Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1921-05-19
Bx O. b. xEEEER

man to talk to- And at the Pied
mont hotel Tuesday morning I had
the pleasure of talking to a~man of
whom it has been said, he stepped
the limits Of civilization back two
thousand years
DR.. John P. Peters. of the Unfver-
sity of the South, the archaeo1ogiSt
who headed the University of Penn
sy1vania expedition that began the
excavations at Nippur in 1888. is in
town for three lectures, Tuesday,
Wednesday and Thursday evenings,
at Emory university.
DR.. Peters is getting along in
years now-a small. sturdy gentle
man with thin white hair. He wore
o black skull cap indoors and smok-
ed a mild cigar as we talked. And
he told me things that made my
eyes stick out; not things he had
read which are the basis for most
of the optical protrusions the aver
age man can cause, but things he
had seen. DR.. Peters dwelt but light
ly on the times he and his compa-
triots almost were massacred in the
Babylonian valley; that was a cheap
sort of adventure, he seemed to
think.
But when they finally got into the
treasure-trove of Nippur; when, aft
er months Of toll and danger and
disappointment and bad luck, word
was flashed about the camp that
they were finding something at
last
Story of Treasure
DR.. Peters eyes sparkled and his
hands trembled, as he told Of that
store of treasure; the stock of sort
of old-t1me jeweler. who made
".votive offerings" for kings to the
temples; the period could be estab-
lished accurately by the names of
the kings an lapis-lazuli and mall
achite.
How long ago? Oh, some four
tian era" he said, carelessly. I'VE
were very lucky. 1t was near the
top of the mound You see, the
RESERVATIONS s, are in layers This age
houses of mud-brick crumbled and
settled down. Ibis workman's shop
might well have been far down. But
1t was near the top; they hadn't built
over his former site in many GEN.
fury, while the wood chest in which
were his treasures moulded away
moulded away in it's packed earthen
covering. You could trace the out
line of the wood, where it had been
In the ciayst that surrounded it. And
the stock was a treasure indeed"
1t was at noon Of a Saturday that
the find was made; and usually
they stopped at noon on Saturdays.
But not that. Saturday. They work
ed until dark; and then went at it
with Sundays dawn, with a heavy
guard of Arab warriors about the
place.
The varied materials found in the
stock established the fact that there
was at that time, 1,400 years be-
and wide; glass stained with cobalt.
that must have come from China;
lapis-lazuli from here; malachite
from there; ivory from yonder-im-
mensely important commercial data
for the pages of the worlds history.
Said He Was Wrong
"And they told me 1 was on the wrong
SCENT" chuckled DR.. Peters. They
said I was all wrong. And for years
after that had to stand alone on
the era of the old King sargon-
who many said was a myth, and then
placed him at 1000 B. G. 1 didn't.
They were calculating him from the
date Of his grandson, Naram-Sid,
whose name was found by king in
working over the foundations of a
temple in another city, about 500 B.
c. This king, who was more of a
reformer than a warrior, left an in
scription that he had found Naram-
Sid's name, the first time it had been
seen in eighty generations. The sci
entists were using forty years to the
generations; but 1 calculated many
times and found the average duration
~
ty years. 1 knocked off 1000
years from the period Of Naram-Sid
and his grandfather, the great Sar-
gon-I hate tod to do it; but we must
take the truth as we find 1t. 1 set
them around $500 B: C.--and cor
roborative evidence since has prac-
tica1ly settled the matter
These dates are rather staggering
to the layman. And when DR.. Peters
told of finding trades Of a great Jew
Nippur, from the time when Ne
buchadnezzar overcame the Jews and
took them into captFvity-the same
old ACKNOWLEDGMENT who. was the
pioneer of all breakfast-food cranks
and went out and ate grass-I asked
It always had seemed fearfully
long time ago to me-back in Bible
times, 1 called it; so long ago that
even the long arm of science couldn't
reach it.
Dr. Peters chuckled again.
ooh, that was not very long ago
b98 B. c. he said.
Comparatively recently, it now ap-
after the shop fell in on the stock-in-
trade of the old jeweler discovered
by DR.. Peters. And the old city of
much farther back than that-so
much farther.
Were Great Writers
'"They were great writers, those
old chaps" said DR.. Peters. They
invented the. cunieform systematic
wedge-system- of making records
on clay tablets. The great temple at
had it's library It had it's text
books. There were songs-on clay
\ tablets. There were bookkeeping
sytems. We could tell when this
man and that, working at the tenn
pie, had run away from his job and
= his name had been taken off the pay
roll. They gave receipts to men who
brought sheep there for food or sac
j rice. They were very business-like
four or five thousand years ago"
er, into the old city of Nippur, not
1 far from Babylon, between the Ii
girls and the 'Euphrates.
How old do you suppose that city
really is?' l asked.
colder than the written record ex-
tends" said the doctor. 1--WE can &C
back to Sargon accurately; say 2,80(
B. c.. or 400 years ago. Nippur
I was as old asl probably older than
4 another city built on what was Their
j the end of the Persian gulf. That
gulf has receded at the rate of 100
by the Tigris and the Euphrates anG
other rivers. Calculated in this man.
ner, by its distance from the gull
now, that city must have been BULL