As far back as our knowledge of Babylonian history extends the inhabitants of the country were acquainted with copper, and its use lasted century after century into quite recent times. Of a stone age, as I have already said, there is no clear trace. It is true that Captain Cros has sunk shafts at Tello, and reached the virgin soil at a depth of seventeen metres, finding there mace-heads of alabaster and hard stone similar to those of primitive Egypt, as well as other stone objects; but no flint flakes were met with, and the pottery was similar to that of the higher strata.[51] On the other hand, objects of copper, great and small, including helmets and a colossal spear dedicated by a king of Kis, have been disinterred, though nothing of bronze has been discovered among the earlier remains, It was the same at Muqayyar, the ancient Ur, as well as on the site of Eridu, where Taylor found only copper bowls and the like in the graves, even in those of so late a date as to contain objects of iron and an Egyptian scarab.[52] At Niffer, moreover, the ancient Nippur, American excavation has the same tale to tell. According to Dr. Peters,[53] though iron knives, hatchets, spear-heads and arrow-heads have been exhumed, the date of which is said to be between 2000 and 1000 B.C., there is no trace of bronze, the multitudinous objects, which further west would have been of bronze, being here of copper. As at Ur, the copper age lasts down to the very end of the Babylonian kingdom. Hilprecht, on the authority of Haynes, does indeed say[54] that in the very lowest strata of the temple mound, far below the pavements of Sargon and Naram-Sin (B.C. 3750), “fragments of copper, bronze and terra-cotta vessels” were disinterred. But no attempt seems to have been made to analyze the so-called “bronze,” which may have been a natural alloy of copper with a small percentage of lead or antimony, and the age ascribed to the fragments is rendered doubtful by the accompanying statement, that “fragments of red and black lacquered pottery” were discovered in the same place which were indistinguishable from the red and black pottery of classical Greece. As yet, therefore, excavation in Babylonian lands has failed to tell us when the art of mixing tin with the copper was discovered and copper was superseded by bronze. This, however, had taken place before the commencement of the Assyrian age. The bronze scimitar of Hadad-nirari I. (B.C. 1330)[55] finds an exact copy in a scimitar discovered by Mr. Macalister at Gezer in Palestine,[56] and the tools and weapons exhumed at Nineveh are of bronze and not copper. Analysis shows that the bronze usually consisted of about one part of tin to ten of copper, though for special objects like bells the amount of tin was considerably increased.[57] When was it that the tin was first imported and intentionally mixed with the copper in order to harden the metal?