Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/174

Rh back to the earliest days of Babylonian history. One is an obelisk of a King of Kish who lived, it is said, so far back as B.C. 3850. Another is a bas-relief of the famous Naram Sin carried off from Sippara; a third is a brick of the same king, a possible indication that he was at one time the suzerain of the country, and contributed to the embellishment of its temples. In addition to these, many boundary stones have been found, all relating to land in Chaldaea belonging to the late Cossaean period, which prove how successful the Elamites continued to be in removing their neighbours' landmarks.

Perhaps of greater interest is the glimpse these excavations have afforded of a still more distant past. M. de Morgan found that the Citadel Hill has reached its present altitude of one hundred and twenty feet above the plain entirely by the accumulation of deposit left by successive generations of settlers.

He sank a series of mines of considerable length into the side of the hill, and at various depths, down to 24.90 metres below the surface. The Achaemenian remains reach no farther down than 4.50 metres, and this stratum represents a period extending over 2,500 years. If we assume a similar rate of deposit for the remainder we arrive at more than B.C. 12,000 for the date of the lowest stratum examined. It is very remarkable that it was precisely at this depth, representing in any case an extremely remote period, that he found the most finished pottery, adorned with the most perfect artistic designs; and these, he has no doubt, could not have been produced except in a high state of civilisation. There is some resemblance between these objects and others recently found in Egypt and ascribed to