A History of Sumer and Akkad. L. W. King
II
THE SITES OF EARLY CITIES AND THE RACIAL CHARACTER OF THEIR INHABITANTS
The excavations which have been conducted on the sites of early Babylonian cities since the middle of last century have furnished material for the reconstruction of their history, but during different periods and for different districts it varies considerably in value and amount. While little is known of the earlier settlements in Akkad, and the very sites of two of its most famous cities have not yet been identified, our knowledge of Sumerian history and topography is relatively more complete. Here the cities, as represented by the mounds of earth and débris which now cover them, fall naturally into two groups. The one consists of those cities which continued in existence during the later periods of Babylonian history. In their case the earliest Sumerian remains have been considerably disturbed by later builders, and are now buried deep beneath the accumulations of successive ages. Their excavation is consequently a task of considerable difficulty, and, even when the lowest strata are reached, the interpretation of the evidence is often doubtful. The other group comprises towns which were occupied mainly by the Sumerians, and, after being destroyed at an early date, were rarely, or never, reoccupied by the later inhabitants of the country. The mounds of this description, so far as they have been examined, have naturally yielded fuller information, and they may therefore be taken first in the following description of the early sites.
The greater part of our knowledge of early Sumerian history has been derived from the wonderfully successful series of excavations carried out by the late M. de Sarzec at Tello,[1] between 1877 and 1900, and continued for some months in 1903 by Captain (now Commandant) Gaston Cros. These mounds mark the site of the city of Shirpurla or Lagash, and lie a few miles to the north-east of the modern village of Shatra, to the east of the Shatt el-Hai, and about an hour's ride from the present course of the stream. It is evident, however, that the city was built upon the stream, which at this point may originally have formed a branch of the Euphrates,[2] for there are traces of a dry channel upon its western side.
The name of the city is expressed by the signs shir-pur-la (-ki), which are rendered in a bilingual incantation-text as Lagash.[3] Hitherto it has been generally held that Shirpurla represented the Sumerian name of the city, which was known to the later Semitic inhabitants as Lagash, in much the same way as Akkad was the Semitic name for Agade, though in the latter case the original name was taken over. But the prolonged excavations carried out in the mounds of Tello have failed to bring to light any Babylonian remains later than the period of the kings of Larsa who were contemporaneous with the First Dynasty of Babylon. At that time the city appears to have been destroyed, and to have lain deserted and forgotten until it was once more inhabited in the second century B.C. Thus it is difficult to find a reason for a second name. We may therefore assume that the place was called Lagash by the Sumerians, and that the signs which can be read as Shirpurla represent a traditional ideographic way of writing the name among the Sumerians themselves. There is no difficulty in supposing that the city's name and the way of writing it were preserved in Babylonian literature, although its site had been forgotten.
The group of mounds and hillocks which mark the site of the ancient city and its suburbs form a rough oval, running north and south, and measuring about two and a half miles long and one and a quarter broad. During the early spring the limits of the city are clearly visible, for its ruins stand out as a yellow spot in the midst of the light green vegetation which covers the surrounding plain. The grouping of the principal mounds may be seen in the accompanying plan, in which each contour-line represents an increase of one metre in height above the desert level. The three principal mounds in the centre of the oval, marked on the plan by the letters A, K, and V,[4] are those in which the most important discoveries have been made. The mound A, which rises steeply towards the north-west end of the oval, is known as the Palace Tell, since here was uncovered a great Parthian palace, erected immediately over a building of Gudea, whose bricks were partly reused and partly imitated. In consequence of this it was at first believed to be a palace of Gudea himself, an error that was corrected on the discovery that some of the later bricks bore the name of Hadadnadinakhe in Aramean and Greek characters, proving that the building belonged to the Seleucid era, and was probably not earlier than about 130 B.C. Coins were also found in the palace with Greek inscriptions of kings of the little independent province or kingdom of Kharakene, which was founded about 160 B.C. at the mouth of the Shatt el-'Arab. But worked into the structure of this late palace were the remains of Gudea's building, which formed part of E-ninnû, the temple of the city-god of Lagash. Of Gudea's structure a gateway and part of a tower are the portions that are best preserved,[5] while under the south-east corner of the palace was a wall of the rather earlier ruler Ur-Bau.[6]
TELLO after de Sarzec
In the lower strata no other earlier remains were brought to light, and it is possible that the site of the temple was changed or enlarged at this period, and that in earlier times it stood nearer the mound K, where the oldest buildings in Tello have been found. Here was a storehouse of Ur-Ninâ,[7] a very early patesi of the city and the founder of its most powerful dynasty, and in its immediate neighbourhood were recovered the most important monuments and inscriptions of the earlier period. Beneath Ur-Ninâ's storehouse was a still earlier building,[8] and at the same deep level above the virgin soil were found some of the earliest examples of Sumerian sculpture that have yet been recovered. In the mound V, christened the "Tell of the Tablets," were large collections of temple-documents and tablets of accounts, the majority of them dating from the period of the Dynasty of Ur.
The monuments and inscriptions from Tello have furnished us with material for reconstructing the history of the city with but few gaps from the earliest age until the time when the Dynasty of Isin succeeded that of Ur in the rule of Sumer and Akkad. To the destruction of the city during the period of the First Dynasty of Babylon and its subsequent isolation we owe the wealth of early records and archaeological remains which have come down to us, for its soil has escaped disturbance at the hands of later builders except for a short interval in Hellenistic times. The fact that other cities in the neighbourhood, which shared a similar fate, have not yielded such striking results to the excavator, in itself bears testimony to the important position occupied by Lagash, not only as the seat of a long line of successful rulers, but as the most important centre of Sumerian culture and art.
DOORWAY OF A BUILDING AT TELLO ERECTED BY GUDEA, PATESI OF SHIRPURLA; ON THE LEFT IS PART OF A LATER BUILDING OF THE SELEUCID ERA. Déc. en Chald., pl. 53 (bis).
The mounds of Surghul and El-Hibba, lying to the north-east of Tello and about six miles from each other, which were excavated by Dr. Koldewey in 1887, are instances in point. Both mounds, and particularly the former, contain numerous early graves beneath houses of unburnt brick, such as have subsequently been found at Fâra, and both cities were destroyed by fire probably at the time when Lagash was wiped out. From the quantities of ashes, and from the fact that some of the bodies appeared to have been partially burnt, Dr. Koldewey erroneously concluded that the mounds marked the sites of "fire-necropoles," where he imagined the early Babylonians burnt their dead, and the houses he regarded as tombs.[9] But in no period of Sumerian or Babylonian history was this practice in vogue. The dead were always buried, and any appearance of burning must have been produced during the destruction of the cities by fire. At El-Hibba remains were also visible of buildings