"From an inscription preserved in the museum at Yale, we know that the last King of Babylon, Nabonidus, following ancient precedent, con: serrated his daughter, Bel-Shalti-Nannar, as high priestess of the Moon God at Ur and built an Gig-Par, or cloister, for her dweling, and, incidentally, he laid down ithe most admirable moral precepts for her guidance. In front of the E-Dublal-Malik, in this, its latest phase, we find a wide' courtyard surrounded by a double wall, enclosing a long range of chamber the bricks of whose pavements bear, together with the name of Nabonidus, the description of the bull ing'as the House of the Priestess The ground plan of the place ai swers perfectly to the word cloister' used in the Yale inscription and there. can here be no doubt we have the actual convent of the priestess.
"The contents of the building were not less important than its character; school materials, writing: exercises, ete., seemed to show that the religious houses then, as now, had their educational side, and the daughter of Nabonidus, himself' well-known antiquary, appears to have kept a museum in her convent, for there were found in the ruin large number of objects of such different dates that it is hard on any other theory to account for their presence all together in rooms lof the Inter period, "Amongst them were a fine boundlary stone carved with the symbol of the Gods, an inscription of King Dungi, 2250'B.C., a notice mace-hend of early date, bronze figurines, ete fand, the most precious of all, record in clay of excavations carried out at Ur in the seventh century B.C, with copies of early inseriptions found in the course of the work. These copies were made for the admiration of the people, anit can now feel that, not only digging here, but also in making public the results of the dig, I am following a local precedent set 2600 years.ago."—Reuter's. Ameriewn
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.