DWELLINGS OF UR.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20075, 16 April 1927, Page 19

DWELLINGS OF UR.

HOUSES 4000 YEARS OLD. HOW ABRAHAM LIVED, INSCRIBED TABLETS FOUND. Buildings belonging to about flic period of Abraham (2100-1900 8.c.), have been discovered at Ur by the joint expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, The work last year, started on October 28, and the site selected was a lofty mound just outside the wall, built by Nebuchadnezzar round the Sacred Area. Hitherto, the excavations have been on temples or fortifications, and little has been learned about the domestic conditions of ordinary people. “Wc have now,” the excavators state, “cleared an area measuring some 70 yards by 50, and have laid bare several blocks of bouses divided by narrow streets, and the result is certainly surprising. The buildings we have found belong to about the time of Abraham, and as they lie deep down in the mound, 20ft or more below the surface, the walls are astonishingly well preserved. MODERN HOMES ANTICIPATED. “From the street door, one passed through a little entrance chamber into a central court, which was partly open to the sky, and acted as a light-well for the surrounding rooms. One side of the court was taken up by the reception room, a long shadow chamber, with a door wider than the rest set in the middle of its length; on another side was the kitchen, and other domestic offices occupied the remaining space. “The living rooms of the family were all on the upper floor. The arrangement of the rooms above corresponds to that of ■the ground floor, but, whereas those had opened on to the paved court, the top rooms were entered from a wooden gallery which ran from the stairhead round the four sides of the court, and seem to have'*been protected by a penthouse roof; the whole plan of the building anticipates almost exactly that of the richer houses of modern Baghdad, and we have only to look at one of these to get a very fair picture of the setting in which a Terah might have passed his life at Ur 4000 years ago. IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS UNEARTHED. “The houses, continuously Inhabited throughout a long period (all sorts of minor rebuildings and alterations showed the whims of successive owners), had been swept bare of nearly all their contents, and even the graves—for it was the custom to bury the dead below the house wherein they had lived—had generally been plundered", and yielded little except clay pots, and sometimes the signet seal of the householder; but in one respect, and that, perhaps, the most important of all, the ruins were productive. “Very large numbers of inscribed tablets were found, some singly, others in hoards, lying along the foot of the brick shelf in the repository, where they had been kept, or flung out together as rubbish in some period of destruction. “From the few which it has as yet been possible to examine, it is clear that we have secured a most important series of documents. Some of these are educational, tables of square and cube roots, others are records of the sacred buildings erected at Ur by kings of the dynasties of Isin and Larsa; others are hymns. It will be a long time before we can really say what the contents of these hundreds of tablets are, but judging from the first few, they should be of very great interest.’’