M. de Morgan's first season's digging at Susa
was carried out in the years 1897-8, and the success with which he met
from the very first, when cutting trenches in the mound which marks
the acropolis of the ancient city, has led him to concentrate his main
efforts in this part of the ruins ever since. Provisional trenches cut
in the part of the ruins called "the Royal City," and in others of the
mounds at Susa, indicate that many remains may eventually be found there
dating from the period of the Achaemenian Kings of Persia. But it is in
the mound of the acropolis at Susa that M. de Morgan has found monuments
of the greatest historical interest and value, not only in the history
of ancient Elam, but also in that of the earliest rulers of Chaldaea.
In the diggings carried out during the first season's work on the site,
an obelisk was found inscribed on four sides with a long text of some
sixty-nine columns, written in Semitic Babylonian by the orders
of Manishtusu, a very early Semitic king of the city of Kish in
Babylonia.[* See illustration.] The text records the purchase by the
King of Kish of immense tracts of land situated at Kish and in
its neighbourhood, and its length is explained by the fact that it
enumerates full details of the size and position of each estate, and the
numbers and some of the names of the dwellers on the estates who were
engaged in their cultivation.
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