volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

268 Tablets Preserved in Jars.
and who seemed to be willing to give us information
about the " finds " they made there. According to
them, there were many thousands of contract tablets
and business documents in clay cases, stamped with
impressions of the seals of witnesses. The biggest of
these were deposited in large unbaked earthenware
jars,^ which stood on the ground, and the smaller were
stacked in heaps on slabs of stone laid fiat on the earth.
They tried to move the jars without emptying them,
but the jars collapsed under the weight of their contents,
and many tablets were broken by falling on the ground.
The chambers in which these jars were found were
6 cubits long, 3 cubits wide, and 5 cubits deep. They
had no doors, and the only access to them was through
the roof. In one chamber they found rows of tablets
lying on slabs, as if they had been arranged there in
some special order. On the ground below them they
picked up scores of pyramidal clay objects bearing
seal-impressions ; in the apex of each of these were
the remains of a thin piece of fibrous wood, and it is
probable that each pyramidal object was attached by
means of the wood to a special tablet, and served as
a label, but fell to the ground when the wood rotted.
A considerable number of seal-cylinders were found
whilst these men were digging at Der, and they gave
me the name of a European gentleman in BaghdM
who was their chief customer. Later I entered into
negotiations with him, and I acquired from him about
thirty very fine cylinders of various periods, the oldest
dating from about 2400 B.C. Among them were the
cylinder-seal of Adda, the scribe, which is engraved
with a remarkable mythological scene, not found elsewhere,
and the cylinders engraved with a scene of the
Sunrise, in which Shamash, the Sun-god, is depicted
issuing from the portals of heaven.^
1 Many of the contract tablets at Abu Habbah were found in jars
arranged in rows on slate shelves ; see my note in Zeitschrift far
Assyriologie, vol. iii, p. 211 ff.
e Brit. Mus. Nos. 89,115, 89,110, 89,531 and 89,548. See Guide
to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities, p. 160.