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 on these ledges. Where there are jar fragments they were probably in clay vases on these ledges. In the use of such rooms for the storage of oil and wine they were probably floored across with wood in which huge jars were set to their necks. The clay jar was one of the common receptacles for tablets in Assyria and was commonest of all apparently for the small collections of family tablets such as were found often at Nippur apparently buried under the floor of a private house.

It appears thus that already in Abraham's time and long before, the system was in full operation which leads one to expect in every city both public and private document collections, religious collections and school collections.