Ur

Where Ur stood is the live question on this page, and the text under-determines the answer. Genesis 11:31 has the family set out from Ur and arrive at Haran, which puts some travelling distance between the two. Acts 7:2 has God appear to Abraham in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran. Genesis 24:10 sends the servant back to Nahor's town in Aram-naharaim, the country of the two rivers, in the north. Those three verses are the whole biblical evidence for an address. The majority identification is the southern city, Tell el-Muqayyar. Its strengths are that the mound is certainly the ancient city of Ur, named in its own foundation deposits; that Ur was a famous and well-connected place in the right millennium; and that the phrase "of the Chaldeans" fits southern Babylonia, where the Kaldu tribes are attested. Alan R. Millard made that case in "Where Was Abraham's Ur? The Case for the Babylonian City," Biblical Archaeology Review 27:3 (2001), and stated it carefully: the case is strong, and the available information precludes certainty. The map pin on this page follows this reading. A northern Ur has real defenders. Cyrus H. Gordon argued in "Abraham and the Merchants of Ura," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 17 (1958), that Abraham's Ur belonged in the region of Urha, later Edessa and today Şanlıurfa, about forty kilometres from Harran. The arguments run that the patriarchal narratives keep sending the family back to Haran and Aram-naharaim and never back south, that Stephen's Mesopotamia is the northern country in ordinary Greek usage, and that a southern Ur makes the family's route a long detour. Hershel Shanks put the northern case to a wide readership in "Abraham's Ur: Is the Pope Going to the Wrong Place?", Biblical Archaeology Review 26:1 (2000), and Millard was answering him. The reading is older than either. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown glossed Genesis 11:28 in 1871, before any excavation had settled anything, with "Ur--now Orfa; that is, \"light,\" or \"fire.\" Its name probably derived from its being devoted to the rites of fire-worship." Adam Clarke, writing in 1832, was blunter about how little was known: "Ur appears to have been a city of some considerable consequence at that time in Chaldea; but where situated is not well known." At Şanlıurfa a cave in the city has long been pointed to as Abraham's birthplace by Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities there. That is a tradition, and it is named here as one. What no one disputes is that Abraham's family came from Mesopotamia, moved through Haran, and left for Canaan from there. Leonard Woolley's teams cleared more than 1,800 graves at Ur, sixteen of which he classed as royal tombs. The tomb of Puabi, grave PG 800, was found undisturbed: a royal woman known by name from her own cylinder seal, with a gold headdress, a cloak of carnelian and lapis lazuli beads, and gold vessels. The Great Death Pit, grave PG 1237, cleared in the 1929 to 1930 season, held seventy-three attendants laid out in rows, which Woolley read as retainers who went into the grave with their ruler. Later re-examination of skulls from the cemetery, published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, argued that at least some of them died from a blow to the head rather than from a sedative, which changes how they died and not the fact that they were buried there. The Standard of Ur, an inlaid box in shell, lapis and red limestone with a war panel and a peace panel, came from grave PG 779. So did the pair of statuettes known as the Ram in a Thicket, and the bull-headed lyres, whose decayed wooden frames Woolley recovered by pouring plaster into the voids they had left in the soil. This site holds no photograph of those objects, no image of the tower and no map of Mesopotamia, so the page describes them in words rather than borrowing a picture of somewhere else. The tower was built for the moon. Ur-Nammu raised it around 2100 BC and his son Shulgi finished it, for Nanna, called Sin in Akkadian, with the goddess Ningal beside him. The lowest stage survives and its baked-brick facing carries Ur-Nammu's name. Nabonidus rebuilt the upper stages in the sixth century BC, installed his daughter Ennigaldi-Nanna as high priestess of the moon god at Ur in 547 BC, and restored the moon temple at Harran as well, where his mother Adad-guppi had served Sin all her life. Ur and Haran are the two ends of one cult, and Genesis has Terah's household move from the first to the second. That pattern is in the evidence, and the page reports it as a pattern. Scripture never names the gods Terah served, no excavated object at Ur names them either, and so this page holds the two facts side by side instead of combining them into a claim. In the priestess's residence Woolley found a room of older objects labelled in three languages on a clay drum, collected under Ennigaldi-Nanna, and it is often described as the earliest known museum. The Code of Ur-Nammu comes from the same dynasty that built the tower, around 2100 BC, and is the oldest surviving law code known. Samuel Noah Kramer translated two fragments from Nippur in 1952, which gave the prologue and five laws, and further tablets from Ur published in 1965 brought about thirty of the fifty-seven laws into view. It predates the Code of Hammurabi by roughly three centuries. What that shows is that written law existed in Abraham's part of the world long before Moses, in the very city Genesis names. What it does not show is that Moses copied anything, and the argument about what a parallel proves is worked through on this site's page on the ancient Near East. In the 1928 to 1929 season Woolley cut a deep pit below the cemetery and found a bed of water-laid silt about three metres thick, with occupation above it and below it. He announced it as the flood of Genesis, the press carried it that way in 1929, and he set it out for a general readership in Ur of the Chaldees the same year and returned to it in Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins in 1936. Flood deposits then turned up at Kish, Shuruppak, Uruk and Nineveh, and when they were compared they did not line up: the silt beds sit at different stratigraphic levels and so record different floods at different dates. Woolley's own silt does not extend across the whole site of Ur, let alone across the plain. Max Mallowan, who had worked with Woolley at Ur, reviewed the whole question in "Noah's Flood Reconsidered," Iraq 26 (1964), and while he held that a memory of a real and severe inundation stands behind the Mesopotamian flood traditions, he did not sustain Woolley's identification of the Ur silt as the biblical deluge. That is where the field has stood since. The silt is real, it was laid down by water, and it buried a settlement; what it is not is a basin-wide layer that can be matched to Genesis 6 to 9. The wider question belongs to this site's page on the flood. One house at Ur is shown to visitors today as Abraham's house, and the label is modern. What Woolley excavated there was a residential quarter of the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian period, roughly 1900 to 1700 BC, with narrow lanes, courtyard houses of baked and mud brick, some of two storeys, a family chapel and burials beneath the floors. That is genuinely how a family of that period in that city lived, and Woolley said as much. No inscription, object or text ties any house at Ur to Abraham or to Terah, and no excavator has claimed one. The name itself raises two questions. The Hebrew city name and the Hebrew word for flame share their consonants, which is two different words with one spelling, and that single fact is the root of the whole fire-of-the-Chaldeans tradition below; modern Assyriology reads the city name as the Sumerian Urim, unrelated to the word for flame. The second question is the date of the word Chaldeans. The Kaldu appear in Assyrian records in the early ninth century BC, first in the annals of Ashurnasirpal II, who reigned from about 883 to 859 BC, more than a thousand years after any date proposed for Abraham. Three readings are held. Some treat the phrase as a later note identifying the region for readers who would not have known the bare name Ur, the way an English writer adds a country to a town, and Woolley took it that way himself. Critical scholarship has used the phrase as a marker for a first-millennium hand in the Genesis text; this page names that position and does not adopt it. Millard argued that it is not an anachronism at all, since the southern territory carried the name Kaldu from the early first millennium, regions in Mesopotamia were normally named for the tribes living in them, and no earlier general name for that region is known. A related conservative reading connects Kasdim to Kesed, a son of Abraham's brother Nahor named at Genesis 22:22, and the objection to it belongs on the page too: Genesis 11:28 already calls the city Ur of the Chaldeans before Kesed is born, so that connection has to be retrospective naming rather than derivation.