An Extract from Banks 1912

 

From the webbuilders: Below we have included an extract from Edgar Bank's primary work. He was one of the early excavators at Adab and the interested reader can further pursue his report online here

From :

Bismya or The Lost City of Adab

A Story of Adventure, of Exploration, and of
Excavation among the Ruins of the
Oldest of the Buried Cities
of Babylonia

1912

By
Edgar James Banks, Ph.D.
Field Director of the Expedition of the Oriental Exploration Fund
of the University of Chicago to Babylonia

The following story of exploration and of excavation
is intended to describe in a popular way the
remarkable discoveries made by the author in the
Babylonian ruin mound of Bismya.[...]

Miscellaneous Discoveries

[...]

The walls of Adab could not be traced entirely
around the city. Near the west corner, along the northwest
side, they appeared distinctly, for in places they lay
exposed on the surface. We cleared other places along
their summit that we might trace their course, and we
dug down at their sides to their foundation. Like the
walls of Constantinople, they seem to have been double.
There was an inner wall five metres wide and somewhat
higher than the outer wall. The outer wall was but
two metres wide, and separated from it by a space of
several metres.

 

It was impossible to form an estimate of their height,
for at no point where we dug to their foundation,
did more than a metre of their base remain.
It is uncertain if a moat flowed along their outer edge,
yet from the colour and nature of the dirt, it seemed
that a trench about two metres wide was once there.
The base of the wall was on the desert level;
the brickks of the lower courses were
plano-convex, laid flatwise in lime.In places along
the summit where the walls were preserved to a
greater height, there were long bricks marked with
three grooves; the walls had been repaired by the
makers of those bricks, and in one place above the
three grooved bricks, were the square bricks of a
later age. It is therefore certain that at least along
the north-west side, the same walls protected the city
during its entire history. We tried to follow the walls
entirely around the city, but it was not possible, for at a
distance of fifty metres from the west comer they
disappeared. Along the north-east side, where the ruins
terminate abruptly, they reappeared, but time did not
permit us to investigate them. No traces of them
whatever were found on the other two sides, but a more
thorough search than we were able to make might
reveal them. About forty metres from the west corner we found a
city gate, or at least a postern gate, for it was scarcely
a metre wide, and in it was a jog or an angle so that one
standing without, could not see through into the city.
Whether the walls possessed a wider gate is uncertain.
As the Christians of some Moslem lands now make the
entrances to their churches so small that the enemy
may not enter in a body, so probably the people of Adab
sought to prevent the enemy from rushing into the city
by building their gates narrow and winding.
There were, however, indications that this gateway
was one of the chief entrances to the city, and that at
least one great battle was fought about it. As we
began to excavate there, several burned, clay balls
appeared on the surface; beneath, the ground was literally
filled with them, and before night more than a
thousand of the balls were piled by the trench.

 

They were the sling balls which the enemy had hurled against
the defenders on the walls, and falling short of their
mark, had fallen to the place where we had found them.
They were of many shapes and sizes; some of them were
no larger than a walnut; others were larger than an
orange. They were square, spherical, egg-shaped, and
diamond-shaped; most of them were of clay burned
to a dark red; a few of them were of white stone.

 

With the sling balls were two semispherical, burned-clay
objects, for which I have never been able to account,
unless they were a part of some contrivance similar to
a catapult for hurling the balls. The larger one, which
was hollow, was thirty-six centimetres across its base
and twenty-six high. In the top was a round hole
eight centimeters in diameter,
and on the sides were four rectangular holes six centimetres
deep. Two of the holes were vertical; the other
two were horizontal.The smaller object of a similar
Found with the Sling shape fitted into the hollow
base as if to serve as a pivot about which it might
revolve.

 

Example of Slingballs from ancient Khafajah, similiar to those found at Adab

from: OIP98 Part One: Excavations at Ishchali, Part Two: Khafajah Mounds B, C, and D.