Page:The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).djvu/189

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MISCELLANEOUS TEXTS.
163

The remainder of the fragment and the two fragments of the other columns agree with the story as far as their mutilated condition allows. The fractured end of the 13th line of the third fragment has the beginning of a name Babi, which may be completed Babil or Babel, but I have not ventured on the restoration. In the case of the 6th and 8th lines of the first fragment I have translated the word "speech" with a prejudice; I have never seen the ssyrian word with this meaning.


View of the Babil Mound at Babylon, the site of the Temple of Bel.

The whole account is at present so fragmentary that I think it better to make no detailed comparisons until more of the text is obtained. The various notices which have come down to us seem to me to point to the great pile of Birs Nimrud, near Babylon, as the site of the tower, this opinion is held by Sir Henry Rawlinson and most other authorities of weight. This ruin has been examined