ABSTRACT
I H A V E already mentioned the work of Taylor and Thompson at Abu Shahrain, the ancient Eridu. I can only find record of one archaeologist having visited Shahrain between Taylor and Thompson, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, who went there and to Muqayyar in 1888 from Suq ash-Shuyukh (By Nile and Tigris, I, 241). Prof. Hilprecht’s statement (Explorations in Bible Lands, p. 181) that ‘owing to the seclusion of the spot and the insecurity of its neighbourhood, Abu Shahrein has never been visited again (since Taylor’s time) by any European or American explorer’, is not quite correct, therefore. But so unknown was Shahrain, owing to the fact that the Turkish authorities would rarely allow anybody to go there or even to Muqayyar, on account of possible attacks by the Muntafiq, or by desert Arabs, that, as Hilprecht remarks (op. cit., 178 ,n . 1), it was often, in defiance of the direct statements of Taylor (which can never have been read), placed not only miles away from its real situation, but even on the wrong side of the river! The most conspicuous example of this extra ordinary error known to me is in the German Assyriologist Delitzsch’s book, Wo lag das Paradies? (published in 1881) : he says (p. 228) that Eridu is ‘to-day the ruins of Abu Sahrain on the left bank of the Euphrates, not far downstream from Mukajjar, nearly opposite the Arab town of Siik es-Sejuh. See Menant, page 59 ff.’ The reference is to Menant’s Babylone et la Chaldee, published in 1875, an<^ Hilprecht ascribes the same error to Menant, from whom Delitzsch presumably derived it. I cannot find that Menant ever definitely stated that Shahrain was on the left bank, but in his map it certainly is so placed, and Delitzsch must have followed this without ever having looked at Taylor’s report in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1855. The mounds lie on the opposite side of the Euphrates and sixteen or twenty miles away
In the desert beyond it! The error was corrected by Scheil in 1898 (.Rec. de Trav., X X I, 126), but even he seems also quite ignorant of Taylor’s publication, although Menant had reproduced the latter’s plans. As Hilprecht says, Scheil’s statement ‘is correct, but only con firms facts better known from Taylor’s own accurate reports, which, however, do not seem to have been read carefully by Assyriologists during the last twenty-five years’ (pp. cit., 179, n.). Hilprecht himself, however, has not always understood Taylor. As I have said, he has in his mind an exaggerated idea of the ‘depth’ of the ‘valley’ in which Shahrain lies. Taylor unluckily calls it ‘deep’ : it is merely a shallow
depression, not more than 20 feet below the rest of the desert, if that. It is ‘deep’ only for Babylonia, in relation to the surrounding landscape. His denial that Shahrain ‘is identical with Nowawis, as assumed by Peters {.Nippur, II, 96, 298 If.)’, is also erroneous. I have heard Shahrain called ‘Nowawis’ myself; and the name is said to mean ‘grasshoppers’ and to refer to the numerous cicadas which fill the air with their strident shrilling there and on the desert around in the spring and summer mornings. I have been nearly deafened by them in May. Thompson, however, {Archaeologia, loc. «>., 106) heard the name interpreted as meaning ‘coffins’ (from nuwas), a reference to the fragmentary late larnakes of pottery that
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lie about on the subsidiary mounds near by.1 Is the supposed meaning ‘grasshoppers’ due to a confusion with namawis or nawamls (plural of Hamits), usually = ‘gnats’ ? In this connexion it may be noted that Doughty (Arabia Deserta, I, 386) noted that in Sinai old surface-tombs of stone are often called nawamls, interpreted by the Arabs as ‘gnats’ houses’, but in reality derived-as, he notes (p. 41 1 ) , Rawlinson had pointed out-through Persian navus from the Greek rao;, ‘temple shrine’. So that the ‘ Iraqi nowawis may = nawamls (since m and w or v are easily interchanged in Semitic), but mean not gnats or grasshoppers at all, but simply ‘ruins’, ancient buildings or tombs.
