(2 of 2)
The Iraqis are aware that their whole country is, in fact, a vast museum waiting to be unearthed, and authorities have welcomed outside archaeologists. Under the 1936 law, Iraq's director general of antiquities gets first pick of all discoveries. Duplicates are often returned to the finders. Archaeologists believe that there are many decades of happy digs ahead. In addition to the tombs of some 500 kings, the excavators have yet to discover the ruins of Agade, referred to in cuneiform scripts as a great capital during the 24th and 23rd centuries B.C., and almost certainly buried under the silt somewhere near Babylon.
* Last week at a meeting of the American Oriental Society at Yale, Sumerologist Samuel Kramer reported that 31 clay tablets, excavated 30 years ago at the ancient Sumerian city of Kish and now at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, have been deciphered. The cuneiform writing recounts a story composed around 2000 B.C. similar to that of the Bible's Babel. It tells of the god of wisdom, Enki, who, probably jealous of a rival god, "changed the speech of man, that had until then been one."