s despatched to Bassorah
on the rafts with the bulk of the collection, whose fate it shared." The
other four tablets are in the Louvre. Their text is almost identical. M.
Oppert gives a translation of it.[408] According to his rendering, the
inscription--in which the king speaks throughout in the first person--ends
with this imprecation: "May the great lord Assur destroy from the face of
this country the name and race of him who shall injure the works of my
hand, or who shall carry off my treasure!"

A little higher up, where Sargon recounts the founding of the palace,
occurs a phrase which M. Oppert translates: "The people threw their
amulets." What Sargon meant by this the excavations of M. Place have shown.
In the foundations of the town walls, and especially in the beds of sand
between the bases of the sculptured bulls that guard the doorways, he found
hundreds of small objects, such as cylinders, cones, and terra-cotta
statuettes. The most curious of these are now deposited in the Louvre. The
numbers and the character of these things prove that a great number of the
people must have assisted at the ceremony of consecration.

[Illustration: FIG. 150.--Terra-cotta cylinder. One-third of actual size;
from Place.]

Several of these amulets were not without value either for their material
or their workmanship, but the great majority were of the roughest kind,
some being merely shells or stones with a hole through them, which must
have belonged to the poorest class of the community. In many cases their
proper use could be easily divined; the holes with which they were pierced
and other marks of wear showed them to be personal amulets.[409] Those
present at the ceremony of consecrating the foundations must have detached
them from the cords by which they were suspended, and thrown them, upon the
utterance of some propitiatory formula by the priests, into the sand about
to be covered with the first large slabs of alabaster.

The terra-cotta cylinders were in no less frequent use in Assyria than in
Chaldaea. M. Place found no less than fourteen still in place in niches of
the harem walls at Khorsabad. The long inscription they bore contained
circumstantial details of the construction of both town and palace. Like
that on the metal tablets, it ended with a malediction on all who should
dare to raise their hands against the work of Sargon.[410]

As for the cylinders hidden in each angle of a building, none, we believe,
hav