BEFORE ABRAHAM.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 12 July 1924, Page 13

BEFORE ABRAHAM.

EXCAVATIONS AT UR, A 4,000-YEAR-OLD TOWER. The British Museum ‘authorities announce that the heaviest task undertaken this year by the joint expedition of the British Museum anfi the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in connection with excavations at Ur of the Chaldees was that of clearing the ziggurat or staged tower of the ancient city. Before work began this was a mound with steeply sloping sides of broken brick and dust, distinguishable from the other mounds of the site mainly by its greater height; to-day it is a brick building whose size and remarkable state of preservation make it the most striking monument of antiquity in Mesopotamia. On an artificial terrace raised high above the plahUthat extends all round the city stands a rectangular building some 195 ft long by 150 ft. wide and 60ft. high; its corners are orientated to the cardinal points of the compass. The whole is solid throughout. The solid mass of the lowest stage, with its triple stairway, was built by Ur-Engur, who was King of Ur about 2350 B.C. The astonishing preservation of much of the brickwork speaks well for the skill of the builders and the quality of the material employed, while the dignity of the conception is worthy of the king who founded a new imperial dynasty. All the upper work, so far. as it is preserved, is due to Nabonidus, the last King of Babylon, who about 535 B.C. took in hand the restoration of the ancient ziggurat; the bricks here are stamped with his name, and in the debris are found the inscribed clay cones on which he records his pious works and gives the history of the site.

Looking at the enormous bulk of this 4000-year-old monument, and thinking of the labour that went to the piling up of its solid brickwork, it is natural enough to ask why men should ever have undertaken such a work, why every, important city of Mesopotamia had its ziggurat, its counterpart of the Tower of Babel. The answer ..seems to be simple. The Sumerians, the builders of these towers, were not natives, of the land, but settlers in it, whose original home had been in the mountain country, of the North-east, where, like all mountain folk, they had been accustomed to worshipping in “high places,” and to setting up tlieir altars “on a very high bill.” Coming down to the unrelieved alluvial flats of the Euphrates Valley, they fount! themselves at a loss, unable to approach the gods as they were wont, and therefore they set to and “built themselves towel’s whose tops might reach unto heaven” — artificial hills whereon man might feel himself as near as might be to God. Mr.’ C. Leonard- Woolley, of the exploring expedition, writes in The Times : We must conclude that Ur-Engur’s building, whose lower part survives today, was completed at least during his son’s reign, and that when Abraham lived at Ur he looked up daily to a ziggurat which, if not. so lofty as some, was at any rate a finished monument.