one of the four or five large canals once bringing life and fertility to the fields of Nippur; that, furthermore, a large number of the Jewish captives carried away by Nebuchadrezzar after the destruction of Jerusalem were settled in the plains around this city; and that even Ezekiel himself, while admonishing and comforting his people, and holding out to them Jehovah's mercy and never-failing promise of a brighter future, stood in the very shadow of Babylonia's ancient national sanctuary, the crumbling walls of the great temple of Bêl at Nippur. The beginning and end of Old Testament history thus point to Nippur as the background and theater for the first and final acts in the great drama of divine selection and human rejection in which Israel played the leading role." In the same article, Professor Hilprecht indicated in a few words what was done at Nuffar by the first three of the four expeditions sent out from Philadelphia since 1888. "It was comparatively easy," he said, "to get a clear idea of the extent of the city and the life in its streets during the last six centuries preceding our era. Each of the four expeditions to Nuffar contributed its peculiar share to a better knowledge of this latest period of Babylonian history, particularly, however, the third and the present campaigns. But it was of greater importance to follow up the traces of a very early civilization, which, accidentally, we had met during our first brief campaign in 1889. By means of a few deep trenches, the second expedition, in the following year, had brought to light new evidence that a considerable number of ancient monuments still existed in the lower strata of the temple mound. The third expedition showed that the monuments, while numerous, are mostly very fragmentary, thereby offering considerable difficulties to the decipherer and historian. But it also showed that a number of platforms running through the temple mound, and made of baked bricks, frequently bearing inscriptions, enable us to fix the age of the different strata of this mound with great accuracy. The two lowest of these platforms found were the work of kings and patesis (priest-kings) of 4000-3800 B. C., but, to our great astonishment, they did not represent the earliest trace of human life at Nippur. There were not less than about thirty feet of rubbish below them, revealing an even earlier civilization, the beginning and development of which lie considerably before the times of Sargon the Great (3800 B. C.) and Narâm-Sin, who had been generally regarded as half-mythical persons of the first chapter of Babylonian history."