| OCR Text |
Show i'3 SNV'?VW "And God -id 'V r - S ' t ,U,V - -t unto Noah, . , . " - - the end of all C3', ? . - , fS - - -v" ' ' S flesh is come 4? f VV - : f- JA And behold, I t' ' ? - ( Cf i t - them with - . 'i i - - - make thee an All That Remams of Ur of the I ' , ' " ' ' 1 2 Ark of gopher j CI aldees, fro- an Old f ' V , s i' , wood." Engraving. L - ' V N ' V I l Gen, ch. vi., v. 13, 14. ,- he Dearch ,VX w"? Ns- ,v r 1 the World L, UT7 ?. " ' w J Catastrophe OSt Ur fj ' .J WhoseMemory - I , ' J Persists in the of the p.- -- E;t. C! I 1 r I ( I , J and Whose ilcilQ CCS 1 0 T" 8 'Steu' iihMfcaa,... .ba Original Storjr May Now Be 41 : 7 1 J " One of the Clay Tablets from Nippur, on Which Was Found. TJilS W OVLCX S Found Evidence of the Existence of the Oldest F. T 1 Library of Man Buried Somewhere in irst; .Library Ancient' Crumbling Ur- and Its Revelations of tlie Gigantic . Catastroplie Wkose Memory Is Found 111 tke Sacred History of Every Race and Tribe J . W - K v --r-- J k' . . k - y J ' - - . ' ' x V ' , ' V ' , t . - Z7 ty A w v N : sl , V1 I v., , r -v , - '4 f ' ,1 1 N -1 ' - " V ' 9 !i i V i -1 . i J ' . t , -lij - ,k ' , . U Vv. f i ? - aVtC: i r ,1 -v ' r- i , 4 . V . . 1 , f - ' I i I ! 1 , , ' w ' f . ' . V- . v: x - - - i P ;--r- . . J "And Noah weni forth, ana his tons, and his wife, a nd his sons' wives with him; every beast, every creep ing thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the Ark." Gen, ch. viii., v. 14, 18, 19. ' THIS great world-n-ar is going to build as veil as destroy. It promises to solve more than one new problem Ixiodern life, and is quite as sure to shed, i 3 flood of light upon questions which have seemed almost past human understanding. . Professor Langdon of the University of Sinsylvania has pointed the way to a most ' promising field of investigation and dis-rovery. dis-rovery. He has discovered upon a very ' nareful and close study of some of the thousands of Babylonian clay tablets In tii o museum of the University, brought , as they were from the great library "of Nippur, that some of the most important inscriptions were actually copies of still more ancient tablets, which are as yet undiscovered. un-discovered. And Professor Langdon has done very much more, for he has ascertained ascer-tained the very site at which the American excavator must 'plant his spade, if he is to bring to light tablets which will astound the religions world, carrying back the his- tory of human thought lliousands of years. References upon the tablets of Nippur to slill older tablets, which were the originals, orig-inals, of which these are comparatively . late copies, have proved io him and to other scholars that if the originals are to be uncovered the excavators will have to dig long and deeply upon the site of ancient an-cient Ur. Ur was the city from which, according to Genesi3. r 31, Abraham emigrated when he vent to the Promised Land, with his family and his nephew, Lot. Fortunately for the projected work the site of Ur haa been luiown ever since 1S47, when " Sir Heury Rawliuson, the famous - and original British Babylonian scholar, deciphered inscribed tablets found in the ruin mounds of what the Arabs called Mughelr, proving that here once stood the mighty city of Ur. with its majestic tem- pie to Sin, the Moon-God. ; thbJt lies on the west bank of the Eu-"' Eu-"' we rile p. half way between Babylon and TF-V" Persian Gulf. It was undoubtedly the Iat. capital of Babylon at the earliest TI,y-iod of the chiliiatiea of that, powerful ,y aionarchv, and thus helps to bear out jro',li'.-ofe!-sor Langdon's suggestion that here II, 0 1iP be .found the primaeval originals of '"' ''hat extensive literature which furnished H,,y the Hebrews the material out of which ;iius ,y ,,ul,t up tue e:iriier chapters of the s in,lu.ila itself. III, c1 V or-more than sixty years, or ever since -r the first translation of the Deluge Tab- w,ierJ w as made by George Smith, scholars ilry lKr recognized the more than striking lU"ks id;irll5' between the story of the flood. :nemy,v fj 'ln (he BUlle .lnd as deciphered no il',tlt tle cay (ajiietj; found in the ruins 'ro'-,fnMiv.iieveh. But bow the Hebrews pos-irom pos-irom tit,s j themselves of this very ancient "p ,ho11. a ic tradition was a constant puzsle "to thuV Heuts of the Bible, who had no record The r- J ti-iem cf any contact between the nio:uis bn.-!v-s and the city of Nineveh in very nk-kci tr llt times. Lire able ,nv a cliolar has desired to dii over the bam Vtiins of Ur. simply because If had been falling buihome of Abraham, and not for a mo-portion mo-portion of; suspecting that here was all that will be suf ssor Langdon promises, but the Turk-ine Turk-ine whcreiovernmenl refused to grant a firman, ind makevTmisslon. because that would have Jusi'whi'" t't;'l ihry would give adequate nro Mr;svi : I; ti .mviU'!ir party, g4 'hat ecajev ; not in a position to offer, hi- cause the wild Arabs of Southern Babylonia Baby-lonia barely acknowledged the rule of the Sultan, and preyed upon any unwary travellers trav-ellers who were so foolish as to come that way. Matters promise very differently as a result re-sult of (he war. Great Britain has been forcing her way through Mesopotamia,' and unv?r her rule will come peace and protection pro-tection for Europeans and Americans as well as for the native Arabs, who will be compelled to become law-abiding. The prospect is therefore most encouraging for some splendid work at Ur and other sites in that important district, the very moment that peace is secured. The ready spade of the excavator will be at work at the earliest possible moment, and from the dry sands and lofty mounds of these ruins may come new revelations of the life and literature of the third, fourth and possibly the fifth millennium before the Christian Era. For Abraham lived about 21.00 B. C., and that was by no means the beginning of Babylonian civilization and culture. ( From that ancient time will come, according ac-cording to Professor Langdon, Dr. Sayce and other scholars, the great original tablets tab-lets on which the first of the Babylonian priests wrote down their tale of the deluge, del-uge, man's early attempt to solve the problem prob-lem of sinners and righteous men on earth. In the later version and copies already translated we know that the Babylonian Noah built his ark, took aboard his family fam-ily and the animals which were to be kept alive, and that be sent fortlv.a raven and a dove, just as the Noah of the Bible did. But how much closer the older version will come to the Bible narrative, we do not know. If it is found, however, it will go far toward establishing the fact that Abraham Abra-ham took the story with him when he emigrated emi-grated to Palestine, and that in the Promised Prom-ised Land the story was worked over, and preserved, until it reached the hands of Moses, and other editors, many genera-lions genera-lions afterward. New discoveries that back un and sup port a remarkable prophecy made two years ago by Dr. Stephen Herbert Langdon. Lang-don. one of the world's foremost Sumeriaa scholars, have just been made at the Museum Mu-seum of the University of Pennsylvania in the translation of ancient cuneiform tablets written in the dynasty of Isin, but based on the religious practices of a still earlier period in Babylonian history. Dr. Langdon is now serving with the British army in France. Before he left this country coun-try he was curator of the Babylonian section sec-tion of the University Museum and he Is also a tutcr of Jeeus College. Oxford. For the best part of a lifetime Dr. Langdon Lang-don has been studying and translating the cuneiform tablets of the world's earliest earli-est civilization, from Nippur and other cities of ancient Babylonia, once inhabited by - the Sumeriatis. in the British Museum and, in more recent years, (he University Museum. Mu-seum. His and other discoveries of tablets in the Temole library of Nippur and in the library of surbauipsl have Elvpn (o the world olume? of ioiorma'ion within the last decade ef the earliest civilization of which wrillea record has been found. But in the readiug of these tablets, some of them fi:lly five thousand years old. Dr. T.sugdon found so many references to earlier earl-ier works sfcat a !iul ie.-s Shan two years ago jo became convinced that the great odes and liturgies of the Sumerians ana later Babylonians were either copied from, or inspired by, a library of knowledge still older. In expressing this belief, he said: "Nippur is no longer a virgin field. Excavations Ex-cavations have been made by the German, the English and the American museums at other points,. ton. But I am convinced that ' m spite of nil the great discoveries which have been .made in the last dozen years the work so far accomplished has hardly scratched the surface. Nipour is In the midst of a large number of buried cities that probably . were populous wlT thS ! ' y- of. Among ffe V W them, to mer. T ftl tion but. two, IV t ,t4 are Ur of the 'ft j. Chaldees, and f-y,, 4 1.1 V & Warka - the i lJ '4 A fc $ Ararat of the I1 A 'MSHf" A 7 Bible. Accord- 4 VT $ J fyl ing to Genesis HWinSHlHaM UroftheChal- An Ancient Baby- JXIE 'of , Seal Show- Abraham." ing the Ark on . (The u"ive'3- the Right. 1 1 y Museum has just now made public a remarkable partial verification verifica-tion of Dr. Langdon's ideas from the very people he has been studying so long the Sumerians. Just before he returned to England to enter the army he discovered and translated a series of tablets containing contain-ing a "Liturgy to the Word." From the religious point of view it is important chiefly in that it carries back the idea of Logos some two thousand years. But from tho popular viewpoint the interesting point is that a great part of the lengthy liturgy now translated for the first time is devoted de-voted to a lamenta'-'on over the destruction destruc-tion of Ur. At the same time the Museum has made public a brief account by Dr. A. H. Sayce, (he noted Oxford scholar, of some Cappa-docian Cappa-docian tablets found m the University Museum. Mu-seum. He states: "We now know the date (o which the tablets must be assigned. The forms of the characters and the proper nam6s belong be-long to the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur. before Christ 2500. and one of them is dated in the reign of a king of that dynasty. dy-nasty. They show that at that early epoch eastern Asia Minor was under the control of the Babylonian government and that Babylonian civilization was firmly planted there." In th'3 region, inhabited by the Htt-(ites, Htt-(ites, women had almost the same status as men. Nearly every reference on cue of the tablets to a prefect, who ruled over the cities, is followed by a reference to ; the prefectess. or woman mayor. ' Although the discovery by Dr. Sayce is the first definite indication that women enjoyed positions of authority in the government gov-ernment of ancient civilization, sharing with tn en rresnmaWy on a basis ef e'lud'-it.v. e'lud'-it.v. tbr lore of all Fahyionia '? r'-plete wi'h records showing that woman's place was almost as important in those days as it is to-day. and far more so than up to the beginning of the nineteenth epptury. And in manv respects the law? of jumer and Babylon regarding worne-, verp f-jr supcrior from the viev point of lae Woman :o present day statutes. J'opyrigiU. 1 r, s, by Star Company. The best instance of this is found in the large collection of marriage contracts en- graved in clay tablets in the University Museum's collection. Hundreds of these semi-private documents were found in the temple archives at N'ippur. They show that when a wnisn married she entered into an flahorat" civil contract v.i'h bT husband, the main purpose of which seems to have been to protect per legal rights in any difficulty lit at might arise iat'r. The laws of al! Batv-icnia would seem rira.-tic to (he worst, victims of p.limouy to-'j'ty. One prov;.-,im in litem v. as that hon p rcD dhorced a. v-rittsti lie must, pay alimony even i hough site married Great Itrituin Rights Reserved. again, provided he got. bis divorce for the purpose of taking another wife, or for any ; reason not her fault. Also, at the time of 1 his death under these circumsta.nces she was entitled to a definite share of bis estate. Officials of the University Museum arc inclined to believe that further mifi) of '"anpadocian tablets in their possession, and excavations in other sections of Mesopotamia, Meso-potamia, will show that even further bad: in antiquity women enjoyed a great share of influence and authority. One reason for this p the fact, that the most important God of the Sumerians and Babylonians was I.-htar. also known a-: Nintud, who. according to the ancient legend, created men out of clay. Ft war, wher (he A""7T-iars A""7T-iars came down from Nineveh aud tha cult of Ish'ar began to lose ground that, woman started to lose her ancien. Independence Inde-pendence and place of equality with mrm. Cr ppadocla. as it, is now known, th9 home of ths. Hiditr's, was. under tbr control con-trol of r.;ihykw'. Ihe r itcrivery by ttr, tr'siyce thai woini iiad twinoHiy in t:te govern rccnt thrre is intcrc-tin as tending to show thai the ancient Babylonians even e.xteuded the unusual woman's rights of their tirat lo the women nf subject nations. na-tions. J.(. is intr-rottinc to note in this, con-psst'lion con-psst'lion (htjt the Arrr'-'ni.wns of fo-dt?;' lain) to he the. direct dc3cerJiiat& of ilist UitUtcs. |
