Megiddo in Palestine

A photograph taken while this operation was in progress has some technical interest, because it was taken with a camera suspended from an ordinary kite. I had at the time recently visited the Oriental Institute excavations at Megiddo in Palestine, and watched the process of taking air photographs from a stationary kite balloon.

But it seemed to me, both that the

apparatus involved in this experiment must be extremely expensive and that a

lot of unnecessary time was wasted on the operation. My own attempt to simplify

the process was surprisingly successful. I used two six foot naval kites,

flying in tandem, and suspended beneath them a cheap camera with an automatic

release and swivels for retaining it in a vertical position. Admittedly this

was no more than a rough and ready way of getting low air verticals; but out of

some scores of pictures which were taken in this way, a dozen or so proved

extremely revealing and useful.

One could, for instance, recover quite

large sections of the ancient town plan, by photographing the unexcavated

surface of the mound after rain; for the tops of the walls were found to dry

and change colour much more rapidly than the filling in between, (PL. IS)

But, while still engaged in recording the

Abu Temple at Tell Asmar, I had at the same time become involved in what proved

to be a much more frustrating operation. Eshnunna, which is the ancient name of

Tell Asmar, had been an important city state during the Isin Larsa dynasty at

the beginning of the second millennium B.C; and we were also excavating a

complex of public buildings belonging to that period, known by the name of its

original founder, Gimil Sin.

Here, as so often happens in Mesopotamia,

the chronology of the stratified remains presented very little difficulty,

because the buildings at successive structural periods were constructed partly

of kiln baked bricks stamped with apictograph inscription bearing the name of

the prince who had rebuilt it.

Not only was his name given, but very often

also that of his father and son; so that a genealogical table was comparatively

easy to establish. But another element in these texts proved more puzzling. It

wTas the repeated references to another and evidently much larger temple

dedicated to Tishpak, the patron god of

Eshnunna. This seemed, (like the Marduk

Temple at Babylon, for instance), to have been the most important building in

the city.