Nippier; or, Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates. By John
Pannett Peters, D.D. 2 vols. (G. P. Putnam's Sons. 25s.) —It is to be regretted that Dr. Peters did not give the story of his work at Nippur to the world a little sooner, and that having been constrained to delay it, he did not materially shorten it. The first volume contains the narrative of what Dr. Peters calls his "first campaign." This may be said to have been com- menced nearly ten years ago, for the expedition left America in June, 1888. It was carried on up to the May of the following year. Nippur (Niffer or Nufar), which lies about a hundred miles S.S.E. from Baghdad, was reached at the end of January, and excavations were commenced a few days afterwards. On April 15th an Arab horse-thief was shot by a Zaptieh. If the man bad been wounded only, nothing much would have happened; unluckily he was killed, and the affair assumed what may be called national importance. The end of it was that the camp had to be struck, and the expedition made the best of its way first to Baghdad, and afterwards to the coast. The positive results of this campaign were small, though it was made evident that further explorations would yield considerable fruit. Dr. Peters thinks that he solved in the course of his outward journey an old geographical problem in the identification of Thapsacus, the famous ford of the Euphrates, not with Deir, but with Dibse, Dibse being the same as the Hebrew Tiphsah (Solomon's kingdom extended "from Tipbsah even unto Gaza"). Dr. Peters returned to America in the summer, and his presence led to a renewal of the effort. Returning without loss of time to Constantinople, he managed to get matters under way, and reached Nippur for the second time early in 1890. The "second campaign" was distinctly successful ; but the discoveries which were made during the course of it are not easy to epitomise, or, indeed, to make in any way intelligible to the inexpert reader. The fact is that they take us back, for the most part, to regions of history that are almost unexplored, we might say unknown. This alone makes them less interesting than they would be if they concerned the familiar figures of the Assyrian and Babylonian Monarchs who were brought into relation with the Hebrew Kingdoms from 800.600 B.C. The Nippur discoveries carry us back a thousand years more at the least, and often to much more remote periods. And then what interest they do possess has been largely discounted by the publication of results subsequently obtained. Nevertheless, Dr. Peters's book is decidedly readable, so far as the "adventures" are concerned. A more vivid picture of conditions of life in these regions of Asiatic Turkey it would not be easy to find. What he says, too, in his preface about the haphazard method of securing antiquities for the European museums is noteworthy. There seems to be an undignified and wasteful scramble for these things. Un- fortunately, "European concert" here also is hopeless.
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