The San Francisco call., 1910-06-12
SehMW NAeYSAM z1SbHa ObHuon
%NlH NNW Translated of
the

reed wrote an account OF the deuge he had learned
1t in the service of EMIL the father of the gods"
;: -Four thousand years have passed since that wise
man Of the east composed his work in strange, wedge
shaped characters And now wise man of the west.
Prof. Herman Y. Hilprecht Assyrioogist of the Uni
Eersy OF Pennsylvania has discovered and translated
atfagment OF the cuneiform tablet The result is the
Oldest and most startling verihcation of the biblical
story OF the food thus far known Professor Hprecht
IS engaged in what might be called without ofense the
Jigsaw puzzle OF the ages The University of Penn
sylvana largely through his efforts collection
Of $4,000 broken specimens of cunefornn writing. un
earthed at Aippur So far only $4,000 have been de-
ciPhered and classified, for the task is monumental
=. At any moment while carrying on this great work
Professor Hprecht is likely to make an even more
wonderful discovery than his latest triumph Among
the remaining $1,000 pieces he may find the missing
parts Of the food story may fit together authentic
accounts of nations and rulers of whose very exist
enoe the world is still in ignorance He is playing the
most fascinating game that science has to offer
This has been Professor Hilprechts life mission to
let in the light that dim and clouded where
to the backward sweeping eye history vanishes in the
mist He has rescued 40 kings from oblivion has given
TO Us their Names attributes, wars civilization and
records. He has pushed away by hundreds of years
the veil of mystery beyond which human knowledge
does not reach. He has traced and reconstructed
lordy cities that dust when Esau sold his birth
right He has conjured up whole epochs when for
gotten races strove and lived and loved
In his piecing Of clew TO clew, fragment to frag-
ment Professor Hilprecht Is like great master de-
tecrve concerned with the problem of happenings in
early times Here he unearths fact there another
fact, and he goes on he forms story into which
all his facts will fit. Out of buried ruins and some
chips of clay he resurrects empire tells who its
people were what they did, what they achieved what
they were interested in With his detective sense and
his gsaw scraps he builds pictures of ancient nations
which but for him would remain nameless and un-
known.
These clay scraps the broken bits of Babylo-
man books. 1t is if some one should enter the
Astor library and tear all the volumes into tiny slips
mix them together and bury them then as if an in
vestigator 1000 years from should dig up part
OF them and try to put them together That is prac-
tcally what happened at the spot where Professor
Hilprecht excavated his scraps An invading enemy
sacked the city Of Nppur and willfuy destroyed the
clay tablets which the priests had kept the Htera-
ture of the country.
MAKING MASTERPIECE
When Professor Hilprecht sits down before a heap
of his shattered gsaw bits of clay and tries to patch
them together anything is possible. dozen frag-
ments might give him masterpiece that would de-
light and astonish the world But he has just about
much chance of getting complete tablet as the
imaginary investigator the site of the Astor library
would have of piecing a whole book out of paper
scraps, and no more. Eleven of those fragments NAV
be scattered among the $1,000 Or they may still be
under the barren hills where Nippur stood, not yet
brought to light.
And Professor Hilprecht has other difficulties to
face These jigsaw bits clean and clear with
smooth sharp edges They are worn and defaced
covered with sediment, caked with nitre CRYSTALS
drawn out of the substance of the clay injured by
their 1000 years of burial The greatest care has to
be taken with them lest they crumbe and become lost
for all time. Then, too they written in different
languages and in different hands
Many times he upon one little fragment which
will not ht with any others; the parts that go with it
can not be found He translates the few incomplete
lines on the fragment and finds, it may be- that he
holds tiny scrap out of great work work that
would be of the utmost interest to christendom 1t
Is tantaizing, this hint of a missing treasure Per
haps the rest of be found day. but at pres
eat he go farther with this particular puzzle
Suppose that imaginary investigator found pas
sage out Of Hamlet among the ruins of the Astor
library and could find the rest He would be in
the same position in which Professor Hilprecht is
sometimes placed when going over his Babyonian
fragments
It was just such thing as this that happened in
the present of the Babylonian deluge story He
came upon piece of large tablet on which priest
Of EMIL had set down the whole national epic of
Babyonia 1000 years ago The account of the deluge
a chapter, to speak, in this epic Professor
Hilprechts fragment was just paragraph out of the
chapter, and far from complete that But the great
point that he could prove two facts-the para
graph dealt with the deluge according to Babyonian
beliefs, and its writing antedated the writing of the
Old Testament by 1000 years or thereabouts
The significance of this find can hardly be over
estimated, for the passage in the Babylonian tablet
which he brought to light corroborates the corre-
spending passage in the bible vvidy in every essen
tal. while of the details are identical Yet the
priest of EMIL wrote under different traditions and in
spratons, the mouthpiece of different and older
religion. The language in which he composed his
work has not been used in common speech for 5000
years