into the lower part of a building or strewn under the pavements.
Taylor ascertained at Mugheir and Loftus at Sinkara that engraved cylinders
were built into the four angles of the upper stories. A brick had been
omitted, leaving a small niche in which they were set up on end.[404]
Profiting by the hint thus given Sir Henry Rawlinson excavated the angles
of one of the terraces of the Birs-Nimroud at Babylon, and to the
astonishment of his workmen he found the terra-cotta cylinders upon which
the reconstruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar is narrated exactly at
the point where he told them to dig.[405] These little tubs are called
cylinders--a not very happy title. As some of them are about three feet
high (Fig. 150) they can take commemorative inscriptions of vastly greater
length than those cut upon small hard-stone cylinders. Some of these
inscriptions have as many as a hundred lines very finely engraved. Many
precious specimens dating from the times of Nebuchadnezzar and his
successors have been found in the ruins of Babylon.[406]

[Illustration: FIG. 148.--Bronze statuette. 10 inches high. Louvre.]

Thus from the beginning to the end of Chaldaean civilization the custom was
preserved of consecrating a building by hiding in its substance objects to
which a divine type and an engraved text gave both a talismanic and a
commemorative value.

As might be supposed the same usage was followed in Assyria. In the palace
of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, Sir Henry Layard found some alabaster tablets
with inscriptions on both their faces hidden behind the colossal lions at
one of the doorways.[407] The British Museum also possesses a series of
small figures found at Nimroud but in a comparatively modern building, the
palace of Esarhaddon. They have each two pairs of wings, one pair raised,
the other depressed. They had been strewn in the sand under the threshold
of one of the doors.

[Illustration: FIG. 149.--Terra-cotta cone. Height 6 inches. Louvre.]

It was at Khorsabad, however, that the observations were made which have
most clearly shown the importance attached to this ceremony of
consecration. M. Oppert tells us that during the summer of 1854, "M. Place
disinterred from the foundations of Khorsabad a stone case in which were
five inscriptions on five different materials, gold, silver, antimony,
copper and lead. Of these five tablets he brought away four. The leaden one
was too heavy to be carried off at once, and it wa