John Peters on Nippur's Inscribed Door-Sockets

In this excerpt from Chapter IX Miscellaneous, John Peters describes the inscribed door-sockets he discovered in the religious sector at Nufar, ancient Nippur.

[p. 238] The finest inscriptions which we discovered in the Temple Hill [Nippur's East Side] were on stone door-sockets. [He mentions one of Shar-kali-sharri (2217-2193 B.C.) and one of Amar-Sin (2046-2038 B.C.).] Both of these door-sockets are formless masses of diorite, either of them about half a camel's load. A place for the foot of the door-post was hollowed out in the face of the stone, and in this turned a wooden post shod with copper, as is shown by the remains of copper in the sockets of several of the door-posts. Both of these door-sockets were brought from Sinai, and judging from their size they were carried on the backs of camels. Each of these makes half a camel's load, and the same is true of [p. 239] the door-socket of Gimil-Sin [now read Shu-Sin] from Ur (see plate facing page 238), and of most, if not all, of the other diorite door-sockets found by us. They were much too heavy for donkeys, mules, or horses, as I found from sad experience, but well adapted to transport by camels. This suggests the use of the camel in that region at an earlier period than hitherto supposed, since one of these blocks bears an inscription of Lugal-kigub-nidudu, 4000 B.C. [now read Lugal-kiginedudu, perhaps ruling from Uruk around the early twenty-fourth century, B.C.], or earlier.

This excerpt is taken from John Punnett Peters, Nippur or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates: The Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition to Babylonia in the Years 1888-1890, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897, Volume II, pp. 238-239.

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