MOON GOD'S TEMPLE

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 16

MOON GOD'S TEMPLE

[revealed amid the ruins op UR.

"In the courtyard of E-dublalmakh, one of the most important of the ancient shrines of Ur, have been found fragments, themselves large enough to be reckoned as monuments, of one of the greatest and most splendid works of art in stono that Mesopotamia has produced." { 80 runs the statement from Bagdad, which was issued by the Director of tho British Museum. The discovery was made by the joint expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of Pennsylvania University, states the "San Francisco Examiner."

"Last year w 6 laid bare the Ziggurat of Ur,' runs the statement, "the huge tower of the moon god sent up by King Ur-Engur about 2500 years before Christ. Now we have beautifully carved in relief upon a limestone slab, which, when complete, with five feet across and nearly fifteen feet high, the portait of its builder and his own record of its conception and achievement. In one scene the king receives from his god the order to build the tower; the god holds out to him the rod and line of the architect, the measuring reed and the flaxen line with ■which Ezekeil, an exile by the waters of Bablyon, saw planned out the city and temple of his dreams. "In another scene Ur.-Engur shows hia obedience by appearing before the god carrying all the tools of the mason, ready himself to lay the first brick of the Ziggurat. In another, of which, unfortunately, but a few small fragments remain, we see the actual construction in progress, with the builders carrying the mortar up ladders, which are set against the unfinished walls.

"Scenes of sacrifice and of music illustrate the piety and the triumphs of tlw great founder of the 'third dynasty of Ur. Brokon as it is ond in parts much damaged, this stela ranks as one of the two finest worku of Sumarian art known and in dramatic interest is surpassed by none. ;

"Tho discovery was madein the courtyard of E-dublalmakh, one the most important of the ancient shrines of Ur. It has now been cleared down to the pavements laid by Kuri-Galzu, king of lJabylon, about the sixteenth century, 8.C., and only the Ziggurat itself is a more imposing ruin. , "Tlirough side chambers and gateways ■which will stand to over the height of a man, the visitor passes into a great paved court at one end of which the little shrine rises high on its pedestal o£ panelled brickwork to dominate the buildings all round. From a corner of the court a flight of steps leads up to the terrace on which the Ziggurat 13 built. Anpthpr gateway forms the f end of a paved street leading, to the- temple of Nin-Gai, the moon god'a wife. "At the endi of three years' work we have, covered between a. third and a half of the area of the walled enclosure, which was the Temenos or Sacred Place of Ur, and our' plans, at least for the various periods between the sixteenth century, 8.C., and tho sixth, when Nebuchadnezzar put up his now Temenos wall around the ancient sanctuaries and his grandson,. Nabonidis, restored them for tho last time, are fairly complete. _so that we see the buildings not as .isolated units, but as parts of a connected whole, which was the moon god's temple, and, though the older buildings have suffered more from time and restoration, and their excavation, necessarily a longer and a costlier task, is not yet so far advanced, we can already form a tolerably coherent and truth picture of this northern end of the Temenos at a much earlier date when Ur-Engur's Ziggurat was new or when later Abraham walked along the brick-paved streets of. Ur."