Morning journal and courier., 1890-07-31

AeoyIAO1ORys
DR.. Robert Francis Harper of Yale, the
Assyriologist, accompanied the expedition to
Babylonia under DR.. John A. Peters of the
University of Pennsylvania. He is at Chau-
tauqua and has furnished some new and i'm
portant particulars of the expeditions work.
DIR. Peters is still in the east and may not re-
turn to this country for another year.
"Ths scene of our operations" says DR..
Harper, twas at the Niffer, the site of the
ancient Nippur, midway between the Tigris
and Euphrates. The country now is mala-
rial swamp. The mould which we exoavated
for tablets Ia as large as that of Babylon, and
is one Of the biggest In Mssopotamia
The expedition left this country on June
20, 1858. 1t was led by DR.. Peters.
Herman Y: Helprecht and I were the
Assyrialogists, whose business it was to de-
cipher the Inscriptions on Whatever tablets
we found, and Field went as the architect and
surveyor, to classify the ruins. We took
with us q photographer and an Arab inter-
prefer. We reached Niffer in February,
1889. The site is about 121 miles south of
Bagdad. We began digging on February 6.
We found 200 or 300 valuable tablets and
thousands of others whose value has not yet
been ascertained. Our trenches were about
six feet wide and the finds were made at
depths varying from Eve to sixty feet. The
tablets are mostly small ones about the size
of your hand, and they are of baked and un-
baked clay. The inscriptions relate princi-
pally to commercial contracts, such as agree.
ments as to the sale of houses. The
season for excavation ends on April Q. The
country then becomes uninhabitable. We
stayed, however, until April 10, though we
came near losing one of our number. have
not yet shaken off the Mesopotamia fever
since left the expedition. I understand
that DR.. Peters has been exoavating at Alex
andretta with good results. The French ex-
Doo A ~ a
also meeting with success in the neighbor-
hood, but the Turkish government has re-
Gently walked up to the fact that the relics
discovered are of value, and excavations are
hampered by thousand restrictions and
great difficulty is experienced in getting per-
init to work at ALL"
The Peters expedition is the second that
was that under DIR. William Hayes Ward the
expense of which was born by Miss Gather
inc Wolfe. but it made no attempt to exca-
vate. DR.. Harper is now an instructor at
Yale. He is one of fifteen or twenty Assyri-
ologists. One day he told an audience of
some of the efforts of recent re-
searches in Babylonia. "In the tab
1--WE have a Babylonian record of the
deluge more complete than that in Hebrew,
and Of a much earlier date; Babylonian
story resembling that of Moses; psalmody
more extensive than the Hebrew, from which
the Hebrews have taken the chief character
istics of their parallelism, and a history be.
ginning earlier than any parallel with He.
brew history for many years, but more COM
plete. Without it Hebrew history would be
puzzle. We know that the AS
syrian and Babylonion languages are
similar and closely allied to the Hebrew,
not alphabetically, but syllabically and ideo-
graphically. We can read to-day documents
written 5000 years ago in Assyrian. We
have history At first hand, which in Hebrew
is obscure. The theory Of some psychologists
that the polytheistic story on the deluge was
adopted by the Hebrews and received meno-
decipherings of Assyrian tablets may have an
effect on future Testament history"