Ziggurat at Ur of the Chaldees, Iraq ca. April 1965
Ur of Chaldees
The following is a description of Ur as recollected by Gavin Young from his book "IRAQ Land of Two Rivers."
A visitor to Ur wrote in 1919, that when Ur was at the mouth of the Euphrates, you could see there dockyards and busy workshops of the capital and greatest of all the cities of Chaldea. Now, he added, Ur is 'a nondescript heap to be disputed over by professors'. Just how near the sea formerly came up to Ur- and to Eridu, the most sacred city of Sumer and now a few sand-covered mounds fifteen miles south-west of Ur at Abu Shahrain- has yet to be exactly determined. Nearby there are low cliffs that could have been foreshores of a greater Gulf, and over the centuries sea-pebbles and shells have been picked up by traveler after traveler, throughout the region of Ur. 'The Chaldean Lake is on our right hand,' wrote an Italian nobleman called Pietro della Valle in 1625 as he made his cautious way from Basra to Aleppo in northern Syria. 'I saw upon the ground an abundance of Sea-shells, shining within, like Mother-of-Pearl, some whole, and some broken: I wondered how they came so far from the Sea . . .'
Sir Leonard Woolley's excavation of Ur- one of the most rewarding operations in the history of archaeology- has, of course, made something more of Ur than just a nondescript heap to be disputed over by professors. The first thing you see of it is its ziggurrat, the best-preserved of the stage-towers of Sumer. It is built of mud-brick, sheltered under eight feet of baked bricks set in bitumen, and measures two hundred by one hundred and fifty feet. Long flights of stairs led up to the three stories and the shrine that surmounted the ziggurrat. These days the area is most unfortunately surrounded by military installations and it is sometimes not possible, for security reasons, to climb to the top of one of the most famous historical monuments in the world.
|
Ziggurat at Ur of the Chaldees, Iraq ca. April 1965 |
The ziggurrats of Sumer- what are they? Some were the work of King Ur-Nammu, the first ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2 113-2006 BC), a time which has been described as 'one of the most brilliant periods in the history of ancient Iraq'. And Ur-Nammu built these impressive monuments not only at Ur but at the Sumerian cities of Warka, Eridu and Nippur as well. There are a number of theories about them. For a start, they are not the Mesopotamian equivalent of the pyramids of Egypt- they do not contain tombs, or indeed anything else. They were most probably built on the site of earlier, low one-story ziggurrats supporting temples.
Some experts once thought that the Sumerians came from the highlands and so had become accustomed to worshipping their gods upon hill- or mountain-tops. The ziggurrats were built by them, therefore, to serve as artificial hills. Others thought that the ziggurrats were designed to raise the shrine of the god high above the contaminating scrimmage of humans at ground level. Still others maintained that the Sumerians raised the shrines between heaven and earth and provided them with staircases so that mortals, born expressly to serve the gods, could commune with them half-way, as it were, between earth and heaven. 'They expressed one of man's most remarkable efforts,' says Georges Roux in Ancient Iraq, 'to rise above his miserable condition and to establish closer contacts with the divinity.' This explanation seems most plausible today.
The most dramatic achievement of Woolley at Ur was his unearthing of the Royal Tombs. Here was discovered a treasury that thrilled all those who worked on the site- golden cups and weapons, golden statuettes, golden helmets and harps, gold daggers with hilts of lapislazuli and princely head-dresses, poured in a dazzling flood out of these great pits in which the Kings and their courtiers, musicians and servants who willingly submitted to fatal drugs at their masters' sides, met their fates at the dawn of history. Many of these treasures are to be seen in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. In the Nasiriya Museum on the west bank you can see golden head-dresses from Ur of four thousand five hundred years ago, necklaces, rings, copper vases, fish-hooks, spear-heads, foundation statuettes, and tablets galore covered with the neat, close-packed cuneiform scratches, each symbol as tiny and perfect as the footprint of a small bird.
The Royal Tombs are still bleakly spectacular. The brick arches and vaults speak of formidable construction; the bricks are in compact arrangements and look like recent fakes, but the old writing is upon them- they are genuine and have survived from the day when, as the Bible tells us, Abraham and his clan moved from Ur to Palestine. I stepped across the massive humps of earth to look down into the dusty chasms of The Great Death Pit, and a red fox ran out of one black-mouthed hole and trotted away to another, glancing up at me over its shoulder.
My Iraqi companion asked me, 'What happened to the Sumerians?' 'You're from near here. You are an ancient Sumerian,' I said. 'I am?' He sounded startled.
'Well, you may have more Arab blood in you by now. Seriously, though: the Marsh Arabs who have lived in exactly the same isolated area for thousands of years may have a touch of Sumerian in them.'
The Elamites from Persia sacked Ur in 2006 BC, and the destruction of the walls which Ur-Nammu had built 'as high as a shining mountain' were destroyed.
The Elamites didn't enjoy their dominion for long. The Arab-blooded Akkadians from further north and the Amorites from Syria prevailed, and soon a Sumero-Akkadian culture extended through Lower and Upper Mesopotamia. The great name of the Great King emerges to dominate the scene from 1792 BC: Hammurabi, the law-giver, unifier of kingdoms, war-lord, presider, over a highly civilized people practicing sublime art and speaking the sophisticated Akkadian language. A new city name soars to outshine the cities of Sumer: Babylon.
Sunrise Over Ziggurat at Ur of the Chaldees, Iraq ca. April 1965 |
But here, today, outside Nasiriya, try to put those aggravating military cantonments out of your sight, to ignore the jet aircraft booming aggressively overhead - pause on the stairway to the shrine of the god. The ziggurrat of Ur towers over the river that once flowed under its very walls. Look east across the flatlands and the marshlands where the Kings of Ur once held sway. over corn-growers and cattle-owners like those who live and prosper there today- and beyond that, north-east, where once there were the estates of the priests and lords and freemen, their houses, mud-wailed gardens, carp-filled fish ponds, and their flocks. And where lay, scattered behind their dykes, the thirteen city-states where civilization was born.
Bibliography: