volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

274 Babylonian Letters and Contracts.
I decided to acquire them/ Bargaining for them was
a slow process, and was complicated by the fact that
I had not a large supply of ready money with me, but
eventually we came to terms, and it was agreed that
Hasan's friend should come back to Der with us, and
that he should be paid for them there. We re-packed
the unique circular tablets, and several Babylonian letters
and contracts which I had to buy with them, and tied
them up in the bags of rice ready to go back with us.
Having now finished the business on account of
which I had come to Al-Kufah, I began to wonder how
we were to get back to Musayyib, and feared that we
should have to be towed up-stream the whole way there.
This was tmdesirable for many reasons ; the chief of these
being that towing was out of the question during the
night, and we were unwilling to draw more general
attention than was necessary to our visit to Al-Kufah.
Whilst Hasan and I were talking the matter over, the
man who sold me the tablets told us that he had come
from Suk ash-Shuyukh in
bound for Musayyib with
a
a
sailing
cargo.
boat which
He had left
was
her
three days before with his tablets, and had come on to
Al-Kufah by canal, and he thought it very probable that
she would arrive that night or early the next morning.
He had made up his mind to come with us to get his
money at Der or Baghdad, and he said it would be
quite easy for us to take passages in the boat when she
arrived, and sail up to Musayyib. This seemed to be
the best solution of the difficulty, and Hasan and I
agreed to take no steps to return until the boat arrived.
This point being settled, I found myself with nothing to
" The round tablets were thirty-five in number. The inscriptions on
them are lists of fields or estates, with their measurements (length,
breadth and superficial area) and statistics. They form part of a large
survey of the cultivable districts in Southern Babylonia, which was
compiled during the reign of Bur-Sin I, King of Ur, about B.C. 2400.
They are dated according to the system employed by the Sumerians,
i.e., by important events and not by regnal years. They were first
exhibited in the Babylonian Room in the British Museum in 1894.
(See Qidde, p. 133 ff.)