardship as king. The political importance of Babylon was lost
after the fall of that dynasty, but Babylon continued to be highly
respected as a cultural and religious center of the ancient world.
During the time of the Assyrian empire it became a vassal kingdom of
that empire but frequently rebelled against the yoke of its overlords
Assyria became actively involved in Babylonian politics through the

intervention of Shalmaneser III in the 9th century B.C. A succession
of rules and intrigues followed, until the death of Ashurbanipal in
627 B.C. According to the contemporary Babylonian Chronicle (which is
now in British Museum), Babylon regained its independence during the
last years of Ashurbanipal. Kandalanu died in 627 B.C. leaving the
decline of the Assyrians and enabling Nabopolasar, a Chaldean, to
recover the city and establish a new dynasty, and to assume the kingship
in November of 626 B.C. In 614 B.C. the Medes joined the Chaldean
56
alliance and with this added strength Nabopolassar captured

Nineveh in the moth of Ab (August) in 612 B.C. and so the great
1
empire of Assyria was ended.
Thus began the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which was to last less
than a century, but leave an indelible imprint upon the world,
particularly the Jewish people.
From 605 B.C. to the Present

The Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar
was the golden age for Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, Nabopolassar's son,
became Neo-Babylonian's most famous king. He was in charge of an
army in one of the most decisive battles of the ancient world faught
at Carchemish in May-June 605 B.C. There, Nebuchadnezzar inflicted a
terrible defeat on Pharaoh Neco of Egypt, crushing Neco's hopes of
extending Egyptian influence eastward, and sending Neo-Babylonian
power to a zenith it retained for the next seventy-five years, when it
declined as quickly. James Mcqueen describes the fury of the
Babylonian assult,
Nebuchadnezzar took them completely by surprise when in late
May or June he crossed the river near Carchemish. The Babylonian
forces were inside the city before Egyptian resistance could be
organized, and bitter hand to hand fighting took place in the
streets as well as in the country round about. The city was set
on fire during the struggle and the Egyptian army was annihilated.
Isolated groups which fled before the battle really began were
pursued to the south. Some were destroyed in the area of Hamath
on the Orontes while the others managed to reach the coast before
1
D.J. Wiseman, Chronicles of. Chaldean Kings (London:
The Trustees of the British Museum, 1956), p. 9.
O
57
being overtaken. Not a man escaped Nebuchadnezzar's fury.

Jehoiakim, the new king of Judah, who had been a humble
vassal of Egypt, was quick to transfer his allegiance to the
Babylonian king and offer him hostages, one of whom may have
been the prophet Daniel. By August, Nebuchadnezzar had reached
the borders of Egypt.l
Excavations at Carchemish show how stubbornly the city was

defended until it was finally set on fire.
The historian Josephus records the outcome in a sinlge
sentence, "So the king of Babylon passed over Euphrates and took
2
all Syria, as far as Pelusium and all of Hatti land.
When Nebuchadnezzar learned of the death of his father in
Babylon he hastened home and secured the throne, on the same day,
the first day of Elul (6th/7th September) 605 B.C.
Nebuchadnezzar is even better known as a great builder than
as a great military leader. He strongly fortified his capital city
of Babylon, and so made one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
He is portrayed as saying, "Is this not great Babylon, that I have
built. . . ?" (Dan. 4:30). This is a most fitting description of the
3
glory he could claim for himself.
His successors were unable to maintain the empire. The last

king of Babylonia was Nabonidus who assumed the throne in 556 B.C.
1
James G. Macqueen, Babylon (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,

1965), p. 140.
2
D.J. Wiseman, Chronicle of Chaldean Kings (London:
The Trustees of the British Museum, 1956), p. 18.
3
Leonard W. King, A History of Babylon (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1919), p. 279.
58
His son Belshazzar (Bel-shar-sar-usur) for a period of time ruled
as co-regent in Babylon. The book of Daniel, incidentally, contains
an interesting reflection of this co-regency of Nabonidus and
Belshazzar. In the epizode regarding the handwriting on the wall,
Belshazzar is reported as saying that if Daniel could interpret the
writing he would make Daniel "third ruler in the kingdom" )Dan. 5:16).
This is a clear implication that there were two rulers already.
The surrender of Babylon to Cyrus marks the end of the city's
greatness. In the eyar 539 B.C., Cyrus the Persian conquered the city
without a battle and did not destroy it. How was this strong, well
fortified place taken? The Greek writers Herodotus and Xenophon give
an interesting account: Cyrus diverted the waters of the Euphrates
River into an artificial lake some miles upstream from Babylon,

allowing the Persian forces to follow the river bed into the city.
Walls along the river also protected the city, though these were not
usually so strongly guarded as the outer fortification system.
Moreover, at the time of Cyrus' entry, gates along the river had been
left open (how often this was done, we do not know). Cyrus' troops,
of course, found easy access to the city.
The city maintained its dominant position under the
Persian rulers, and when the Persian Empire in its turn fell to
Alexander the Great on October 1, 331 B.C. Babylon again offered no
resistance, but received the conqueror with open arms. A few years
later, Alexander, following his return from the east, began massive
reconstruction projects in the city. Though the site of Esagila was
cleared, work ceased on Alexander's death in Babylon on June 13, 323.
59
Following the division of his empire (caused by struggles among his
generals), and the founding of the new capital city at Seleucia on the
River Tigris increased the decline of the ancient metropolis. Large
numbers of the inhabitants moved to the new capital, and the city once
again fell into disrepair and ruins, although, according to cuneiform
texts, the temple of Bel continued in existence at least until A.D. 75.
Such was a history of the city from which envoys and
ambassadors came from many foreign countries, the cultural and
religious center of a great nation - a city full of palaces, temples,
great business houses, and military establishments. Once many
thousands lived here, the streets were filled with merchants,
craftsmen, soldiers, and officials, and from numerous temples rose the
1
smoke of incence.
Now the vast area of what was once Babylon is a land of
light-brown heaps of rubbish, sand, and bricks, the monotony of which
is broken only by the date palms and the places of excavation.
Herodotus on Babylon
The most important, as well as the earliest, of the descriptions
given by classical authors is that of the Greek traveller and historian
Herodotus, who visited Babylon about the middle of the fifth century
B.C., when the city was still largely as it had been before the
Persian conquest. Herodotus is called "the father of history."
1
H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon (New York:

The American Library, 1968), p. 282.
60
He has preserved for posterity many historical and geographical facts

that would have been forever lost if his versatile pen had not put them
in writing. For centuries he was almost the only sorce for a knowledge
of the cultural and religious conditions of ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia.
We are here concerned with Herodotus' description of ancient
Babylon. He claims to have visited Mesopotamia, and therefore his
statements have frequently been considered as those of an eyewitness.
Despite his uncritical acceptance of measurements given by his
Babylonian guides, Herodotus gives a surprisingly accurate account.
He says,
The city of Babylon is situated on a large plain. It is

square in shape, and each side is fourteen miles long, so
that the complete circuit is fifty-six miles. It is built
like no other city known to the Greeks. A wide deep moat
full of water runs round it, and inside the moat is a wall
330 feet high and 86 feet thick. I must tell you where the
earth was used when it was taken from the moat, and how the
wall was built. As they were digging the moat they formed
the mud which was brought out of the excavations into
bricks, and when they had moulded a sufficient number of
bricks, they baked them in kilns. With these bricks they
built the banks of the moat, and after that the wall itself,
using hot bitumen for mortar and inserting red-mats every
thirty rows to strengthen it. Along the edges on top of the
wall they put one-roomed buildings facing each other, with
sufficient space between them for a four-horse chariot to
turn round. There are a hundred gates in the wall, all made
of bronze with posts and lintels of the same material. The
Euphrates, a wide, swift and deep river which rises in
Armenia and flows into the Persian Gulf, runs through the
city, dividing it into two parts. The wall runs down to the
river on either side, and the ends are joined by fortifications
of baked bricks along each bank of the river. The city itself
contains many houses three or four storeys high, and all the
streets are straight, some running parallel to the river and
some at right angles to it. At the end of each street which
runs down to the river there is a gate made of bronze in the
wall to give access to the river.
61
These walls form the city's outer defence. Inside them

there is another wall, narrower than the first but almost as
strong. In each half of the city there is a fortified building;
on one side of the river there is the royal palace with its
great defensive wall, and on the other side is the temple of
Bel, the Babylonian Zeus. This is an enclosure a quarter of
a mile square, with bronze gates, and was still in existence
when I visited Babylon. In the middle of the enclosure is a
solid square tower with its sides more than two hundred yards
long. On top of it there is another tower, and another on top
of that, and so on up to eight stages. The staircase to the
upper storeys runs spirally round the outside, and about
halfway up there is a platform with seats where people going
up can rest. On the top storey there is a large temple in
which there is a great couch covered with fine draperies, with
a table of gold alongside it.
There is another temple in the sacred enclosure at
Babylon. It is a ground level, and contains a large seated
figure of Bel, made of Gold. The base of the statue, the
throne on which it sits, and the great table alongside are
also golden. The Babylonians told me it took more than
eighteen tons of gold to make them.
As the river divides the city in two, anyone who wanted
to cross from one to the other had at first to go by boat,
and this must have caused a good deal of inconvenience.
Queen Nitocris however found an answer to this. When she was
altering the course of the Euphrates upstream from Babylon
so as to improve the defences of the city, she made use of
these operations to bridge the river and add to her own fame.
She had long blocks of stone cut, and when they were ready
and the basin for the river had been dug, she diverted its
waters into the basin. While this was filling, the old
river bed became dry, and Nitocris used bricks baked in the
same way as had been done for the walls to build embankments
on either side of the river it ran through the city, and
ramps leading to them from the gates that opened on to the
river. At the same time she used the stone blocks which
had been prepared to build piers for a bridge at the city
center, binding the stones together with iron and lead.
On these piers she laid squared timbers over which the
inhabitants were alowed to cross during the day. At night
however the timbers were removed to stop people crossing
in the dark and commiting burgiaries. 1
1
George Rawlinson, trans., The History of Herodotus
(New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1941), pp. 66.67.
62
The description given by Herodotus conveys well enough

the impression made by Babylon on Greeks who worked and travelled in
the orient. It was one of vast size, enormous wealth and magnificient
buildings. Post-classical visitors found only a desolate wildreness,
but despite this the site of the city was not forgotten, and from time
to time western travellers brought back information about the place,
most of it picturesque rather than accurate. In the early nineteenth
century interest in the antiquities of the Middle East took a more
scientific turn, and small excavations of Babylon were undertaken by
J. de Beuchamp 1784, C.J. Rich (1811, 1812, 1821), A.H. Layard 1850,
J. Oppert 1852-1854, and H. Rassam 1878-1889.
It was not until 1898 that a full scale, systematic, and
scientific exploration of Ancient Babylon was undertaken by the
German Oriental Society (Deutsche Oriental Gesellschaft, Berlin)
under the direction of Prof. Robert Koldewey, an architect who was
assisted by a group of distinguished collegues, most of them architects.
They started their work on the site on March 26, 1899. These
archaeologists worked without interruption, summer and winter, for
eighteen years. The excavation was forced to close in 1917 because
of the World War I when the British advanced into Mesopotamia. One of
the main aims of German expedition was to reveal the buildings of
the city, and not simply to search for texts and museum objects.
Since Koldewey's time only only minor excavation has been done at the
site, by Heinrich Lenzen 1955-1956, and the Iraqi Department of
Antiquities has carried on the work of restoration in recent years so
that the modern traveler can appreciate by means of the impressive
63
BABYLON
AND ITS ENVIRONS
SCALE lee ENGLISH MILES

2 4 6 8
10
SIXTH CENTURY B.C.
'p Bobil .
0
Kish
Modern Ir iaotion Canals
ACCORDING TO ECKHARD UNGER,
L."
BABYLON; DIE HE/LIGE STADT
e Euphrates n she* e present bed.

ayng chanced ors course tear Bakst.
!sod Somppa Lmes ..... duse from NM
;t , are modem wneartems catch. deubt
' less sands. to /merge, catch

mi.
1/14 1/42 314
0 .4
1.2 1.6
KILOMETERS
llorsippo
(Sirs
Nimrud)
Key to Temples
A temple of the feta Year's Feuti
Temple
3.2 64 06 128 16
KILOMETERS
of fiinosooh
C Temple of Befit Pisa

Temple of Adod
Temple of Shomeft
F Temple of littler of Akkod
Efemenonki flemple foor)
Temple of Mord sok
1 Temple of Gehl
Temple Of Miner to
Not lh
Cisode
Morduk
Gott
MOAT
Mod Gott
Urges
Get.
O
64
ruins the grandeur of Babylon of old. And so the greatness that

was Babylon's has partially been revealed by the archaeologist's
1
spade.
The city: Herodotus and Supporting Data

What are the facts now, after has the spade of archaeologist
2
has laid bare this great city of antiquity? Herodotus describes the
city as being square. The excavations show that the city before
Nebuchadnezzar's time had been almost square, its walls being about
one mile long on every side. This old city was the part of
Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon that is called Inner City. In Nebuchadnezzar's
time the city became the capital of a far-flung empire, and needed
enlargement. A new section was built on the western bank of the
Euphrates. This new quarter was connected with the old city by a
bridge resting on eight piers which were discovered in the excavations.
Nebuchadnezzar also built a new palace far in the north of the old
city, the so called Summer Palace. He had a great outer wall
constructed, which included this palace and added much new space to
the city.
Herodotus describes the city as being of massive proportions
and with outer walls some 330 feet high by 85 feet deep. That Babylon
was truly extensive in area is known but not quite of the size
Ibid. p. 66.
2
Ibid. p. 67.
65
Herodotus describes. Comenting Herodotus' description of the city

walls, Koldewey writes,
Generally speaking, the measurements given are not in
accordance with those actually preserved, while the general
description, on the contrary, is usually accurate . . . .
We can get no clue from the ruins as to the height of walls
or towers, as only the lower parts remain. 1
It is, however, almost impossible that a wall twenty-six

feet thick should have reached a height of 330 feet. Neither an
ancient nor a modern example of a city wall is known where the
proportion of the height to the thickness is 12 to 1.
Herodotus also informs us that the silt (mud) from the
digging of the moats was used for making fired bricks. These were
then employed in the wall construction. This can only be partially
true, since the walls were not entirely constructed of such brick, a
time-consuming and expensive manufacturing process. Let us again
hear what the great excavator of Babylon has to say,
Herodotus describes the wall of Babylon as built of burnt
brick. To an observer from without it would appear as such,
as only the top of the inner mud wall could be seen from
outside.
The walls of Babylon were to a great extent merely ridges of

earth, bricked up for support and additional strength. This was
indeed a common construction technique for a variety of structures
requiring a broad foundation and great height. Often, unfired bricks
1
Robert Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon (London:

Macmillan and Company, 1914), pp.3-4.
2
Ibid., p.3.
13(11)11011.
Ibulel reconstruction of
Mc Procession ii
/cooling to the Ishtar gale
! Babylon.
67
(formed, sundried mixtures) constituted the core of such solid

structures. In time, particularly after violent destruction, such
materials lost their shape and it is sometimes difficult to determine
if a core was of brick, or merely heaped up earth braced with brick.
Either way, the walls would have been massive, if not of the size given
by Herodotus.
Nebuchadnezzar records the completition of his outer defensive
system with evident satisfaction. The most important passage occurs
in his inscription (Steinplatten) col. 7 1.22-25:
That no assault should reach Imgur-Bel, the wall of Babylon,
I did, what no earlier king had done. . . . I caused a mighty
wall to be built on the east side of Babylon. I dug out its
moat, and I built a scarp with bitumen and bricks . . . . In
order that the enemy who devised (?) evil should not press on
the flanks of Babylon, I surrounded it with mighty floods. .
I piled up an earthen embarkment by it, and encompassed it
with quay walls of burnt brick. The bulwark I fortified
cunningly and made the city of Babylon into a fortress. 1
Herodotus noted that the streets of the city were for the
most part straight. This was confirmed by excavation. The streets
were laid out in a straight criss-crossing pattern in order to bisect
the city, establish well-defined districts and provide easy access
from one area to another. With the tightly packed buildings and
moats which also besected the city, these formed additional strategic
defenses, requiring an attacker to engage in fierce, close-quarters
combat once the outer defenses were breached.
Ibid. pp. 5-6.
O
63 .
1
Herodotus' account of the fall of the city in 539 B.C. is
straight-forward and certainly based upon facts current and available
to him. The River Euphrates ran north to the south on the west side
of the ancient city and provided a natuaral division when the new city
was built. Never very deep and varying seasonably in width, it would
have been no problem to divert, even though great effort would have
been required. The drainage areas and ancient canals are, for the
most part, unrecovered. Whether the city fell through such a stratagem,
or by intrigue, is not yet finally known, but the account of Herodotus
is entirely plausible. His comment that those at the interior of
the city were engaged in a festival and did not know what had occured
until some time after the city was penetrated is also in keeping with
biblical account of a great feast given by Belshazzar on the night the

city fell (Daniel 5:30.31).
Conclusions
While neither perfect, nor absolutely accurate in detail,
Herodotus' account of Babylon has nontheless proven relatively correct.
What are then the reasons for his description of the height of
the ancient walls, and the size of the city? When Herodotus visited
Babylon, the city lay in ruins, having been destroyed by Xerxes after
a serious revolt against his rule. Temples, palaces, and all
fortifications were at that time thoroughly demolished, so Herodotus
1
George Rawlinson, trans., The History of Herodotus (New York:
Tudor Publishing Company, 1941), pp. 71.72.
69
at the time of his visit had to depend on oral information regarding

the former state of affairs, the appearance of buildings, and the
size of the city and walls. Since he , did not speak the Babylonian
language, but was dependent on a Greek-speaking guide, he may, owing
to translation difficulties, have received some wrong information,
though some of his inaccurate statements may have been the result of
a faulty memory.
We do not know at what time the information Herodotus received
in Babylon was written down. If this was done long after his return
to Greece, when some impressions had become hazy, it can easily be
explained how he made the mistakes concerning the size of Babylon
and walls. However, his description of the city has in many respects
1
proved to be reasonably accurate and reliable.
Although ancient Babylon did not have the fantastic size it
seemed to have had according to Herodotus' description, its size was
nevertheless formidable in a time when cities were very small
according to our modern standards. Concerning this Dr. S. Horn
states,
Babylon's circumference of ten miles compares favorably
with the seven-and-one-half-mile circumference of Nineveh,
the capital of Assyria's empire; or the four miles of the
walls of Athens at the height of its history in the fifth
century. This comparison with other famous cities of
antiquity shows that Babylon was the largest and greatest
of all ancient capitals, though it was much smaller than
the classical writers wanted us to believe it had been.
We can understand why Nebuchadnezzar felt that he could
rightly boast to have built 'this great Babylon ... by the
might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty . 1
1
S.H. Horn, The Spade Confirms the Book, 2nd ed.

(Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publ. Ass., 1980), p. 41.
70
Herodotus' statement that he did visit Babylon is in

conjuction with remarks concerning trade and culture and seems, in
view of his degree of accuracy on such matters to be truthful.
,
Although his statements on canals and walls cannot as yet be wholly

verified, they too appear to be more than a little correct. It
would be not wise to take Herodotus at whole face value on the
subject, but neither does he deserve to be discounted or considered
an entirely second-hand source. He is valuable contribution to our
knowledge of the city of Babylon.
CHAPTER V
PERSIA
In Old Persian a term Parsa was used for both Persia and
Persians. Elamite word is Par-sin, Akkadian Pa-ar-sa, while in
Hebrew and Aramaic is
tnn
(Paras), late Egyptian Pars, and in
Greek is nepafa. The name Iran was instituted by Reza Pahlavi

(1925-41). It is derived from Avestan Ariyana.
The term Persia and
Persians refer to the empires of various duration and territorial

1
expanse.
Persia is one of the most interesting and colorful countries
of the Near East. In the larger sense, Persia is situated between the
Caspean Sea and west Turkistan in the north, the Persian Gulf and the
Gulf of Oman in the south, the lower and middle Indus Basin in the
southeast, and Mesopotamia in the southwest. Persopolis and Pasargade
were the chief cities.
The Indo-European Persian language was written in a cuneiform
script composed of 51 simple syllabic signs but this was restricted to
imperial monuments almost exclusively. The imperial chancery used
Aramaic language and characters for official communications through
the Empire, the foreign office, not so much at home. Translations
1
Donald N. Wilber, Iran: Past and Present (Princeton:
71
72
were made into local tongues. The earliest traditions of the Persian
people are recorded in the sacred book, the tend-Avesta.
The earliest
recorded kings ruled from Anshan, northwest of Susa now identified

1
as Tepe Mahijan.
Persian history actually begins with Cyrus the Great (553-530
B.C.). He rebuilt and enlarged the capital of Pasargade, from this
and the two capitals Ecbatana and Shushan, ruled over his vast
territory. In this mast empire there was instituted a system of
justice, and a notework of roads over which relays of riders raced
along night and day carrying government dispatches and royal mail in
"pony express" style. By 540 B.C. he was sufficiently strong to
attack Babylonia. After several battles he entered Babylon in triumph
on October 29, 539 B.C. and thus became the founder of an empire that
2
was greater than any that had previously existed. In 530 B.C.
Cyrus was buried in a colonnaded tomb at Pasargade, and was succeeded
by his son Cambyses II who died violently in 522 B.C. on his way home
from Egypt where he organized Nile Valley into a strong Persian
satrapy.
Darius I (522-486 B.C.), a distant relative, claimed kingship
and restored the order and reunited the country. He recorded his
exploits on the famous Behistun rock carving described in cnapter I.
Four more rulers followed on the throne but during their reign the
empire lost much of its might and territory.
I
Robert Rogers, A History of Ancient Persia (New York:
Charles Scribner 's Sons, 1929), pp. 14-15.
2
Albert T.E. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 50.
73
Our attention will focus upon the four capital cities of the
old Persian Empire, (1) Ecbatana, the Summer residence, situated in
the cool highlands of Iran, (2) Susa, the Winter residence, situated
near the head of Persian Gulf in Elam. The place was too hot to be
the Summer residence, but pleasantly warm in the Winter, (3)
Pasargade, "Cyrus City," where Cyrus was buried, and the most glorious
of all Persian cities, (4) Persepolis, a treasure city with beautiful

palaces built in the desert. Persepolis was also the spiritual center
of the empire.
ECBATANA
The name Ecbatana is ultimately derived from the Akkadian
a-ga-ma- to -nu, and in Old Persian hagmatana, and similar in Aramaic
nnbrai
EK k,orrava
, meaning
. The city is better known by its Greek name
citadel, fortress, or the place of assembly.
Its modern name is
Hamadan.
The ancient capital of Media lies in a fertile highland plain
in western Iran, 290 km. west of Teheran at about the 1830 m. level
near the foot of Mount Orontes (Aurvant). Although cold in winter,
it has a delightful summer climate. Because of this Persian kings
1
used it as their summer capital. The city was visited twice by
Alexander the Great. Despite his 'alleged destruction and looting the
city remained famous for its luxury for some time. Herodotus (i.98)
described it as a magnificient city fortified with seven concentric
1
Ibid. p. 30.
74
walls, the inner walls raising above the outer, the city was on the
hill. After the Islamic conquest, the modern city of Hamadan took its
place.
Ecbatana plays an important part today. It is one of the
principal cities of. Iran, with modern buildings and wide avenues. Its
location on the roads from Baghdad to Teheran makes it center of
traffic and comerce noted for its pottery and for the manufacture and
sale of rags.
The modern city is built on the top of the ancient, making it
nearly impossible to excavate the city mound in which lie the ruins of
the city of Ecbatana. The only artifacts have come from chance
finding. Among these was a gold tablet written in cuneiform, the
oldest Achaemenian object known and containing the earliest Old
Persian text, which is now in the Teheran Museum.
The city is mentioned in cuneiform documents from Tiglathpileser I (ca. 1100 B.C.) as a Kar-kassi ("Kassite town"). The
Iranian Archaeological Service has began cleaning operations at the
northern outscirts of the city. At the northeast sector of Hamadan is
the area known as sar Qa/ia ("Cliff Castle") where the citadel of
Cyrus once stood. Excavations of the towers and other parts of the
palaces of. Median and Achaemenian kings. Ecbatana still awaits the
spade of the archaeologist.
75
SUSA
The old Akkadian name was shu-sha-an, shu-(o)-shi; Elamite
shu-shu-un; Hebrew
ittntti
(Shushan) .
The ancient capital of the
Elamite and the later one of the capitals of the Persian Empire was
called by the Greek historian Herodotus Eouaa, variant Eouata.
Its
modern name is Shush.

Susa was located about 160 km. north of the Persian Gulf in
the stepe country east of the Tigris River which is in reality a
continuation of the southern Mesopotamia plain. The city had a long
history, being referred to from the third Millennium B.C. in the
records of Mesopotamia.
In a well-known inscription Darius the Great describes the
building of his palace with a large Apadana (festival hall). The city
1
shared the honor of being capital with Babylon and Ecbatana. When
Alexander the Great came to Susa in 331 B.C. vast treasures which
generations of Persian kings had collected fell into his hand.
About 645 B.C. Ashurbanipal crushed and plundered Susa. In
his account of this event he says,
I conquered Susa, a great city, the abode of their gods,
the seat of their oracles. By the command of Ashur and Ishtar,
I entered its palaces, and sat down with joy. I opened their
treasures, wherein was stored up silver, gold, and possessions
which the former kings of Elam, and the recent kings had
collected and stored away, on which no other enemy besides me
1
Ibid. p. 204.
O
76
had laid his hand, and I brought it out and counted it as spoil. 1
Excavations began at Susa (modern Shush) in 1851 by Loftus,

but most spectacular discovery made at Susa was in December 1901 when
the French scholar Jacques de Morgan found the diorite round-topped
stele containing the Code of Hammurabi. At the top of the monument
is a bas-relief showing Shamash the sun god in the act of giving the
laws to king Hammurabi. Beneath the carving appears the lengthy Code,
inscribed in cuneiform script, and comprising some 282 statues
written in 3000 lines. Pere Jean Vincent Scheil, a brilliant French
Assyriologist, translated and published the Code within three months.
It soon came to be recognized as one of the most important legal
documents that has come down to us from antiquity.
PASARGADE
The name Pasargade or its variant Pasargada is derived from
the Pars or Fars tribe which migrated to southwestern Iran from
Azarbijan. Here Cyrus had won a decisive victory over Astayages the
Mede. This city was located about 70 km. northeast of the later
capital at Persepolis on whose ruins the oft-repeated trilingual
inscription (Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite) reads, "I am Cyrus,
2
the king, the Achaemenid."
1
Jack Finegan, Light from theAncient Past (Princeton:
2
Ibid. p. 197.
77
O The first archaeological soundings were done in the first

decade of this century by Professor Ernst Herzfeld. In 1949, Ali Sami,
at that time director of the Archeological Institute at Persepolis
began excavations there and found that it had once been a vast city of
parks, gardens, temples and palaces. In the midst of these royal
parks and gardens, Cyrus built three palaces for himself. North of the
palace of Cyrus is so called Palace Harem where the tomb of Cambyses
II, the son of Cyrus, and Cyrus' tomb stands at the southwest edge of
the ruins of the city. According to tradition, Alexander the great
visited the tomb and read the inscription, "Stranger, I am Cyrus, the
founder of the Persian Empire and was king of Assyria; envy me not,
1
therefore this monument."
PERSEPOLIS
Original Persian name of this city is unknown. The city is
mentioned by numerous Greek historians from Strabo on as HcpauroXis
and also known as Parsa (Old Persian).
The ruins of Persepolis lie in southwest Iran some 60 km.
south of the ruins of Pasargade and about 75 km. north of the modern
city of Shiraz, now known as Taht-i Jamshid, "throne of ( the
legendary king") Jamshid."
The city was established by Darius the Great in his home
province of Parsa, modern Fars who probably began work on his palacefortress soon after his accession, and were continued on an even longer
scale by his son Xerxes (485-465 B.C.) and his successors.
1
Ibid. p. 194.
78
Darius desired to have one capital city that would be a

typical Persian Metropolis. It was to exceed all other ancient
metropoli in glory and splendour and to be the shaw place of Persian
art and architecture.
After the Greek victory at Gaugamela in 331 B.C. when
Persepolis was less than 200 years old it was looted and destroyed by
Alexander the Great, who converted it into one of the most spectacular
ruins of the world. Alexander's treatment of Persepolis has puzzled
historians, for his usual generosity seems to have left him. Some
feel that he burned city in revenge for the burning of Athens by the
1
Persians.
The first description and drawings of the ruins of Persepolis
was provided by early travelers, Pietro della Valle (ca. A.D. 1622),
Carsten Niebuhr (ca. A.D. 1765), and others.
The first real excavations of Persepolis were done by a
Persian governor of the area in 1878. It was not until 1931 when the
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago conducted systematic
archaeological investigation under the direction of Ernst Herzfeld
(1931-34) and Erich F. Schmidt (1935-39) and after his departure by
the Iranian Archaeological Service, first under the leadership of
Andre Godard, and later Ali Sami. They were able to trace the plan of
the ancient city, observing that the palaces and public buildings were
erected on a terrace of masonry some distances from the city proper.
Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis (New York: Crowell, 1969),
p. 14.
O
79
The entire city was surrounded by a triple fortification system with

one row of towers and walls running over the crest of the mountain.
The entire terrace was found to have been occupied by the
royal buildings of Darius, Xerxes (485-465 B.C.), and Artaxerxes
(465-425 B.C.). The main hall of the palace was 150 square meters,
adorned with reliefs proclaiming, "I am Darius, great king, king of
kings, king of lands numerous, son of Hystaspes the Achaemenian, who
1
constructed this palace."
Few archaeological sites are so impressive both in breadth

and grandeur of their plan, the enormous size of the buildings and
also in the close relationship between architecture and sculpture.
These monuments give a clear idea of what the Achaemenid empire
was like.
BEHISTUN
Behistun (Bisitun) is the modern village that stands west of
Hamadan (Ecbatana), and about 40 km. east of Kermanshah on the old
caravan road from Ecbatana to Babylon. Nearby DariUs I, the son of
Hystaspes (522-486 B.C.), won his greatest victory over his enemies
and caused an account of his success to be cut high in the cliff
overlooking the battle site. This trilingual inscription became the
"Rosetta Stone" of Assyriology, and in Rawlinson's master hand the '
key to the understanding of the Assyrian documents. The entire bas-
1
Albert T.E. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 175.
80
relief goes down in history as the greatest outdoor sign ever
erected, but neither its size nor the story it told were as
significant as the fact that after twenty-two years Henry C.
Rawlinson had completely translated two of the languages and this
provided the keys with which to unlock the treasured secrets of the
1
vanished nations of the Babylonian-Assyrian civilizations.
Darius the Great ordered the Behistun inscription to be cut
in the side of the cliff 120-150 meters above the plain. Knowing how
frequently successors plotted out the memory of their predecessors,
the king tried to prevent this in his own case by making his victory
relief and inscriptions practically inaccessible. Thus it stood
intact for modern archaeological study.
As noted in chapter one, this trilingual inscription was

especially useful to Rawlinson in the decipherment of cuneiform.
This trilingual inscription unlocked the Assyro-Babylonian
system of cuneiform writing in the same way that the Rosetta Stone
2
made possible the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Since
that time Lexicons and Grammars of cuneiform have been compiled and
published, and the history and culture of the Babylonians have
become the common possession of the civilized world.
1
Jack. Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past (Princeton:
2
Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of
Assyriology (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company, Limited, 1925),
p. 34.
O
81
The following is the condensed excerpt from the Behistun

Inscription.
The beginning of the inscription cyDARIUS,kig
Persia (521- 486 B.c.), on the rock of Bel o
( .( If ( Iry TYT
(Pin). CUS" ;THE 11*rieh
( itx 1"i$ (11 1Th01(--

(
i
'Ur Gibi Au. Kinre(;6 - " ,^- '
(rmk-rrTx.- ((unit-Tx-lc, rf (
T4Eatin
6:17 P PER P3 LE
ria11116
(.1(--OirOiHTT ( 1/i . ITqllifiTE-'fi (1-t- (

4COUXTriutE3
119' SfA?PrS' v a s p stin
iTi ti".M IT! (r-- ( ( ( ( tT, r ifTTIT:07 ;3"
A r
R aS 11 '1;E v A Als ruisoli
, THE
Atal11171170'intl. w.
A copy of the Behistun Inscription was also found at Babylon

on black diorite, and an Aramaic papyrus version was discovered
among the Jews of Elephantine. Darius evidently spared no effort

to tell of his might in the most remote corners of his empire.
PART THREE
IN THE LAND OF THE
PHARAOHS
83
MEDITERRANEAN - SEA
GAZA
TANIS
EGYPT
LOWER
GIZEH
HELIOPOLIS
SAKKARA
DAHSHUR
LAKE
4C"?
MOERIS
BITTER
LAKES
MEMPHIS
GERS EH
SINAI
PENINSULA
MEIDUM
FAYUM
UPPER
EGYPT
BENI HASAN
AKHETATON
(TELL- EL-AMARNA)
RED
TASA
BADARI
ABYDOS
D ENDEREH
DEIR EL-BAHRI
/
MEDIN ET HABU
SEA
THEBES
KHARGA
OASIS
EL KAB
EDFU
ANCIENT
EGYPT
0 miles a 100 1
KOM OMBO
Elephantine
(ASWAN 1st CATARACT)
CHAPTER VI
THE LAND OF THE EGYPTIANS
The modern name EGYPT derives from the Greek

Latin Aegyptus.
Alyinto0,
This term itself is probably a transcript of the
as is shown
Egyptian H(wt)-k'-Pt(h), pronaunced roughly Ha-ku-ptah,
by the cuneiform letters, ca. 1360 B.C.
The regular Hebrew (and common Semitic) word for Egypt is
(Misrayim), and in Akkadian is Musri.
By Musri, the Assyrian
sources usually mean Egypt. The word Misrayim first occurs in

external sources in the 14th century B.C., as MSRM in the Ugaritic
(North Canaanite) texts and as MISRI in the Amarna letters. In the
first Millennium B.C., the Assyro-Babylonian texts refer to MUSUR or
MUSRI.
The ancient Egyptians themselves had their own terms for their
homeland: KEMYT, "The Black Land," because of its rich black soil
(as opposed to the desert, the "red land"), TAWY the "Two Lands"
(Upper and Lower Egypt), and Ta-meri, "the Beautiful Land." The Arabs
1
refer to it to this day as MISR.
The modern Arabic name for Egypt, MISR, is related to Hebrew
MISRAYIM, a dual form probably referring to Upper and Lower Egypt.
John Baines, Atlass of Ancient Egypt (New York: Facts on

File, Incorporated, 1980), p. 12.
84
85
Since February, 1958, the official name of the country has been
al-Jumhuriyah al- i Arabiyah al-Muttahidah, "the United Arab Republic."
In 1971 Egypt formed a loose association with Syria and Lybia called
the Federation of Arab Republics and renamed itself the Arab Republic
of Egypt.
Natural Features and Geography

A map of modern Egypt shows that the present day country is
almost square in shape, extending from the Mediterranean coast of
Africa in the north, and from the Red Sea in the east and the state
of Israel, on the south to the Sudan, and on the west to Lybia.
The real Egypt is the land reached by the Nile, being
Herodotus' "gift of the Nile."
Egypt is in a "temperate zone"
desert-belt having a warm, rainless climate.

To the Egyptians, the Nile has been more than a river, which
rises near the equator (the only river in the world which does so) and
flows north into the temperate zone. It is approximately 6000 km.
in length, probably the longest river in the world. For life-giving
water, Egypt depends wholly on the Nile, and the country's very
existence is made by the river and its seasonal, never-failing flood.
The ancient Egyptians attributed this regular annual rise of
the river to a holy tear shed by the goddess Is's in grief for her
2
dead husband, OSIRIS. It was believed that on the night of June 18,
1
John Ruffle, The Egyptians (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1977), pp. 11-12.
86
one of her sacred teardrops fell into the Nile, causing the river to
rise. So from the grief of the goddess there came the blessing of a
full Nile. Although Isis is no longer worshiped in Egypt, the
Egyptians still celebrate on the night of June 18, which they refer to
"the night of the teardrop."
The
Two Egypts
The Nile valley is divided by the Egyptians into "Upper" and

"Lower" Egypt. Upper Egypt included all the people that lived along
the Nile in the central and southern portions of the country, from
Cairo to the border of Sudan. The symbol of their kingdom was the
lotus. Their more important places were el-Amarna, Abydos, and Thebes.
Lower Egypt has, from antiquity, always included the northernmost part of the Nile valley from just south of Memphis (Cairo),
stretching to the Mediterranean Sea. The symbol of their kingdom was
the papyrus plant. Their more important places were Memphis (Noph),
1
Heliopolis (On), and Zoan (Tanis).
The Egypt of Antiquity

Egypt was ancient even to the ancients. The first important
move occured around 3100 B.C. At that time the Egyptian people,
hiterto divided into two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt, found themselves
under one king called "Pharaoh" - the first of thirty dynasties of
1
William W. Hallo, and William K. Simpson, The Ancient

Near East:. History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971),
p. 188.
87
pharaohs. He wore a double crown, had a palace in both Memphis and

Thebes, and divided his time equally between Upper and Lower Egypt.
Besides the double crown and double residence, there were also two
treasuries, and two federal granaries, so the original independence
1
of the two lands was never forgotten. They thereby became the world's
first united nation and took a decisive step toward establishing a
stable civilization. With the first two dynasties, which covered some
400 years, Egypt emerged from prehistoric obscurity into the full
light of history. From that point on are numbered its greatest era.
Egyptian history is divided into three main eras - the Old Kingdom,
the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom, separated by two intermediate
2
periods when the country's fortunes were temporarily at low ebb.
Each of the three Kingdoms was characterized by accomplishments

of its own. The Old Kingdom, from about 2650-2175 B.C., was the period
during which the great pyramids were built. With the Middle Kingdom,
about 2000 B.C. to 1800 B.C., Egypt enjoyed an expanding political
strength and broader economic horizons. The New Kingdom, beginning
about 1575 B.C., saw the nation's zenith as a political power and its
acquisition of an empire mostly in Asia. When the New Kingdom came
3
to a close around 1100 B.C., Egypt's days as a great nation were over,
1
Henry James Breasted, A History of the Ancient Egyptians
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), p. 74.
2
George Steinford and Keith C. Seele, When Egypt Ruled the
(Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 11.
Past
3
Kenneth A. Strand, Brief Introduction to the Ancient
Near East (Ann Arbor: Braun-Brumfield, Inc., 1969), p. 246.
.
88
although pharaohs, interspersed with foreign conquerors, continued to
ocuppy the throne until the forth century B.C.
The great Greek historian made a grand tour of ancient Egypt
in the fifth century B.C. and wrote of "wonders more in number than
those of any other land and works it has to show beyond expression
great."
By that time Egypt was going into decline, and found itself
unable to cope with the rising power of Assyrian nation and later the
Babylonians. It suffered decisive defeat at the hand of Nebuchadnezzar
at Carchemish in 606-605 B.C. After a six-months campaign in 525 B.C.
at Pelusium and the capture of both Memphis and Thebes, Cambyses
annexed the country to Persia and was that country's vassal until the
conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. At Alexander's death in
323 B.C. a Macedonian general named Ptolemy (whose name appears on the
Rosetta Stone descovered near Rosetta in the western Nile Delta in
July 1799), was appointed governor of Egypt and for nearly three
hundred years the country was ruled by his descendants, the Ptolemies.
Then came the tragic death of Antony and Cleopatra and the end of the
1
ancient Egypt.
History of Egyptian Archaeology

A complete study of archaeological discoveries in Egypt would
exceed the space available and go far beyond the purpose of this study.
Archaeological discoveries from Egypt are very abundant, because the
area has an extremely long history of continuous habitation by
H.R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1935), p. 194.
89
productive civilizations and beacuse the climate of Egypt favors the

preservation of nearly all kinds of artifacts and non-written
artifactual materials.
Modern archaeology in the sense of scientific excavation,
Egyptian or otherwise, started with W.M.F. Petrie in 1880, but from
the standpoint of exploration and discovery our story must start with
Herodotus, the "Father of History," who travelled in Egypt as far
south as Assuan. He picked up much information as well as misinformation from guides, priests, and tomb robbers, and thus his
1
description of ancient Near East is not always reliable.
In the period from 1500 to 1800 B.C. there were sporadic
invasions of Egypt by English and French explorers but few of them
wentured beyond the pyramids of Giza.
To the military expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in the summer
of 1798, belongs the honor of having turned the attention of the west
towards the Egyptian monuments. With his expedition he took with him
a staff of 175 scientists, including orientalists, geographers,
cartographers, and many other specialists, as well as a large library
and a shipload of scientific instruments. They were to make a
completed record of all they might find in Egypt, of antiquity,
geography, natural history, and so on. In 1799 a detachment of French
troops, commanded by an officer named Bouchard, was wotking on the
foundations of an extension to a fort near the town of Rashid
1
F. Gladstone Bratton, A History of Egyptian Archaeology
(London: Robert Hale, 1967), p. 52.
O
90
1
Rosetta, in the western. Delta. The pick of one of the soldiers
struck a large slab of basalt (a hard black rock), and he noticed that
it had writings carved upon it. By some miracle of understanding the
soldiers felt that the stone might be of some importance, they cleaned
it up and.sent it to the commander in Alexandria. He in turn sent it
to Cairo where it was handed over to the Institute set up by the team
of scholars who had accompanied the expedition.
By simple inspection it could be seen that there were three
sections to the inscriptions, each written in a different script. At
the top was a hieroglyphic text, in the middle a text written in a
cursive script, later to be called. Demotic, and at the bottom a
Greek text. It was assumed rightly from the start that the three
sections probably represent three versions of the same text. Copies
and casts were made and sent to Paris, and from there further copies
were distributed. The stone itself was confiscated by the British
forces after the surrender of the French in Egypt 1801, which eventual2
ly reached the British Museum in London.
In 1822 a French scholar, Jean Francois Champolion, studying
the Rosetta Stone in the light of his previous work in Coptic,
published his conclusions which provided a firm foundation for the
science of Egyptology which was soon added to the curicula of the
major universities of Europe. Scholars, both professional and
1
David A. Rosalie, The Egyptian Kingdoms
1975), p. 50.
(Phaidon: Elsevier,
91
amateaur, began making their way to Egypt to copy inscriptions and

1
study antiquities.
Also important were discoveries and explorers, such as G.B.
Belzoni, who explored the Nile Valley to Abu Simbel, and who found the
tomb of Seti I, among other achievements. Twenty important items
in the British Museum were acquired through Belzoni's expeditions.
He was collector, however, rather than an archaeologist. He was also
the first in modern times to enter and explore the second pyramid of
Giza. After four years of work in Egypt (1815-19), he went to England
where he published his Narrative and enjoyed great fame for his
2
success.
In 1828 an expedition was sent out by the Tuscan government,
provided with a number of scholars, and supported by Charles X of

France. At the head of expedition were Champollion and the Itallian
Ippolito Rosellini, professor at Pisa. They took along a corps of
architects and artists and examined the most important ruins of
Egypt as far as the second cataract, copying pictures and inscriptions
in the tombs and temples as they went. Owing to the outbreak of
revolution, Champollion was unfortunately compelled to return to
France, where very soon afterward he died. The task of continuing the
work fell to the lot of Rosellini. In spite of this misfortune the
results of the Franco-Tuscan expedition were very great, being
1
T.G. James, The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt (London:

The Bodley Head, 1972), p. 132.
2
C.W. Ceram, Gods, Graves, and Scholars, 2nd ed. (New York:
Bantam, 1972), pp. 117-119.
92
published in two large volumes, which have remained to this day the
1
most important storehouse of Egyptological science.
A new period of Egyptian excavation opened in the year 1850
the French savant Augustus E. Mariette went to Egypt. His name stands
connected with the epoch-making dsicoveries on Egyptian soil from
1850 to 1880. The greatest and most important, which places Mariette
foremost in the science of Egyptology was his discovery of the Serapeum
at Memphis. The Serapeum was the burial place of the sacred Apis bull,
thought by ancient to be the living manifestation of the god Ptah.
Mariette began his excavations by the avenue of the sphinxes,
and following it was led to the entrance of the Serapeum which he
opened on November 12, 1851. There before him stretched thirty-three
meters of underground galleries. Sixty-four Apis tombs were discovered
together with funeral figures, amulets, and ornaments. Above all,
thousands of memorial stones, which pious pilgrims had erected, were
recovered from a long-forgotten past, and were sent by the fortunate
2
discoverer to enrich the collection at Louvre. Great was the value
of the inscriptions found from an archaeological standpoint, yet still
greater because of their historical interest, for nearly all the stones
and coffins were dated in the reigns of different kings, and thereby
supplied most important material for the chronology of Egyptian history.
1
Leslie Greener, The Discovery of Egypt (London: Cassell and
Comany Limited, 1966), pp. 156-159.
2
F. Gladstone Bratton, A History of Egyptian Archaeology
London: Robert Hale, 1967), pp. 76-79.
93
His activities were largely restricted to four sites however, Tanis,

Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes where he conducted extensive excavations in
the temple of Karnack, the temple of Medinet Nabu, and the temple of
Deir el-Bahri.
In 1857 Mariette was appointed Director of the newly established
Service of Antiquities thus placing Egyptian archaeology under
supervision. He established the rule that all antiquities found in
Egypt were to stay in Egypt. On his death in 1881, a greatful Egypt
buried him at the door of his museum.
The first, if not the only, leading figure in the opening age
of scientific archaeology in Egypt, and to a degree in other parts of
the Near East was Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). He was a man who
had come to the Near East not primarily to find treasures - although
he probably found more treasures during his career than any other
excavator in Egypt.- but to excavate and preserve for posterity
whatever ancient Egypt had left for him to find. He saw value in
every object. Broken pieces of pottery were just as carefully
collected and recorded as statues or inscribed monuments, because he
realized that they could provide valuable information to the expert
1
in ancient ceramics. He inaugurated methods of excavation with rigid
standards of recording every find, even the most insignificant and
apparently wothless object. Many successful archaeologists of Egypt
were trained by Petrie, and everyone who has worked in the field of
1
T.G.H. James, Excavating in Egypt (London: The Trustees

of the British Museum, 1982), pp. 17-22.
94
Egyptology owes him gratitude. In 1906 he established the British

School of Archaeology in Egypt. He continued his work in Egypt until,
1926, when after forty years of excavation there, he turned his
attention to Palestine primarily to discover the origin of the Hyksos.
Petrie's significance for understanding of Egyptian history
and the development of scientific archaeology in Egypt and elsewhere
is clearly stated by one of his associates, Margaret Murray,
When he ended that career, the whole of Egyptian
prehistory and history had been mopped out and settled . .
Every archaeologist owes to Petrie that systematic
1
arrangement of knowledge of the past in every country.
Due to the lack of space only a few of the great scholars

who have contributed to Egyptian archaeology since the days of
Petrie can be listed here. One of them is James H. Breatsed, founder
of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, who has
edited five volume
Ancient Records of Egypt,
copied from the
monuments of Egypt. He has been concerned with gathering the original

survey team at work copying the ancient inscriptions. The other
scholar to be mentioned here is Alan H. Gardiner who produced for the
English-speaking world his
Egyptian Grammar
which is still standard
work in this field.

,American, British, German, French, and Egyptian archaeologists
as well as those of several other nations, have provided us with
important excavations, writings, interpretations, and other works.
1
Margaret A. Murray, The Splendour that Was Egypt, rev. ed.
(New York: Praeger, 1964), pp. 220-221.
CHAPTER VII
DISCOVERIES IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
TELL EL-AMARNA
Tell el-Amarna is the modern name of the ancient capital
city of Egypt Akhenaten, during the reign of the heretic pharaoh
Akhenaten (Amenophis IV) and his immediate successors, ca. 1387-1366
B.C. The ruins lie some 320 km. south of Cairo on the east bank of
the river Nile. When Akhenaten initiated the monotheistic sun
worship of Aten (Aton) he found so much opposition in Thebes, the
royal residence and center of the old religion, that he moved the
capital to a new site, which he called Akhenaten, "Horizon of Aten."
The movement collapsed soon after his death, and the capital was
moved back to Thebes. Akhenaten and his short-lived capital were
1
forgotten until its ruins were rediscovered in modern times.
Tell el-Amarna derives its name from the Arab tribe known as
the Beni Amran, who settled there in comparatively modern time
(18th century) in a semicircular area bounded on its 9 km. diameter
2
by the Nile and on its periphery by an area of high cliffs.
1
David A. Rosalie, The Egyptian Kingdom (Phaidon: Elsevier,

1975), p. 119.
2
J.D.S. Pendelbury, Tell el-Amarna (London: Lovat Dickson and
Thompson Ltd., 1935), p. 35.
95
96
The site of Tell el-Amarna has been partially excavated. The

impressive remains include temples, administrative buildings, tombs
with wall paintings as well as the buildings of many prosperous estates
with houses often of uniform plan.
The Amarna Tablets and the Invasion of Canaan

The site of Tell el-Amarna first came into prominence in 1887
when a peasant woman unearthed some baked clay tablets there, inscribed
in cuneiform, which proved to be part of the diplomatic correspondence
sent to the ancient Egyptian court from the north Syrian region and
subsequently buried in the ruins of the royal archives. These were
the famous "Amarna letters."
They were discovered accidentally and by a nonspecialist, a

peasant woman from the village of Tell el-Amarna. She was digging
in the mound of ruins in search of rich soil for her garden, when she
accidentally unearthed a deposit of 370 cuneiform tablets in 1887.
Ignorant of their value, she sold them to a neighbour for ten
piasters. He in turn took them to the village and increased his
1
investment a hundredfold by selling them for ten pounds.
There, an official of the British Museum, E.A.W. Budge, was shown
eighty-two of these letters, which he quickly recognized as
containing Babylonian cuneiform, he suggested an acceptable price,
and eighty-two became the property of the British Museum. One hundred
and ninety-four went to the Royal Museum in Berlin, sixty to the
Flinders W.M. Petrie, Tell el-Amarna (Westminster: Aris

and Phillips Ltd., 1974), p. 30.
97
Egyptian Museum in Cairo, twenty to Oxford, and the reminder to other

museums or to private individuals.
Since the discovery in 1887, there have been archaeological
axcavations at Tell el-Amarna. Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of
scientific Egyptian archaeology, excavated at Tell el-Atharna numerous
details of the city and a few more tablets, but none has been as
fortune as that of the unknown Egyptian woman who made the first find
1
of cuneiform tablets. Later expeditions have continued this work,
and have provided us with additional information concerning one of the
most fascinating periods of Egyptian history.
These letters were written with great courtesy, such as would
be expected in the East. They deal with political conditions, social
affairs, the exchange of gifts and slaves, inquiries regarding the

king's health and welfare, and other things too numerous to be
mentioned. Nearly 300 of these letters were written by the governors

of various cities or districts in Palestine, Phoenicia, and southern
Syria. About 150 were from or to Palstine, and thus are of supreme
importance for the history of ancient Israel, during the time when the
2
Israelites were invading Canaan. It can definetly be said that few
discoveries have ever been made that have shed more light on internation
international relations and cultural conditions during a given period
Ibid. p. 34.
2
Robert S.J. North, Archaeo-Biblical Egypt (Rome: Piba,
1967), p. 21.
98
in the past, a period of about thirty years encompassing roughly the

second quarter of the 14th century B.C., the heart of so called
Amarna Age.
But it came as a surprise that the language of diplomatic
correspondence between the Egyptian king and his governors in Syria
and Palestine should have been neither Canaanite or Egyptian, but the
Akkadian language written in the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia.
When the 14th century cuneiform texts were published around
the turn of the century, they provided a number of references to a
people in Syro-Palestine known as the Habiru. In few of the fact that
the Habiru appear to have caused some military disturbance similar to
those described in the book of Joshua, some scholars came to the
conclusion that the Habiru should be identified with the Hebrews and
that these texts provided extra-biblical evidence for Joshua's
1
conquest.
This very fact that most of these tablets were written in
Babylonian cuneiform, even though they come from various countries,
indicates that the Babylonian cuneiform was the one general system of
writing readily understood by almost all the people of the Near
Eastern lands during that particular period, and perhaps long before
and after.
In Palestine the Hebrews, called Habiru, invaded the country
from the east and took over one part of the land after another. The
loyal Canaanite princes sent frantic appeals to the king to come to
Ibid. p. 55.
99
their rescue and save them from disloyal elements in the country and
from the foreign invaders, both Habiru and Hittites. Of particular
interest was a series of seven letters from Abdi-Hiba, governor of
Urusalem (Jerusalem), who pleaded for help to prevent the loss of that
country. His letters customarily begin with some salutation of the
greatest deference like this:
To the king, my lord, say: Thus 'Abdu-Reba, thy servant.
At the two feet of the king, my lord, seven times and seven
times I fall. Behold the deed which Milkilu and Shuwardata
did to the land of the king, my lord. They rushed troops of
Gezer, troops of Gath and troops of Keilah; they took the
land of Rubutu; the land of the king went over to the 'Apiru
people. But now even a town belonging to the king has gone
over to the side of the people of Keilah. Let my king hearken
to 'Abdu-Heba, thy servant, and let him send archers to recover
the royal land for the king. But if there are no archers, the
land of the king will pass over to the 'Apiru people.'
Then he proceeds, as in the following letter, to protest

vehemently his own loyalty and to beg urgently for help:
What have I done to the king, my lord? They slander me
to the king, the lord: 'Abdi-Heba has become faithless to the
king, his lord.' Behold, neither my father nor my mother has
put me in this place. The mighty hand of the king has led me
into the house of my father. Why should I practice mischief
against the king, my lord, lives I will say to the deputy of
the king, my lord: 'Why do you love the Habiru, and hate the
regents?' But therefore am I slandered before the king, my lord.
Because I say: 'The lands of the king, my lord, are lost,'
therefore am I slandered to the king, my lord . . . . So
let the king, the lord, care for his land . . . . Let the
king turn his attention to the archers so that archers of the
king, my lord, will go forth. No lands of the king remain.
The Habiru plander all the lands of the king. 2
1
Ibid. p. 488.
2
Ibid. p. 489.
100
No aid was ever sent in response to the appeals. Akhenaten

(Amenhotep IV) was much too busy building a new capital and
endeavoring to reform the faith of his people. The victorious
Hebrews took great part of the country and established themselves
without any interference from the Egyptians. H.R. Hall sums it
up by saying, "We may definitely say that in the Tell el-Amarna
Letters we have early Judges period seen from the Egyptian point of
1
view."
This period of political weakness meant much for the young

nation that emerged from the deserts of Sinai and Transjordan in
search of new homes in the Promised Land.
In conclusion we can say that the Amarna Letters have
given us first, a first-hand account of the conditions in Canaan
in the fourteenth century B.C. from which we see that the power
and authority of the Egyptian kingdom was weakened at the right time
so that it did not interfere when Hebrews were taking the
possession of the Canaan land.
1
H.R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935), p. 409.
0
101
THE MERNEPTAH STELE
When Ramses II died in 1234 B.C. after a long and prosperous

rule he was buried in his funerary temple, the gigantic "Ramesseum"
which still stands in the western side of Thebes. Since he outlived
many of his seventy-nine sons, only the thirteenth became his
successor on the throne under the name of Merneptah (1234-1225).
On coming to the throne he inherited the perplexing problems
1
of a growing Asian power and a reinforced Libya. He fought battles
with both and seemed fairly successful, but like other monarchs he
began in the early part of his reign to plan for his after-life. He
selected a site one half a mile south-west of the Ramesseum,
"borrowed" considerable material from Amenhotep's nearby temple,
brought in some new materials, and constructed a fairly nice temple
for himself.
THEBES
Thebes, the famous capital of Upper Egypt and the best known
site in Egypt, with the exception of Memphis and the pyramids, was
situated on a broad fertile plain stretching away for miles on the
both sides of the Nile 670 km. south of the present capital city of
Egypt, Cairo. Unlike the cities of Babylon and Nineveh, whose
1
Frank H. Stubbings, "The Aegean Bronze Age," The Cambridge
Ancient History, 3rd ed., (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1970)
3:1555.
novutliS1
tiEwitAGE
CENTER
James White Wow,

**ORM AINP/111911V
102
remains were hidden until modern times in mounds of rubbish, the glory
of Thebes was always visible in the ruins of its great temples which
are still standing on the east bank of the Nile.
The name Thebes was given by Greeks who transformed the native
name Ta-Ape after the city of the same name in central Greece. The
Hebrew name is No from the Egyptian Niwt (Imn) the city of Amon. The
Egyptians called the city Weset but more often refered to it simply
by the name "city." Homer speaks of it as "the city where rich are
1
housed in treasure, a hundred has she gates .
The modern city of Luxor occupies a small portion of the area
occupied by ancient Thebes. The name Luxor is derived from the Arabic
E1-Uqsur, "the castles," a reference to the ruins of the great temples
which still dominate the site. They are one of the living witnesses to
the fact that human glory is short-lived, that earthly fame lasts at
most but a few generations.
The story of research and excavation at Thebes, like the glory
of the monuments, is too long to tell. the Jesuit Father Claude
Sicard (as a result of surveys of 1707 to 1721) gets credit for being
the first to identify the great structures at Lixor and Karnak with
ancient Thebes. Frederick Norden made the first real survey of the
2
site in the winter of 1737 and 1738. The English clergyman Richard
Pococke (1738) made plans of the temples, copied inscriptions, and
1
Iliad, IX. 381.
2
James Baikie, The Amarna Age (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1926), p. 1.
O
103
drew diagrams of some of the tombs that had been discovered.

The first large collection of copies of inscriptional material
was made by Champollion and his colleague Rosellini from 1828 to 1829.
Bu the most important discovery for the purpose of this study is one
done by Flinders Petrie. On December 16, 1895, he began excavation on
the temple sites, piles of stone chips and dust, with some broken
brick walls. It was the site of Merneptah's stele that was being
excavated in 1896 by Petrie when, as he sais,
Th
The site of Merneptah's temple was disastrously dull;

there were worn bits of soft sandstone, scraps looted from
the temple of Amenotep III, crumbling sandstone sphinxes,
laid in pairs in holes to support columns. I was tempted
to leave it as fruitless; then came the half-length figure
of Merneptah, a fine portrait work, and in the last corner
to be cleared there lay 'a black granite stele, over ten
feet high and five wide - on it a long inscription of
Amenhetep III, which had been mostly erased by Akhenaten,
and then piously re-engraved by Seti I. On looking beneath
it, there was the inscription of Merneptah.
I had the ground cut away below, blocking up the stele
on stones, so that one could crawl in and lie on one's back,
reading a few inches from one's nose. For inscriptions,
Spiegelberg was at hand, looking over all new material.
He lay there copying for an afternoon, and came out saying,
'There are names of various Syrian towns, and one which I
do not know, Isirar."Why, that is Israel,' said I. 'So it
is, and won't the reverends be pleased,' was his reply. To
the astonishment of the rest of our party I said at dinner
that night, 'This stele will be better known in the world
than anything else I have found,' and so it has proved. 2
It had been inscribed on both sides, one being covered with
the carvings - of Amenhotep III, in whose tomb it was originally placed.
1
Edward Fay Campbell, The Chronology of t-e Amarna Letters
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1964), p. 6.
2
Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1932), pp. 171.172.
104
But Merneptah had taken it for his own use, and on its higlhy polished
reverse side, had engraved the story of his victories in battle with
his enemies.
In the center of the relief at the top of the stele is shown
the double image of the god Amon-Ra presenting a curved sword to the
king. Behind them on the right is the moon god Khonsu, son of Amon
and Mut. At the left is Mut mother goddesss. Bellow are twenty-eight
closely packed lines of about 3000 hieroglyphics with the pharaoh's
cartouche repeated ten times. The line twenty-seven contains the only
mention of the name of ISRAEL in all ancient Egyptian writing. The
following is a translation of this section of the inscription.
The princes are prostrate, saying: 'Mercy.'
Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows.
Desolation is for tehenu; Hatti is pacified;
Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is made as that which does not exist;
ISRAEL is laid waste, his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow for Egypt.
All lands together, they are pacified;
Everyone who was restless, he has been bound
by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt: Ba-en-Re MeriAmon; the Son of Re: Mer-ne-Ptah Hotep-hir-Maat,
given life like Re every day.l
This stele of Merneptah was carved toward the end of the
thirteenth century B.C., during the 5th year of King Merneptah's
reign, the earliest original document mentioning the name of Israel,

therefore it became widely known as the "Israel Stele." It throws
interesting light on the history of ancient Israel. All names of
peoples or countries are followed in this hieroglyphic inscription by
James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton:

105
a sign that means "foreign country," but the name Israel is followed
by the hieroglyphics of a sitting man, a sitting woman, and the plural
signs, indicating that the recording sculptor considered Israel a
people not yet sufficiently settled to give to it the sign "foreign
country." This observation agrees with the conditions in which Israel
lived at the time of the judges, in which period Merneptah ruled over
Egypt and made his raid into Palestine. It was at the time when
Israel was not yet fully established in Canaan, but was living more
or less a nomadic life.
ARAMAIC PAPYRI FROM ELEPHANTINE

The Egyptian name of the islan was Iebew, which later Aramaic
papyri reproduced as
Y e b
(Egyptian word for Elephant). This was
translated by Greeks to Elephantine.
The modern Arabic name is
ASWAN ("market").
Elephantine was located at the first cataract of the Nile

opposite Aswan, at the southern frontier of ancient Upper Egypt on the
narrow palm-studded island in the Nile River. The area around Aswan
is rich in hard stone: red and gray granite which look like elephants.
It is popularly believed that this gave rise to its name, but that view
receives no credence from Egyptologists.
Elephantine was established as a fortress possibly as early
as the Third Dynasty. Certainly they were well established there in
the Sixth Dynasty, when Elephnatine became the residence of powerful
princes who exercised some control over the wild "land of the bow."
On the west shore of the Nile opposite Elephantine are still to be
106
seen the tombs of some of these mighty men, with inscriptions

recording their deeds of war and their expedition to the south. The
Jews of the fifth century, whose houses lay on the western rim of the
island, must often have looked across the river to that hill of the
tombs, where slept "kings and counselors of the earth who built up
1
waste places for themselves. Elephantine undoubtedly played an
important part as a frontier military past against enemies and desert
tribesmen and as a fortress for keeping open the trade routes to the
south.
One of the mosts startling discoveries in Egypt about the
opening of this twentieth century was made at the foot of the first
cataract of the Nile. As early as 1893, diggers among the ruins on
the south end of the island found ostraca and rolls of dried papyri
covered with Aramaic writing. These papiry were the first of the
great discoveries made on Elephantine. They fortunately fell into
friendly hands and were rescued for scholars. The considerable
corpus of Aramaic papyri from Elephantine had been purchased by
Charles Edwin Wilbour, at Aswan in 1893. Before the find was announced
Wilbour died on his way to America, and a trunk containing the papyri
/Th
was never opened until it came into the possession of the Brooklyn
2
Museum in 1947.
1
The Book of Job 3:14.
2
Emil G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri
(New Haven: The Yale University Press, 1953), p. 64.
O
107
Some other excavations at Elephantine have been conducted by

the French (1920 ff), the Germans (1906-1908), Fathers of the
Pontifico Instituto Biblico in Rome after World War I, and the
Egyptian government (1932 and 1946).
Among building structures excavated were the Temple of Khnum
(of the 4th century B.C.) and an earlier mud brick temple, the latter
excavated by the Egyptians in 1948. The excavations have not produced
conclusive evidence regarding the exact location of the Jewish temple
of Yahu (Yahweh) which seems to have been located between "the road of
1
the king" and the "street of the king."
The Elephantine papyri referred to above give us an interesting
glimpse of one of the outlying regions of the Persian empire at
this time. As it is already mentioned these documents were discovered
2
in 1893 on the island of Elephantine at the first cataract in Egypt.
The papyri came from a Jewish military colony which was located at
Elephantine during the 5th century B.C. The papyri were written in
Aramaic, which was the language of diplomacy and of trade throughout
western Asia in the Persian period, and which was gradually replacing
Hebrew as the everyday tongue of the Jewish people not only abroad but
also at home in Palestine.
These documents provide considerable information concerning
historical events of this dark period, particularly regarding the
' 1
Bezalel Porten, Archives from Elephantine (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1968), p. 110.
2
Ibid. p. 115.
108
Jewish colony located at the southern border of Egypt probably from

the time of the last kings of Judah. They brought with them their
religion and built a temple to Yahu, the short form of the divine name,
Yahweh, their national god. But these Jews were not intolerant of
Egyptian gods. Their religion closely reflects the one that many Jews
1
had before the Babylonian exile.
One of the most striking of the letters found among the Aramaic
documents at Elephantine was one dated in 407 B.C. It was a petition
to the governor of Judah to assist in the rebuilding of the Jewish
temple on Elephantine which had been destroyed when the Persian '
governor of Egypt was in Babylon and Susa from 410-408 B.C. and in his
absence the Yahu temple had been destroyed in 410 B.C. at the
instigation of rival priests of the Egyptian god Khnum. Upon his

return the Jews experienced satisfaction of seeing the chief provocators
of the crime punished, but a permit to rebuild the temple was'not
immediately given. The. Persian satrap requested the petitioners to
secure the consent of the Jerusalem authorities before he would grant
them a permit. Part of the petition reads,
To our lord Bagoas, governor of Judah, your servants
Yedoniah and his colleagues, the priests who are in the
fortress of Elephantine. May the God of Heaven seek after
the welfare of our lord exceedingly at all times and give
you favor before King Darius and the nobles a thousand
times more than now. May you be happy and healthy at all
times . . . . Nor your servants Yedoniah, and his colleagues,
and the Jews, the citizens of Elephantine, all say thus:
If it please our lord, take thought of this temple to
rebuild it, since they do not let us rebuild it. Look to
Emil G. Kraeling, "New Light on the Elephantine Colony,"

The Biblical Archaeologist Reader (New York: Doubleday and Company,
Inc., 1961), p. 129.
109
your well-wishers and friends here in Egypt. Let a letter be

sent from you to them concerning the temple of the god Yaho
to build it in the fortress of Elephantine as it was built
before, and the meal-offering, incense, and burnt offering
will be offered in your name, and we shall pray for you at
all times, we, and our wives, and our children, and the Jews
who are here, all of them, if you do thus, so that the temple
is rebuilt . . . . Because of this we have written to inform
you. We have also set the whole matter forth in a letter in
our name to Delaiah and Shelemiah, the sons of Sanballat the
governor of Samaria . . . . On the 20th of Marheshwan, year
17 of King Darius.'
Two other important facts are given in the letter. First,
these Jews of Elephantine stated that they had written to the high
priest in Jerusalem, Johanan and his colleagues the priests, and
to Ostones (Ustan), the brother of Asani, and the nobles of the Jews.
To this letter had been no reply. Secondly, they stated that they had
written to Delaiah and Shelemiah, the sons of Sanballat the governor

of Samaria.
These two facts are the most significant for they give us a
glimpse into Judah and Palestine at the close of the fifth century B.C.
We learn that Bagoas was governor, Johanan was high priest, and
Sanballat was still alive, although his two sons were of some
importance, owing no doubt to the age of their father. He made
2
Nehemiah's work difficult.
Through the Elephantine papyri that are now in the Brooklyn
Museum we also learn that the civil calendar of the Jews of Elephantine
1
James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton:
2
Ibid. p. 492.
110
began in the autumn. The existence of such a calendar in Judea was

known from the book of Nehemiah, but had frequently been disputed by
scholars. It existence in Elephantine during the same fifth century
1
B.C. supports in a remarkable way the statement made by Jeremiah.
A further result of having this text available is that some
additional light is thrown on the time of Ezra's return in Judea in
457 B.C. In the last extract cited and the previous pages Johanan is
mentioned, which means that in 410 B.C. he was high priest in
Jerusalem.
The most valuable single result of the papyri finds in Egypt,
besides shedding a great deal of light on matters of detail, is to
demonstrate that the Aramaic employed in Ezra is characteristic of the
fifth century B.C. and that the letters recorded in the fourth chapter
of Ezra show the same general style and are written in the same
language as the Elephantine papyri and other recently discovered of
2
the same period.
The aforegoing examination of the evidence of the Elephantine
colony's origin, reveals a number of important facts which play no small
part in the reconstruction of the time period in which the colony was
established.
1. The papyri reveal that the Jewish community was in existence
and worshiping in a temple, erected in the days of native Egyptian
1
S.H. Horn and L.H. Wood, "The Fifth-Century Jewish Calendar
at Elephantine," Journal of Near Eastern Studies XIII (1954):1.
2
Ibid. pp. 5-7.
111
kings, prior to the arrival of Cambyses in Egypt (525 B.C.).

Both the Bible and secular records disclose a steady
influx of Jews into Egypt during the Saitic period.
The relationship between Judah and Egypt were maintained
on a comparatively friendly basis.

The temple erected at Elephantine was dedicated to Yahu
(Yehowah), and the religious customs very closely resembles those
fostered during the reigns of Manasseh, Amon, and the years of Josiah
prior to the latter king's reforms of 622/621 B.C.
A syncretistic form of Yahweh worship had been revived in
the area of Bethel and Ephraim, after the fall of the northern kingdom.
The Deuteronomic reforms of Judah extended beyond the
borders of Judah to the area previously inhabited by the northern
kingdom.
The papyri reveal a small percentage of personal names that
reflect northern afirmities, and deities of Syro-Babylonian origin.
After considering the above factors, we can conclude that the
Elephantine community did not become established at any given time,
but was the result of a series of Jewish migrations, what is in
agreement with Jeremiah 44 which reveals established Jewish communities
as being already existing at the time of his arrival in Egypt just
after the fall of Jerusalem 586 B.C.
O
APPENDIX
0
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114
Relief and inscription of Darius in Old Persian, Elamite, and Alaadiau, on the cliff at Ilehistun in Iran.
.1. -4 S ;
TT
vs%
-
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r .41
1,21r
40,IS ,

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.;
Script of the Oil Persian text of the Darius inscription at Behistun.
jr.
fe:
115
Botta
Layard
Petrie
Champollion
Shalinaneser III receives tribute of "Jehu, son of Ounri," who is upon his hands and knees
116
A stela of Mer-ne-Ptah which mentions "Israel," from Thebes.
ifra4
tC
Au.
ALL.
- Detail of the name "Israel" from the stela of Mer-ne-Ptah, No. 342.
118
TELL EL-AMARNA TABLETS.
No. 58.
(BU. 88-10-13, 64 2i
in. by
plate 15.)
2 in. ; see
OBVERSE.
Tr.- t T*"<<< V-4T Cffr T; 4--T11 .-4(?)R

rte.* r-..- L-r 172474 T
T; 4 '---474 r T T1 <YT 'a-T; 'a M tz1/4 -TM EL':
5 r.-4 OT* 4 r14I YT- 111'4 err 5
T41' >I- IT
4Tifr t2,- 4-)TIT 4 r err
TT' -TM
-TT<T
YT -TM * 11.41
10 is`"
4T4 S14 T -TM 10
.-k * EDGE.
DGE.
-(Te 11(.444 t:T411 k41(?)

'-
REVERSE.
<T-Ni :-.1T -4-TT Sr

0-*T4s1
[Traces of impressions from a Babylonian cylinderseal are here visible.]
This line is written over an erasure.
O
Plate 15
119
(1
OBVERSE
REVERSE
S 'VI. 3. 88 -10 -!3, 61.
OBVERSE
O
OBVERSE
REVERSE
(Reverse effaced.)
BRITISH MUSEUM.
B. 88 - I0 - !3, 62
BRiTISH MUSEUM.
B. 88-10-13, 64.
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0
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06 '0312_

ARCHAEOLOGY IN NEAR EASTERN LANDS

Chairman: Carl Coffman,

ABSTRACT OF GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH

Title: ARCHAEOLOGY IN NEAR EASTERN LANDS

Importance of the Study

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present study to stimulate interest of an undergraduate student in

Division and Scope of the Study

one-semester course, meeting three times a week for a total of three

ARCHAEOLOGY IN NEAR EASTERN LANDS

PRESENTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

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Copyright 1982, Dragomir Obradovid

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PART I. THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaelogical Sites Individually Considered

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Natural Features and Geography

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The interest for the study of archaeology of ancient Near

The basic material presented in this study is intended to

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ARCHAEOLOGY - A KEY TO THE PAST

much more than that. It is the scientific study of material remains

The Birth of Near Eastern Archaeoloa

investigations into the history of this world began in the lands

where the earliest civilizations had flourished - the valley of the

has fulfilled the dream of all archaeologists, because it possesses a

The Discovery of the Archaeological Keys

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The Rosetta Stolle, containing a decree issued in honor of king

James J. Hester, Introduction to Archaeology (New York:

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These inscriptions were trilingual, being written in (1) Old Persian,

These two great achievements opened up the historical records

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Glyn Daniel, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (New York:

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scratches on the rock, painted on the wall of tombs, or marked in

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is derived from the Greek expression

meaning "the Land Between the Rivers." A term taken

over from the Hebrew plim niN ('cram

meaning high place

Martin A. Beek, Atlas of Mesopotamia (London: Nelson, 1962),

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Although the history of the

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Civilization Began in Mesopotamia

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writing was common, and monumental works of architecture were being

Under Hammurabi the civilization of the lower Tigris-Euphrates

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The Development of Mesopotamian Archaeology

Early Travellers and Diplomats

BENJAMIN BAR JONA of Tudela,

learned rabbi, from the kingdom of Navarre in Spain. Leaving home

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of antiquities he accumulated for the British Museum aroused an

The First Excavators