[Illustration: FIG. 92.—“Pre-Sargonic cup.” [Illustration: FIG. 93.—“Earliest vase from Nippur.” (Hilprecht, _Explorations_, p. 407.)] Although stone-ware appears to have been used more frequently in the earlier periods of Mesopotamian civilization, it must be not supposed that terra-cotta pottery was not also used by the ancient Sumerians and early Semites. A vast quantity of pottery comprising bowls, phials, flat vases, chalice goblets, oval pots and vessels of every description, size, shape and form has been recovered from Tellô, Nippur, Fâra and other recently excavated sites in Babylonia, and indeed so numerous and so manifold are the vessels in question that only a long and systematic study of the mass of material now available, as thorough and exhaustive as that made by Professor Flinders Petrie of Egyptian pottery, would justify any attempt to classify and date the different specimens. The earlier excavations in Mesopotamia similarly yielded a large number of terra-cotta pots and jars, but unfortunately there is so much uncertainty as to the locality from which many of them came, and even where that is known, there is generally no means of ascertaining in what strata they were found—(as is unhappily also the case with a good deal of the pottery discovered in recent years)—and as they further bear no inscriptions, any attempted systematization in our present state of knowledge is inevitably based largely on unproved and unprovable hypotheses. Two good examples of early pre-Sargonic pottery are seen in Figs. 92, 93. Both the cup (Fig. 92) and the vase (Fig. 93) were discovered in the pre-Sargonic strata at Nippur.[153] Many other interesting specimens of early pottery were discovered on the same site, some being apparently black in colour, others being red. In a room beneath the pavement of Narâm-Sin two vases were brought to light which illustrate the remarkable differences in size and shape exhibited by early Babylonian pottery, one of these vases being bell-shaped and having a flat bottom twice as large in diameter as its mouth, while the other, a little over two feet high and one foot nine inches across the top, was decorated with a rope pattern.[154]