In June 1995 the Iraqi Department of Antiquities made repairs to the south wall of the cella of the temple of Nabû ša ḫarê at Babylon. During the course of these repairs Elham Hashim Ali, a member of the Department's staff, found an inscribed clay cylinder embedded about one metre inside the thickness of the wall and one and a half metres above the building's lower floor.

When the temple of Nabû ša ḫarê was excavated in 1979, the only foundation document discovered there was part of a clay cylinder found in secondary context among the debris that had accumulated over the south-east part of the kisû of the temple. The fragment, published by Antoine Cavigneaux in 1981, bears the remains of a cuneiform text in 28 lines. The ends of the lines are missing, but enough survived for Cavigneaux to identify the text as a foundation inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II (1. 1: dnabû(nà)-ku-dúr-ri-ú-ṣ[ur]) reporting his construction of a temple of Nabû (1. 28: bit (è) dna-b[i-um … ]). Many school tablets found in the temple and published by Cavigneaux in the same year bear the ceremonial temple name é-nig.gidru-kalam.ma-sum.ma, “House which Bestows the Sceptre of the Land”. This was already well known as the name of the temple of the god Nabû ša ḫarê at Babylon from the many inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II which report its rebuilding, and from the standard list of the temples of Babylon (Tintir IV 15). For this reason Cavigneaux suspected, even before the discovery of the cylinder fragment, that the building excavated by Danial Ishaq was the temple of Nabû ša ḫarê. The sanctuary of this god, first encountered in the eleventh century, is well attested in the first millennium BC. Its importance rested on the probability that it was the place where the Babylonian crown prince was invested. It is now known to have survived as a building until at least 78 BC, at which time an astronomical diary reports armed conflict among citizens of Greek descent in the temple's vicinity.