And even of what has been catalogued there is much which has not yet been fully copied or examined. The British Museum, moreover, is no longer the sole repository of Babylonian literature. The Louvre, the Berlin Museum, and the American University of Pennsylvania, are equally filled with the clay tablets of the Babylonian scribes; while the collection in the Museum of Constantinople far exceeds those which have been formed elsewhere. Even private individuals have their collections of larger or less extent; that of Lord Amherst of Hackney, for example, would have made the fortune of one of the great museums of the world but a few years ago. It is evident that it will be long before more than a fraction of this vast and ever-accumulating literature can be adequately studied. And what adds to the difficulty is that it is still increasing year by year. At present there are as many as three exploring expeditions in Babylonia. M. de Sarzec’s successor on behalf of the French Government is still carrying on work at Tello, the ancient Lagas, which was begun as far back as 1877; the Americans are continuing their excavations at Nippur, where, ever since 1888, they have been excavating for the first time on a thoroughly systematic and scientific plan; and now the Germans have commenced work at Babylon itself, and have already fixed the site of the temple of Bel-Merodach and of that palace of Nebuchadrezzar in which Alexander the Great died.(203) Even while I am writing, the news has come of the discovery of a great library at Nippur, which seems to have been buried under the ruins of the building in which it was kept as far back as the Abrahamic age. The mounds in which it has been found lie to the south-west of the great temple of Bel. Already nearly 20,000 tablets have been rescued from it, and it is calculated that at least 130,000 are yet to be disinterred. The tablets lie in order upon the clay shelves on which they were arranged in the days of Khammurabi, the Amraphel of Genesis;(204) and, so far as they have been examined by Professor Hilprecht, it would appear that they relate to all the various branches of knowledge which were known and studied at the time. History, chronology, religion and literature, philology and law, are all alike represented in them. When we remember that the catastrophe which overwhelmed them occurred more than two thousand years before the Christian era, we may well ask what new and unexpected information the future has in store for us, and hesitate about coming to conclusions which the discovery of to-morrow may overthrow. We know but a tithe of what the monuments of Babylonia have yet to reveal to us, and much that we seem to know to-day will be profoundly modified by the knowledge we shall hereafter possess.