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- Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Now in present day Iraq, Ur was a city that rose from the "Mounds of Pitch" half way between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, ten miles west of the Euphrates. Sir Leonard Woolley documents his experience as leader of the great expedition that carried on without interruption until 1934. Before its closure, this significant archaeological dig on the part of both museums established an image of Ur throughout its four thousand years in existence. Indeed, the excavators unearthed much more than they ever expected. This book follows this expedition, recording its every detail. These findings reveal the impressive history of Ur: its beginning, the flood, the Uruk and Jamdat Nasr periods, Al 'Ubaid and the first dynasty of Ur, the Dark Ages, the third dynasty of Ur, the Isin and Larsa periods, the Kassite and Assyrian periods, and finally Nebuchadnezzar and the last days of Ur. Although written earlier in the last century, this treatise is particularly relevant today, in an age when it becomes essential to remember the great treasures yielded from this cradle of civilization that is now modern-day Iraq.
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Excavations at Ur
by Leonard Woolley
First published in 1927
This edition published by Reading Essentials
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
The ‘ram in a thicket’ from grave PG-1237
EXCAVATIONS AT UR
A Record of Twelve Years’ Work bySIR LEONARD WOOLLEYDirector of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the University Museum of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia
CONTENTS
Chapter
Page
Introduction
11
I.
The Beginnings of Ur, and the Flood
19
II.
The Uruk and Jamdat Nasr Periods
37
III.
The Royal Cemetery
52
IV.
Al ‘Ubaid and the First Dynasty of Ur
91
V.
The Dark Ages
110
VI.
The Third Dynasty of Ur
122
VII.
The Isin and Larsa Periods
163
VIII.
The Kassite and Assyrian Periods
195
IX.
Nebuchadnezzar II and the last days of Ur
216
Appendix
: The Sumerian King-List
251
Index
257
PLATES
The ‘ram in a thicket’ from grave PG/1237
Frontispiece
Plate
Facing page
1.
Painted pottery of the al ‘Ubaid period
36
2.
Clay figurines of goddesses of the al ‘Ubaid period
37
3.
Palace wall at Warka decorated with a mosaic of coloured pegs
44
4.
Vessels of the Jamdat Nasr period;
45
above, two painted clay pots;
below, alabaster and diorite vases
5.
a.
Steatite figure of a wild boar, Jamdat Nasr period
48
b.
Steatite bowl in the Jamdat Nasr tradition
6.
a.
The grave of Mes-kalam-dug
49
b.
Tomb-chamber of King A-bar-gi; showing the vaulted roof and arched doorway
7.
a.
The gold helmet of Mes-kalam-dug
64
b.
A gold bowl from Queen Shub-ad’s tomb
8.
The head-dress of Queen Shub-ad
65
9.
a.
A gold tumbler from Queen Shub-ad’s tomb
80
b.
A silver model of a rowing-boat from the tomb of King A-bar-gi
10.
a.
A decorated lyre from grave PG/1237
81
b.
An inlaid gaming-board with its ‘men’
11.
Shell plaques engraved with mythological scenes
86
12.
Limestone statuette of a woman from a soldier’s grave in the Royal Cemetery
87
13.
The ‘Standard of Ur’.
96
14.
A-anni-pad-da’s Temple of Nin-kharsag;
97
a.
Mosaic frieze from the façade
b.
The ruins of the temple platform
15.
Examples of seals;
112
1, shell cylinder seal from a soldier’s grave, Royal Cemetery period.
2, Sargonid green stone cylinder.
3, Stamp seal, Mohenjo-daro type.
4, Third Dynasty seal.
5, Third Dynasty seal.
6, Seal of the Larsa period
16.
The headless statue of Entemena, Governor of Lagash
113
17.
a.
Limestone relief of sacrifice, Lagash period
128
b.
Ur-Nammu’s wall supporting the Ziggurat Terrace
18.
The Ziggurat of Ur-Nammu; back and front views
129
19.
Dungi’s Mausoleum; the stairs seen from the tomb chamber below room 5
144
20.
Bur-Sin’s Mausoleum; the stairways leading to the tomb chambers
145
21.
a.
Dungi’s Mausoleum; the offering-tables in room 5
160
b.
A typical drain of terra-cotta rings
22.
a.
Scene from the Stela of Ur-Nammu
161
b.
A mud-brick column of the Third Dynasty
23.
Enannatum’s Temple of Nin-gal;
176
a.
The kitchen, showing the cistern and well, the cutting-up table, the cooking-range, quern and grindstone
b.
the inner court, looking towards the sanctuary; the brick base is that of Hammurabi’s war memorial
24.
Sculptured heads in diorite and marble, Third Dynasty or Larsa period
177
25.
a.
A street scene in the Larsa town
180
b.
Steps down from the street into No. 15 Paternoster Row
26.
a.
Clay ‘teraphim’ of the Larsa period
181
b.
View of No. 3 Gay Street, from the guest-chamber
27.
The Family Chapels of the Larsa period
188
a.
The family burial-vault beneath the floor
b.
The altar, offering-table and incense-hearth
28.
a.
The statue of Pa-sag
189
b.
The Pa-sag chapel seen from the street
29.
a.
Kuri-galzu’s shrine of Dublal-makh
208
b.
The Courtyard of Dublal-makh
30.
a.
The Harbour Temple
209
b.
Magic figures from sentry-boxes below the floors
31.
a.
The ‘Museum label’ from Bel-shalti-nannar’s school
224
b.
Ivory toilet-box
32.
Persian coffins made of rivetted sheet copper
225
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Figure
Page
1.
Map of Lower Mesopotamia
20
2.
Flint Hoes
25
3.
Section of the ‘Flood-pit’
29
4.
Plan of the grave of King A-bar-gi
63
5.
The Ziggurat Terrace of the First Dynasty
103
6.
Plan of the City of Ur, showing the principal sites excavated
124
7.
Reconstruction of the Ziggurat of Ur-Nammu
130
8.
Plan of the Third Dynasty Temenos
139
9.
The Bastion of Warad-Sin
141
10.
The Mausolea of the Third Dynasty Kings
151
11.
Enannatum’s Temple of Nin-gal
167
12.
Town plan of the Larsa Period
176
13.
House plan
179
14.
Reconstruction of a private house
183
15.
The Nin-gal Temple of Kuri-galzu
200
16.
Reconstruction of the Nin-gal Temple
201
17.
Reconstruction of the Dublal-makh Court
204
18.
Reconstruction of the Ziggurat of Nabonidus
218
19.
The Temenos of Nebuchadnezzar
221
20.
The Harbour Temple
230
21.
The Palace of Nabonidus
233
22.
Houses of the Late Babylonian Period
242
Introduction
Ur lies about half-way between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, some ten miles west of the present course of the Euphrates. A mile and a half to the east of the ruins runs the single line of railway which joins Basra to the capital of Iraq, and between the rail and the river there is sparse cultivation and little villages of mud huts or reed-mat shelters are dotted here and there; but westwards of the line is desert blank and unredeemed. Out of this waste rise the mounds which were Ur, called by the Arabs after the highest of them all, the Ziggurat hill, ‘Tal al Muqayyar’, the Mound of Pitch.
Standing on the summit of this mound one can distinguish along the eastern skyline the dark tasselled fringe of the palm-gardens on the river’s bank, but to north and west and south as far as the eye can see stretches a waste of unprofitable sand. To the south-west the flat line of the horizon is broken by a grey upstanding pinnacle, the ruins of the staged tower of the sacred city of Eridu which the Sumerians believed to be the oldest city upon earth, and to the north-west a shadow thrown by the low sun may tell the whereabouts of the low mound of al ‘Ubaid; but otherwise nothing relieves the monotony of the vast plain over which the shimmering heat-waves dance and the mirage spreads its mockery of placid waters. It seems incredible that such a wilderness should ever have been habitable for man, and yet the weathered hillocks at one’s feet cover the temples and houses of a very great city.
As long ago as 1854, Mr. J. E. Taylor, British Consul at Basra, was employed by the British Museum to investigate some of the southern sites of Mesopotamia, and chose for his chief work the Mound of Pitch. Here he unearthed inscriptions which for the first time revealed that the nameless ruin was none other than Ur, so-called ‘of the Chaldees’, the home 12 of Abraham. Taylor’s discoveries were not at the time apprised at their true worth and his excavations closed down after two seasons; but more and more the importance of the site came to be recognized, and though, partly through lack of funds and partly because of the lawless character of the district into which foreigners could penetrate only at their own risk, no further excavations were undertaken, yet the British Museum never gave up hope of carrying on the work which Taylor had begun.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century an expedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania visited Ur and contrived to do a little excavation of which the results have never been published, and then again the site lay fallow until the Great War brought British troops into Mesopotamia and gave an opportunity for long-cherished hopes to be revived and realized. In 1918 Mr. R. Campbell Thompson, formerly assistant in the British Museum and then on the Intelligence Staff of the Army in Mesopotamia, excavated at Eridu and made soundings at Ur. The British Museum was encouraged to put a regular expedition into the field, and when Mr. Leonard King, who was to have led it, fell ill, Dr. H. R. Hall took his place and during the winter of 1918-19 dug at Ur, Eridu, and al ‘Ubaid. Dr. Hall’s work at Ur was of an experimental nature, richer in promise than fulfilment, but his expedition was of prime importance in that he discovered and partly excavated the little mound of al ‘Ubaid with its remarkable remains of early architectural decoration.
Again the want of pence which vexes public institutions brought matters to a standstill. Then, in 1922, Dr. G. B. Gordon, Director of the University Museum of Pennsylvania, approached the British Museum with the proposal of a joint expedition to Mesopotamia; the offer was accepted, and Ur was chosen as the scene of operations.
The directorship of the Joint Expedition was entrusted to me and I carried on the field work without interruption for the next twelve winters. We could not in that time excavate the whole of Ur, for the site is immense and to reach the earlier levels we often had to dig very deeply so that, although 13 work was always done at high pressure and the number of men employed was the maximum consistent with proper supervision—at one moment it topped the four hundred—only a minute fraction of the city’s area was thoroughly explored. None the less, we did secure a reasonably detailed picture of Ur throughout its four thousand years of existence and had made discoveries far surpassing anything we had dared to expect; now there was the danger that more digging would yield results more or less repetitive, and the preparing of our material for publication, an imperative duty, could not be undertaken while field work was still in progress; it was therefore decided, in 1934, to close down the Expedition.
Almost from the outset our work at Ur attracted the interest not only of scholars but of a wide general public and it was to satisfy that interest in what had already been done and to enable people to follow future discoveries with better understanding that in 1929 I published a small book, Ur of the Chaldees, dealing with the results of our first seven years. In the present volume I am concerned with the whole of the twelve years of excavation and, since it is meant to be a comprehensive account, a good deal that was written in my former book must be repeated. The facts, of course, remain, and the description of them cannot be radically altered, but the conclusions which we formed about them may have been modified by later discoveries so that there must always be a certain amount of re-writing, even where the finds belong to our early seasons; and all the later discoveries, as numerous and as important as those of the first seven years, have now to be duly recorded.
This is a book about excavation, about the buildings and the objects that we unearthed, and the wealth of our archæological material is so great that I do not propose to deal with anything outside it. So far as is possible I shall treat of things in historical order, but I am not writing a history of Ur; that has been done, and admirably done, by Mr. C. J. Gadd[1] who draws, as I am not qualified to do, upon literary sources, and I shall do no more than try to 14 show how our finds illustrate or supplement his historical framework. But the introduction to my book does seem to be the appropriate place in which to describe the positive additions to history afforded by our work in the field.
When the Expedition was being planned I was told that we might expect to recover monuments taking us back so far in time as the reign of King Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, but should probably find nothing earlier. King Ur-Nammu was indeed almost the first character in the history of Mesopotamia acknowledged by scholars to be historically authentic. It was known that cities went back far beyond Ur-Nammu; there were in museums actual monuments of earlier kings with their names written against them—but there was no means of saying when they reigned; about one great figure, Sargon of Akkad, there were poems and legends—but so late as 1916 Dr. Leonard King[2] found it necessary to argue at length the real identity of one who had been discounted as a mere hero of romance. There was even a list of kings which had been drawn up by Sumerian scribes soon after 2000 B.C., a sort of skeleton of history not unlike the King-list ‘William I, 1066, William II, 1087 . . .’ of our English school-books, but unfortunately it did not seem to help; the earlier part of the list is printed here on p. 251, and anyone looking at it will understand why scholars could give it little credence. It starts with kings who reigned ‘before the Flood’ and the reigns of eight kings add up to the total of 241,200 years! In the first dynasty after the Flood the rulers are credited with reigns of a thousand years each, on the average, in the next with an average of about two centuries, and although the dynasty after that, the First Dynasty of Ur, is marked by no such wild exaggeration, it is followed by other dynasties of impossibly long-lived kings. The figures from the Flood to the accession of Sargon of Akkad give a total of 31,917 years, and even though one may assume that dynasties overlap, and were really contemporary, as is known to be the case with those after Sargon’s time, the entire chronology is palpably absurd. The natural result was 15 that scholars were led to reject the King-lists altogether and to maintain that history properly speaking began little if at all before the time of Ur-Nammu of Ur.
It was therefore most satisfactory to find at Ur contemporary records of Sargon of Akkad, these including a portrait group of his daughter, who was High Priestess of the Moon-god, and the personal seals of three officials of her suite. Much more important was the discovery at al ‘Ubaid of the foundation-tablet of the little temple there which stated that it was built by A-anni-pad-da King of Ur, son of Mes-anni-pad-da King of Ur; the latter figures in the King-lists as the founder of the First Dynasty of Ur, and with the discovery that First Dynasty, which had been regarded as mythical, emerged into history. It also cleared up a minor difficulty. Owing to the similarity of the two names that of A-anni-pad-da had dropped out of the King-lists and Mes-anni-pad-da was credited with the unlikely reign of eighty years; as soon as it became evident that the figure had to be divided between father and son the improbability vanished and the record could be accepted as authentic. The written history of the country had been carried back for something like five hundred years; and although nothing could justify the swollen chronology of the King-lists one could at least suspect that behind it all there lurks an element of misunderstood truth. At an archæological congress of excavators held at Baghdad in 1929 it was agreed that the early civilization of Southern Mesopotamia could be classified in successive phases which should be called, after the places where the evidence for each was first discovered, the al ‘Ubaid Period, the Uruk Period (named after Uruk, the Biblical Erech and the modern Warka), the Jamdat Nasr Period, and then the Early Dynastic Period within which (but relatively late in it) comes the First Dynasty of Ur. On this archæological sequence all of us agree, but for my own part I am inclined to go farther and to emphasize the extent to which our factual sequence harmonizes with the divisions of the King-lists; the al ‘Ubaid Period is pre-Flood, properly speaking, and survived the Flood only in a degenerate form and for a short while; we have two periods corresponding to the two dynasties 16 (of Kish and Erech) given by the Lists, and the next dynasty is proved to have existed. There may, after all, be something in the tradition on which the Sumerian scribes based their scheme of history—but they were hopelessly wrong with their dates.
We too cannot possibly establish a fixed chronology for the early periods, for the simple reason that writing was unknown (it seems to have been invented in the Jamdat Nasr Period) and without written records there can be no exact dating. Even when writing comes in a positive chronology is hard to arrive at, and any system that we may adopt must be regarded as tentative and liable to revision. Thus when we found at al ‘Ubaid the tablet of A-anni-pad-da Assyriologists reckoned that the First Dynasty of Ur, now shown to have existed, must have started about 3100 B.C.; naturally I accepted this decision and, further, since I knew that the Royal Cemetery dated to just before the First Dynasty of Ur and, judging by the number of royal burials, must represent a considerable period of time, I suggested that it be put between 3500 and 3200 B.C., and these are the dates given by me in Ur of the Chaldees. But very soon after that book was published a revised version of the chronology brought the First Dynasty of Ur down to 2900 B.C., and to-day some Assyriologists at least favour a further reduction and make Mes-anni-pad-da come to the throne about 2700 B.C.—and the dates of Sargon of Akkad, of Ur-Nammu of Ur and of Hammurabi of Babylon have all been subject to reduction. The question has to be settled on literary evidence, and the archæologist must accept that; consequently I adopt here a chronological system quite different from that put forward in 1929; the inconsistency really witnesses to the advance of knowledge. But I would point out that no change in the positive dates can upset or alter the archæological sequence, which is based on observed facts.
When the Joint Expedition began its work at Ur no other digging was being done in Iraq, but later on other archæological missions entered the field, and at one time there were no less than eleven engaged in different parts of the country, and although some of those were shortlived and none of them 17 are functioning at the present time, yet for very many years the Archæological Department of the Iraq Government has worked without interruption and with excellent results. Now no single dig, however successful, can give a complete picture of the history even of its own site, much less of the whole country. Sites may be very large, so that the excavations cannot cover their entire area, or may be very complicated so that digging has to be done down to great depths in order to reach the earlier levels, and the expense of such work may be prohibitive. Part of a site may at one time have been deserted, with the result that excavation in that part will fail to produce any evidence of a cultural phase which elsewhere on the site may be well represented; in preparing the foundations of an important building the old builders may have swept away a whole series of earlier strata and so have made a gap in our archæological series which we have no reason to suspect; or that building may have stood unaltered throughout a period of time that saw many vicissitudes in the town’s history—but if our excavation is limited to the building it will tell us nothing of those vicissitudes. Our own excavations therefore do not give us the full story of Ur; what they do give has to be amplified and sometimes modified by the results of the many other digs on other sites; but since the subject of this book is the Ur excavation and not a complete history I shall refer to the other digs only when such reference is necessary for the proper understanding of what we found. If then I say little or nothing about the discoveries made by fellow archæologists working in Iraq it is not because I under-rate their importance but because they do not fall within my province. But I should indeed be doing injustice if I failed to acknowledge the debt that I owe to my own staff. In the course of twelve years I had the help of a large number of assistants; my wife was with me for ten seasons, Professor Mallowan for six, others for four or less; if they are not mentioned individually in the course of this book it is because the work was team-work throughout and each was prone to sink his personality in the common task; looking back now, I am surprised to find how seldom I can say of a particular job ‘So-and-so did that’;—nearly always 18 it was a joint affair. And perhaps that is the highest praise I can give to a staff which deserves all my praise and gratitude; they did not do this job or that—they were the Expedition, and its success was the measure of their devotion.
I The Beginnings of Ur, and the Flood
Lower Mesopotamia, the Sumer of the ancient world, is no more nor less than the river-valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates; it does not include the high-lying Syrian desert to the west, because that is desert—a waterless expanse of gravel barren for most of the year at least—where the wandering Bedouin may pitch their tents for a brief space but no man claiming to be civilized could make his home; and it does not include the Persian mountains that fringe it on the east because always those mountains were held by warlike tribes more ready to raid the cultivated fields of the valley people than to submit to their sway. And it is a land of recent formation. Originally that arm of the sea which we call the Persian Gulf extended far inland, to the north of modern Baghdad, and it was only at a relatively late date in human history that salt water gave place to dry land, a change due not to any sudden cataclysm but to the gradual deposit of river silt filling the great rift between mountain and desert. If the Tigris and the Euphrates alone had been concerned the formation of the delta would have followed the normal pattern; starting in the extreme north it would have pushed southwards very gradually, and man’s occupation of the newly-made soil would have been conditioned by that slow progress so that only after centuries or indeed millennia could he have settled in the south country where Ur lies. But as a matter of fact this was not the case at all. The people of Sumer themselves believed that the oldest of their cities was Eridu, which lies about twelve miles south of Ur, and excavation there by an Iraqi Government expedition has gone far towards confirming this belief; nowhere in Lower Mesopotamia proper 20 have there been found traces of a settlement so ancient as that at Eridu. Clearly this requires explanation, and we must look again at the physical geography of our area.
Fig. 1. Lower Mesopotamia
The Tigris and the Euphrates are not the only rivers that empty into the Persian Gulf. Close to the modern town of Mohammerah is the mouth of the Karun river which from the Persian mountains brings down almost as much silt as do the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates together; almost opposite to it is the Wadi al Batin, now a dry valley but in ancient times a great river draining the heart of Arabia; not so violent a stream as the Karun, it must yet have carried down in its waters no less heavy a charge of mud collected from the light surface soil through which its long channel was cut. The two rivers, facing each other and flowing at right angles to the Gulf, discharged into it a mass of silt which in time formed a bar across it; this neutralized the scouring action of what little tide the Gulf can boast and also slowed up the current of the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates so that the silt brought by them was heaped 21 against the inner side of the bar; the first dry land to be formed was in fact in the extreme south. The immediate result of this was to turn the upper end of the old gulf into a stagnant lake, whose waters, fed by the great rivers, gradually turned from salt to brackish and from brackish to fresh, and over the whole of it the silt of those same rivers was dropped uniformly, raising the level of the lagoon’s bed. Undoubtedly the action would be quickest near the mouths of the streams and dry land would be formed first in the north and in the south with, in the middle, a vast marsh diversified by low islands; but in time this too shrank until where there had been an arm of the sea there stretched a great delta through which ran rivers so flush with their banks that they were for ever changing their courses; every year the spring floods swamped the flat valley, in summer a pitiless sun scorched it, but its light and stoneless soil was as rich as could be found anywhere upon earth. The story of the Creation of the world as man’s home which we find in the Book of Genesis was taken over by the Hebrews from the people of Lower Mesopotamia, where it originated, and most faithfully does it record the facts. ‘God said “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear”, and it was so . . . And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’ It was indeed a good land, inviting settlement, and there were plenty of people ready to accept the invitation; immigrants moved in, land-hungry men snatching at each acre of fertile soil as soon as it emerged from the waters, and with their coming the first chapter in the long history of Sumer began.
This earliest phase was illustrated for us by three distinct sites examined by the Ur expedition, by Ur itself, by Rajeibeh and by Tell al ‘Ubaid.
In 1919 Dr. H. R. Hall, who was carrying out an experimental dig at Ur on behalf of the British Museum, discovered and partly excavated a little mound called by the Arabs Tell al ‘Ubaid, which lay some four miles to the north of Ur; the results were so important that the complete 22 excavation of the site was one of the first items in the programme of the Joint Expedition when it took the field three years later. The most sensational discovery was that of the First Dynasty temple which will be described hereafter (p. 92); what interests us now was something entirely different and very much older. About sixty yards from the temple ruins there was a low mound—it rose no more than six feet above the plain—the surface of which was strewn with flint implements and fragments of hand-made painted pottery, of a sort which had already been found at Eridu, south of Ur, and had been recognized as ‘prehistoric’, though little more than that was known about it. We excavated the mound and were somewhat taken aback to find how little work it required—everything lay quite close to the surface. Under a few inches of light dust mixed with potsherds there came a stratum not more than three feet thick composed of hard mud in which were quantities of sherds of painted ware, flint and obsidian tools, and bits of reed matting plastered with clay mixed with dung or, less often, with a mixture of earth and bitumen; below this was clean water-laid soil. This was, in fact, an island of river silt which originally rose above the marshy plain and had been seized upon by immigrants who had erected on it their primitive hut dwellings of reeds plastered with clay. The village had later been deserted and the dust and potsherds of the topmost layer represented its ruins; at one point we found in this layer the foundations of a mud-brick wall contemporary with the First Dynasty temple close by, and since this lay immediately in and over the older remains from which it was separated by an unknown length of time, we could conclude that our village had been definitely abandoned and that its site remained for long uninhabited. The three feet of hard mud and household rubbish had accumulated during the village’s lifetime, as the flimsy huts fell down and others were erected over them; the lighter soil above represented the last buildings, but much of it had been eroded by the desert winds (which accounts for the mass of potsherds exposed on the surface) and this must have happened during the time when the site lay desolate. But, 23 scanty as the remains were, they were enough to tell us a great deal about the people who lived there. First and foremost, they belonged to the Late Stone Age; at al ‘Ubaid not a trace of metal was found, and if copper was known to them at all it can have been used only for small objects of luxury; all their implements were of stone. The larger tools, such as hoes, were chipped from the flint or chert that can be got from the upper desert; knives and awls might be of rock crystal or obsidian—volcanic glass—both of which had to be imported from abroad; beads were made from rock crystal, carnelian, pink pebble and shell, and these were all chipped into shape and not polished; but one or two ear- or nose-studs of polished obsidian found on the surface may date from this period and if so show that a finer working of stone was not beyond the powers of the al ‘Ubaid craftsman. But that in which they excelled was their pottery [Plate 1]. The vessels were hand-made without the use of the wheel, but were thinly walled and finely shaped, and the characteristic ware was decorated with designs in black or brown paint on a ground which was intended to be white but often, through over-firing, assumed a curious and rather effective greenish tint. The patterns were all geometrical, built up from the simple elements of triangles, squares, wavy or vandyke lines and chevrons which might be filled in solidly or with hatching, but these were most skilfully combined and in all cases the design was admirably adapted to the shape of the vessel; it can safely be said that this, the earliest pottery of Lower Mesopotamia, is artistically superior to any that was to be produced there until the Arab conquest. At al ‘Ubaid the pottery seems to be from the outset fully developed; it is not of local growth. In more recent times excavations at Eridu have brought to light an earlier phase of the same ware, but the difference is one of degree only, not of kind, and the essential characteristics of the al ‘Ubaid pottery are already there. It is evident that the first settlers in the river valley brought with them a ceramic style which had been developed in their original home. Now the only thing of the sort known to us at present is the prehistoric painted ware of Elam, discovered in the excavations at Susa; it is by no means the 24 same, but there are certain unmistakable similarities, at least enough to warrant the idea that the two have a common ancestry; if that be the case the al ‘Ubaid people must have come down into the valley from the Elamite mountains to the east. It would be natural enough that the attraction of the drying marsh-land with its promise of rich crops should have appealed first to the dwellers on the land’s borders; since such nomads as there were in the western desert would have had small interest in agricultural possibilities the invasion must have come either from the east or from the north; what we know of northern pottery makes any connection with al ‘Ubaid impossible (the earliest pottery there is unpainted) and even the partial analogy with Elam should settle the question.
Quite definitely the newcomers were agriculturalists; the commonest stone implement is the hoe; many of the small flints seem to come from the sledges used for thrashing grain; stone querns and pounders show that this was used for bread. But the most curious evidence is that given by the sickles, which, or rather the fragments of which, litter the site of the village. These sickles were made of baked clay. Clay would seem to be the very last material that one would use for a cutting instrument, but the shape is indisputable, and the clay is so hard-baked and the jagged edge of the blade so keen that they would cut more or less; and if it be argued that they would certainly break the answer is that they did, only too easily, and that is why we find them in such numbers, and hardly ever one of them intact. The people then tilled the ground, and they kept domestic animals—the cow-dung in the mud plaster of their huts is evidence for that, and we found a clay figurine of a pig; spindle-whorls of baked clay or of bitumen prove that thread was spun, woollen thread presumably, and heavy clay discs pierced with two holes are almost certainly loom-weights. Fish-bones found in the hut ruins show that fish were eaten, as one would expect in a village close to river and marsh; some were so small that the fish must have been taken in nets, and a number of grooved pebbles that we found may have been net-sinkers; we found also a clay model of an open boat with 25 canoe-like body and curled prow. We have seen that nose- or ear-studs were worn, and beads; part of a painted clay figurine shows a woman wearing a very wide necklace and on the shoulders there are painted lines which may represent drapery; another figurine fragment, the lower part of the body, shows either tight-fitting breeches laced down the front or else tattoo marks on the flesh.
Fig. 2. Flint hoes
One day two Arabs came to the expedition house at Ur and from a folded handkerchief produced four or five big flint hoes (Fig. 2) which they had picked up, they said vaguely, ‘in the desert’. They received a good baksheesh and, as I had hoped, returned a day or two later with more hoes, but again would not specify where they were found. When they came for the fourth time I refused any reward, protesting that I had hoes enough, but told them that they would be well paid if they would guide us to the find-spot; which, seeing that that was the only chance of making any more money, they agreed to do. The site, called by the Arabs Rajeibeh, lay some six miles to the North East of Ur; it was so low a mound as to be hardly noticeable, but as soon as we came to it the mystery of our visitors’ hoe-harvest was explained; one could not walk a step without setting one’s foot on worked flints and painted potsherds lying so thick as to hide the desert surface. It was a site exactly like al ‘Ubaid but much larger. No excavation would have availed here, for directly below the stone and pottery refuse was the clean silt of the island on which the settlers had made their home; 26 nobody in later times had ever built upon the site[3] so that there were no upper strata to protect it, and the wind had carried away everything that wind could carry. Probably there had been here successive building levels representing a fairly long period, and the flints, etc. (too numerous to be all of one date) must have been distributed throughout a deposit of considerable depth; but as the process of wind erosion went on the heavier debris of the upper levels had settled down until all the dust of the decomposed dwellings had been blown away and the flints and potsherds of many generations had sunk to one common level which was virtually flush with the surrounding desert and so offered no challenge to the winds. Rajeibeh did not give us any information beyond what al ‘Ubaid had given, but its importance lay in the fact that it repeated exactly the al ‘Ubaid story; in both cases we have a natural island in the marsh-land inhabited by immigrants of the same stock and culture and in both, after a period of continuous occupation, the site is completely and finally deserted. Why this was, we were to learn from the excavations at Ur itself. And another point on which we needed evidence was the relative date of these village settlements, we knew from the stratification at al ‘Ubaid that they were older than the First Dynasty of Ur, and everything pointed to their being of the Late Stone Age, but we had no means whatsoever of showing how long was the time-gap between the Stone Age and the First Dynasty, nor anything to illustrate the development of history during that time; the al ‘Ubaid culture was an isolated phenomenon which, as one scholar wrote at the time,[4] ‘ought to have some place in the Sumerian historical tradition, and doubtless had, but the connection is at present missing’.
In the year 1929 the work of excavating the Royal Cemetery at Ur was drawing towards its end. On the evidence then to hand I was convinced that the cemetery came before, but only just before, the First Dynasty of Ur; the treasures recovered from its graves illustrated a civilization 27 of an astonishingly high order and it was therefore all the more important to trace the steps by which man had reached that level of art and culture. That meant, presumably, that we had to dig deeper; but it was just as well to begin by a small-scale test of the lower levels which could be carried out with a minimum of time and cost. Starting then below the level at which the graves had been found we sank a little shaft, not more than five feet square at the outset, into the underlying soil and went down through the mixed rubbish that is characteristic of old inhabited sites—a mixture of decomposed mud brick, ashes and broken pottery, very much like that in which the graves had been dug. This went on for about three feet and then suddenly, it all stopped: there were no more potsherds, no ashes, only clean water-laid mud, and the Arab workman at the bottom of the shaft told me that he had reached virgin soil; there was nothing more to be found, and he had better go elsewhere.
I got down and looked at the evidence and agreed with him; but then I took my levels and discovered that ‘virgin soil’ was not nearly so deep down as I had expected, for I had assumed that the original Ur was built not on a hill but on a low mound rising only just above the surrounding swampy land; and because I do not like having my theories upset by anything less than proof I told the man to get back and go on digging. Most unwillingly he did so, again turning up nothing but clean soil that yielded no sign of human activity; he dug through eight feet of it in all and then, suddenly, there appeared flint implements and fragments of painted al ‘Ubaid pottery vessels. I got into the pit once more, examined the sides, and by the time I had written up my notes was quite convinced of what it all meant; but I wanted to see whether others would come to the same conclusion. So I brought up two of my staff and, after pointing out the facts, asked for their explanation. They did not know what to say. My wife came along and looked and was asked the same question, and she turned away remarking casually, ‘Well, of course, it’s the Flood.’ That was the right answer. But one could scarcely argue for the Deluge on the strength of a pit a yard square; so in the next season I marked out on 28 the low ground where the graves of the Royal Cemetery had been a rectangle some seventy-five feet by sixty and there dug a huge pit which went down, in the end, for sixty-four feet. Now the graves, which had been pretty deep-lying, had been dug down, from a ground-surface much higher than the level at which our pit started, into rubbish-mounds heaped against the flank of the old town; we had cleared away the graves and the rubbish and the level of the pit’s mouth therefore was necessarily older than the graves by the (unknown) length of time required for so much rubbish to accumulate; it was probably quite a long time.
Fig. 3. Section of the ‘Flood-pit’.
Almost as soon as the new dig started we came upon the ruins of houses. The walls were built of mud bricks of the ‘plano-convex’ type—rectangular but rounded on the top instead of flat—which we had found alike in the First Dynasty temple at al ‘Ubaid and in the Royal Cemetery, and such pottery as lay in the rooms was of the sort common in the graves higher up. Below these ruins (Fig. 3) came a second building stratum, and then a third; in the first twenty feet we dug through no fewer than eight levels of houses, each built above the ruins of the previous age; but in the lowest three the wall-bricks were not plano-convex but flat-topped, and there were types of pottery different from any that the Royal Cemetery had produced. Then, abruptly, the house-ruins stopped and we were digging down through a solid mass of broken pottery which continued for about eighteen feet and in it, at different levels, were the kilns in which the pots had been fired. It was the site of a vase-factory; the sherds represented the pots which went wrong in the firing—were cracked or distorted—and having no commercial value were smashed by the potter and the bits left lying there until they were heaped so high that the kiln was buried and a new kiln had to be built on the top of them; an accumulation of eighteen feet of wasters meant that the factory was in production for a long time, and the changes of fashion during that time could be traced from its discards. The sherds in the upper debris were for the most part similar to the few found in the lower house levels, but amongst them were fragments painted in red and black on a buff ground identical with a ware which on a site called Jamdat Nasr, a hundred and fifty miles to the north of Ur, had shortly before been found associated with written clay tablets of a most primitive sort; but Jamdat Nasr, like al ‘Ubaid, was as yet an isolated discovery whose relation to Sumerian history was a matter of guesswork only. Lower down in our kiln stratum the character of the potsherds changed, the polychrome wares disappeared and in their place all the distinctive fragments showed a monochrome decoration, plain red produced by a wash of hæmatite or grey or black resulting from the use of the ‘smother-kiln’ in which the smoke is retained to carbonize the clay; this was a ware which the German excavators at Warka (the ancient Erech) had been finding in the lowest levels they had yet reached. Low down in this ‘Uruk’ stratum we found a remarkable object, a heavy disc of baked clay about three feet in diameter with a central pivot-hole and a small hole near the rim to take a handle; it was a potter’s wheel as used by the maker of the ‘Uruk’ vases, the earliest known example of that invention whereby man passed from the age of pure handicraft into the age of machinery. And only a foot or so below the point at which the wheel was found the character of the pottery changed again and we were digging through sherds of the hand-turned painted ware of al ‘Ubaid. But this was al ‘Ubaid with a difference. The hand-made pots were of the same clay and had the same whitish or greenish surface, but in most the decoration in black paint was reduced to a minimum—plain horizontal lines or the simplest patterns perfunctorily and carelessly drawn; clearly they belonged to the last stages of decadence. Then—it was only a thin stratum—all the pottery came to an end and we had, as we expected, the clean silt piled up by the Flood. A few graves had been dug down into the silt, and in them was al ‘Ubaid pottery of a richer sort than that in the kiln rubbish above; in one of them there was a copper spear-blade, the earliest example we have found of metal being used for weapons or tools; the bodies all lay on their backs, rigidly extended, with the hands crossed below the stomach, a position not found in Mesopotamian graves of any later date 31 until the Greek period; such a difference in the ritual of burial is most important in that it implies a difference in the basic religious beliefs of the people. In some of the graves there were terra-cotta figurines of the type also found in the al ‘Ubaid house ruins; they were always female and nude [Plate 2], sometimes showing a woman suckling a child but more often a single figure with the hands brought in front of the body very much in the attitude of the dead beside whom they lay. These graves, dug into the silt deposit, were of course later than the Flood, but they had been made before the vase factory occupied the area in the last phase of the al ‘Ubaid period.
At this point the clean silt measured about eleven feet in thickness and except for one scarcely noticeable stratum of darker mud was absolutely uniform throughout; microscopic analysis proved that it was water-laid, subject to the action of gentle currents, and it was composed of material brought down from the middle reaches of the Euphrates. Below it came the level of human occupation—decayed mud brick, ashes and potsherds, in which we could distinguish three successive floor levels; here was the richly-decorated al ‘Ubaid pottery in abundance, flints, clay figurines and flat rectangular bricks (preserved because they had been accidentally burnt) and fragments of clay plaster, also hardened by fire, which on one side were smooth, flat or convex, and on the other side bore the imprint of reed stems, the daub from the walls of the reed huts which, as we saw at al ‘Ubaid, were the normal houses of the pre-Flood people, as they are of the Marsh Arab to-day.
The first huts had been set up on the surface of a belt of mud which was clearly formed, for the most part, of decayed vegetable matter; in it were potsherds (thicker at the bottom of the belt) all lying horizontally as if they had been thrown there and had sunk of their own weight through water into soft mud; below this again, three feet below modern sea level, there was stiff green clay pierced by sinuous brown stains which had been the roots of reeds; here all traces of human activity ceased and we were at the bottom of Mesopotamia.
The digging of so great a pit was a long and expensive matter, but it amply repaid us in historical results; it confirmed the sequence which had been tentatively drawn upon the strength of our own and other excavations—particularly those of Warka—and it added a lot of valuable detail.
The green clay at the bottom was the floor of the original marsh bordering the island which was occupied by the first settlers in the part of the valley; it was dense with reeds, and with the decay of their stems and leaves and with the rubbish thrown into the water from the island the bottom rose and gradually dry land was formed; when it was dry enough people set up their huts on it at the foot of what was by now the city mound. All this low-lying quarter was overwhelmed by a great flood and buried beneath its silt. There were survivors, of course, and they carried on the old culture, as we can see from the graves, but they were a disheartened and impoverished remnant and when, some time later, the kilns were established on the site of the old graveyard the traditional arts were in their last decadence.
The appearance in the kiln stratum of the red, black or grey ‘Uruk’ pottery marks a new chapter in the history of the delta. Into the rich but now sparsely-inhabited valley there poured a new wave of immigrants, coming this time from the north, who brought with them a more advanced culture—they enjoyed a free use of metal and were skilled workers in copper, and they made their pottery not by hand but on the potter’s wheel; and though they were content to settle down side by side with the al ‘Ubaid survivors they very soon made themselves the masters of the country. Above the ‘Uruk’ potsherds comes the painted ‘Jamdat Nasr’ ware, made on the same factory site, and this again means a fresh invasion, probably (though we cannot yet be sure) from the east; the lordship passes to a new stock who developed if they did not actually invent the all-important art of writing, for it is with the Jamdat Nasr pottery that we find tablets with the pictographic writing which was gradually formalized into the cuneiform script of the Sumerians. Then, high up in our pit, with the fourth stratum of house ruins Jamdat Nasr disappears, round-topped bricks replace 33 the old flat type, and the pottery becomes that which we find in the Royal Cemetery—it is the beginning of what we now call the ‘Early Dynastic Period’. But the houses were to decay and be rebuilt three times, and thereafter the site of them was to be abandoned and turned into a rubbish-heap before the first grave of the Royal Cemetery was dug; that cemetery therefore, and the First Dynasty of Ur which immediately succeeded it, do not introduce the Period but come relatively late in it.
Such is the outline of history given by the stratification of our great pit. It shows, beyond all question, the order of the historic phases, and until we know that order there is no history at all; but it does not necessarily tell us much about any one phase; the picture has to be completed from the results not of one dig but of many. Thus from the three superimposed floor levels found below the Flood silt it might be argued that the Flood happened when the settlement was still young; but that is far from being the case. At Eridu the Iraq Government expedition unearthed the ruins of fourteen temples, one above the other, and all belonged to the first al ‘Ubaid period, prior to the Flood; at Warka the Germans found an al ‘Ubaid occupation stratum no less than forty feet thick; evidently the period was very long. We might have found similar evidence if we had been digging into the centre of the prehistoric town, but as it happened our pit was outside its walls, so that our houses represented the town’s expansion at a relatively late date. Again it might have been supposed that the people of the al ‘Ubaid I phase, before the Flood, being still, apparently, in the Neolithic stage of culture, must have been savages of no concern to the rest of the world. But their peculiar painted pottery spread to the northern limits of Mesopotamia and was thence carried eastwards to the valley of the Orontes river and to the shores of the Mediterranean, witness to a far-flung trade; and actually, in the house ruins under the Flood silt at Ur, we found two beads made of amazonite, a stone of which the nearest known source is the Nilghiri hills of central India; it was a fairly sophisticated community that could import its luxuries from lands so far away. Even the terra-cotta figurines cannot 34 rightly be classed as primitive. The slender bodies, conventional as they are, are skilfully modelled and the queer reptilian faces with the high bitumen-covered head-dress are due not to lack of art but to intention; these are goddesses who must not be represented otherwise. What the religion of the people was we cannot tell, but religion of a sort they certainly had. Whether or not these al ‘Ubaid people should properly be called Sumerians is a matter of dispute; but this much at least can safely be said, that the culture which they evolved was not a sterile growth doomed to be obliterated by the disaster of the Deluge, but contributed not a little to the Sumerian civilization which in later times was to flower so richly. And amongst the things which they handed down to their successors was the story of the Flood; that must have been so, for none but they could have been responsible for it.
The familiar Bible story of Noah’s Ark is not by origin a Hebrew story at all; it was taken over by the Hebrews from Mesopotamia and incorporated, with suitable emendations, in their own sacred canon; it is exactly the same tale as we find on tablets written before the time of Abraham, and not only the incidents but even much of the phrasing is identical. The Sumerian legend is in the form of a religious poem reflecting the beliefs of a pagan people, and if that were all that we were told about the Flood we might dismiss it as a piece of fantastic mythology. But it does not stand alone. In the King-list which I have already discussed (see above, p. 14) we see enumerated at the beginning a series of kings, presumably fabulous, who enjoyed phenomenal reigns of thousands of years each, and then ‘The Flood came. After the Flood came, kingship was sent down from on high’ and the list gives a dynasty of kings whose capital was at Kish, then a dynasty whose capital was at Erech, and thirdly the First Dynasty of Ur, the historical reality of which has been proved by our excavations. Here there is no picturesque legend, only what the old historians meant to be a plain statement of fact. The statement is indeed so plain that it implies the legend, for otherwise it would have no meaning; ‘The Flood’ was for the Sumerian reader the only flood that really mattered, what we call Noah’s Flood.
