volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

126 Colonel Talbot's Influence.
In another house I examined a second fine collection
of early Babylonian tablets, which came from the same
place and were of the same period as those which I
bought in 1888. These also I bought at a reasonable
price, and when the time for paying for them arrived I
found that they belonged to the three former watchmen
of the Trustees, who had vowed they would never sell
me any more tablets. They were most anxious for me
to take the tablets with me, and they said that they still
regarded themselves as servants of the British Government
though the Mijlis {i.e., the Committee of the
Trustees) no longer paid them for their devoted services !
They said they knew of the existence of other large
collections of tablets, and that if I could stay in Baghdad
for three months they would bring me enough tablets
to load one of Lynch's steamers. Of course they
exaggerated, but I was sure that there were many
hundreds of fine tablets buried in the basements of
houses in Baghdad and Hillah, and that £5,000 would
have bought them all. I greatly regretted that I had
not the necessary money, especially as the general
feeling of the town towards the English was very
friendly. The Wall P^shS, and Colonel Talbot were on
good terms, many difficulties between the Residency
and the Sarayah had been smoothed out, and the fact
that the Wall Pashi had called upon me and that I was
at the Residency as a fellow-guest with the son of the
British Ambassador, caused officials of all kinds quietly
to relax their rules and regulations in my favour. In
one of my conversations with the Wall P&.sh§. I told
him about the altar of Sargon II and the bricks and
bas-reliefs which I had brought down with the Delegate
from Mosul, and he gave orders that no obstacle was
to be placed in the way of their leaving Baghd§.d. When
the time came for me to depart the Customs' officers
came and looked at the objects and asked me a few
reality part of another model of a liver. The texts on the liver bought
at Baghdeld date from the period of Khammurabi, about b,c. 2000.
Similar models with Babylonian inscriptions were found by Winckler
at Boghaz Kioi in 1907. See Jastrow, Jr., Bildermappe, coll. 72, 73.