UR OF THE CHALDEES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20208, 19 March 1929, Page 11

UR OF THE CHALDEES.

WORK OF EXCAVATORS.

BIBLICAL STORY, OR FLOOD

SIGNS IN CONFIRMATION.

SENSATIONAL DISCOVERIES. Australian and N.Z. Press Association. (Received March IP, 8.25 p.m.) LONDON. March 17. Professor Leonard Wooley, head of the British Museum's expedition to Ur of the Chaldccs, has come to the conclusion that the Biblical story of the flood in the days of Noah is (rue, despite the fact that distinguished theologians have ridiculed it. The professor says the sensational discoveries made by his party in the latest excavation are capable of no other interpretation. The excavators unearthed strata which indicated that tlio earliest settlements on tha Euphrates delta had been overwhelmed.

When the workmen reached the clay deposit they announced that it was virgin ground, but Professor Wooley decided to see if there were anything below it. He bored through eight feet of the clay and then found deposits which indicated that Ur was a civilised and properly built town.

The excavators believe the catastrophe which demolished the town could only have been a flood and that only a flood of unexampled magnitude could have deposited an eight-feet bank of clay upon the original site of Ur. Professor Stephen Langdon, Oxford Assyriologist, says the recent revelations in the excavations at Ivish suggested that there had been two great deluges there, the second one having marked the beginning and the end of the long period of Sumeiiau civilisation.

The Sumerians were the first people to possess a legend that a flood had occurred and that men built boats to escape from it. 'J'ho Babylonians and the Greeks borrowed that legend, and the whole of Hebrew tradition is borrowed from the Babylonian tradition. Presumably, says Professor Langdon, human history does not go much further back than 5000 years B.C.