No less than twenty-one different strata, representing separate periods of occupation, have been noted by the American excavators at various levels within the Nippur mounds,(1) the earliest descending to virgin soil some twenty feet below the present level of the surrounding plain.  The remote date of Nippur’s foundation as a city and cult-centre is attested by the fact that the pavement laid by Naram-Sin in the south-eastern temple-court lies thirty feet above virgin soil, while only thirty-six feet of superimposed debris represent the succeeding millennia of occupation down to Sassanian and early Arab times.  In the period of the Hebrew captivity the city still ranked as a great commercial market and as one of the most sacred repositories of Babylonian religious tradition.  We know that not far off was Tel-abib, the seat of one of the colonies of Jewish exiles, for that lay “by the river of Chebar",(2) which we may identify with the Kabaru Canal in Nippur’s immediate neighbourhood.  It was “among the captives by the river Chebar” that Ezekiel lived and prophesied, and it was on Chebar’s banks that he saw his first vision of the Cherubim.(3) He and other of the Jewish exiles may perhaps have mingled with the motley crowd that once thronged the streets of Nippur, and they may often have gazed on the huge temple-tower which rose above the city’s flat roofs.  We know that the later population of Nippur itself included a considerable Jewish element, for the upper strata of the mounds have yielded numerous clay bowls with Hebrew, Mandaean, and Syriac magical inscriptions;(4) and not the least interesting of the objects recovered was the wooden box of a Jewish scribe, containing his pen and ink-vessel and a little scrap of crumbling parchment inscribed with a few Hebrew characters.(5)

     (1) See Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands, pp. 289
     ff., 540 ff.; and Fisher, Excavations at Nippur, Pt.  I
     (1905), Pt.  II (1906).

     (2) Ezek. iii. 15.

     (3) Ezek. i. 1, 3; iii. 23; and cf. x. 15, 20, 22, and
     xliii. 3.

     (4) See J. A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from
     Nippur, 1913

     (5) Hilprecht, Explorations, p. 555 f.

Of the many thousands of inscribed clay tablets which were found in the course of the expeditions, some were kept at Constantinople, while others were presented by the Sultan Abdul Hamid to the excavators, who had them conveyed to America.  Since that time a large number have been published.  The work was necessarily slow, for many of the texts were found to be in an extremely bad state of preservation.  So it happened that a great number of the boxes containing tablets remained until recently still packed up in the store-rooms of the Pennsylvania Museum.  But under the present energetic Director of the Museum, Dr. G. B. Gordon, the process of arranging and publishing the mass of