After three years, while still in Baghdad, he was hired to be a teacher and educator in the house of the exiled Persian pretender Naib al-Saltana, the brother of Nasir ad-Din, Shah of Persia.
He gazed at the desolate ruins in the now-deserted steppe and after the dried canal runs, seeking to find connections to the geographical features described in the Talmud.
After his return home in the summer of 1876 he published a series of articles entitled My trip to the ruins of Babylon in the Hebrew weekly HaMaggid.
From that time until his final return to Europe in 1884, Obermeyer often found the opportunity to travel even further through the scenery between the Euphrates and Tigris, and to explore and to extend his knowledge on the Babylonian Talmud.
It differs from the work of the predecessors in that apart from the use and support of previous writers of antiquity and Arab geographers and historians, it rests on Obermeyer's personal experience and on his own views of the sites and spots of Babylonia.