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110 A MOST REMARKABLE VISION. Professor Hermann V. Hilprecht, of the University of Pennsylvania, had charge of the excavations at Nippur.

One Saturday evening, about the middle of March, 1893, he had been wearying himself, as he had done so often in the weeks preceding,, in the vain attempt to decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the finger-rings of some Babylonian. The labor was much increased by the fact that the fragments presented remains only of characters and lines, and that dozens of similar fragments had been found in the ruins of the Temple of Bel at Nippur, with which nothing could be done; that in this case, furthermore, he had never had the originals before him, but only a hasty sketch made by one of the members of the expedition sent by the University of Pennsylvania to Babylonia.

He could not say more than that the fragments, taking into consideration the place in which they were found and the peculiar characteristics of the cuneiform characters preserved upon them, sprang from the Cassite period of Babylonian history {circa 1 700-1 140 B.C.); moreover, as the first character of the third line of the first fragment seemed to be KU, he ascribed the fragment, with an interrogation point, to King Kurigalzu, while he placed the other fragment as unclassifiable with other Cassite fragments upon a page of his book where he published the unclassifiable fragments. The proofs already lay before him but he was far from satisfied. The whole problem passed yet again through his mind that March evening before he placed his mark of approval under the last correction in the book. Even then he had come to no conclusion. About midnight, weary and exhausted, he went to bed and was soon in deep sleep. Then he dreamed the following remarkable dream:

A tall, thin priest of the old pre-Christian Nippur, about