levels within the Nippur mounds,(1) the earliest descending to virgin
soil some twenty feet below the present level of the surrounding plain.
The remote date of Nippur's foundation as a city and cult-centre
is attested by the fact that the pavement laid by Narâm-Sin in the
south-eastern temple-court lies thirty feet above virgin soil, while
only thirty-six feet of superimposed _débris_ represent the succeeding
millennia of occupation down to Sassanian and early Arab times. In
the period of the Hebrew captivity the city still ranked as a great
commercial market and as one of the most sacred repositories of
Babylonian religious tradition. We know that not far off was Tel-abib,
the seat of one of the colonies of Jewish exiles, for that lay "by the
river of Chebar",(2) which we may identify with the Kabaru Canal in
Nippur's immediate neighbourhood. It was "among the captives by the
river Chebar" that Ezekiel lived and prophesied, and it was on Chebar's
banks that he saw his first vision of the Cherubim.(3) He and other of
the Jewish exiles may perhaps have mingled with the motley crowd that
once thronged the streets of Nippur, and they may often have gazed on
the huge temple-tower which rose above the city's flat roofs. We know
that the later population of Nippur itself included a considerable
Jewish element, for the upper strata of the mounds have yielded numerous
clay bowls with Hebrew, Mandaean, and Syriac magical inscriptions;(4)
and not the least interesting of the objects recovered was the wooden
box of a Jewish scribe, containing his pen and ink-vessel and a little
scrap of crumbling parchment inscribed with a few Hebrew characters.(5)

(1) See Hilprecht, _Explorations in Bible Lands_, pp. 289
ff., 540 ff.; and Fisher, _Excavations at Nippur_, Pt. I
(1905), Pt. II (1906).

(2) Ezek. iii. 15.