Abraham's 'Home Town'

FEBRUARY, 1926

BY GEORGE BYRON GORDON

And they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan.
— GENESIS XI. 31

I

READERS of the Bible will not need to be reminded that Ur is mentioned in a passage that occurs not far from the beginning of the Book of Genesis. It is one of the substantial facts contained in that Book of Beginnings, a long-forgotten fact that is now being verified in the most miraculous way as excavation proceeds and we see the ancient city emerging from the sands that have covered it for ages. The eleventh chapter of Genesis is a most arresting human document, recording as it does the beginning of a great adventure. It opens with the building of the Tower of Babel and it ends with the simple statement that Abraham went out from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan — that is to say, the land we call Palestine to-day. We are not told at this point why Abraham emigrated with his family from Ur, and we are left at liberty to assume, if we choose, that his motive was not different from that of many emigrants in all times and places, and that he left the city of his fathers to seek a home among strangers and to be the founder of a new inheritance, under that divine guidance that becomes his ruling motive and his chief incentive as his adventurous journey continues and as his astonishing story develops.

Abraham may have had other reasons for leaving Ur. We shall never know, but it is worthy of passing note that he did not depart by divine mandate. That came to him later. He and his father Terah, and his nephew Lot, and Sarai, his wife, and their little band of followers traveled north till many days’ journey lay between them and the city they had left, ‘and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there,’ and Terah, Abraham’s father, died in Haran. It was then that he received the commandment that was to remain throughout the rest of his life his supreme possession and guiding principle — the mandate for Palestine, ‘the land of Canaan,’ for himself and for his posterity forever; for it was made known to him at Haran that he would become a great nation. To phrase it in modernist fashion, his Oriental imagination became possessed with that idea and he formed the purpose of making the dream come true. So he left Haran and continued his journey.

We are assuming that Abraham was a real person; and indeed, though his name has not yet been found on any contemporary document, it is probable that such a person lived about the time assigned to him in the Scriptures. ‘And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.’

Here for the time being we may take leave of the Bible, for we are not now concerned with the wanderings of the Patriarch, but with the history of his birthplace, Ur of the Chaldees. That city is not again mentioned in the Book of Genesis. To fill up the blank we must turn to some of the most wonderful discoveries of modern times — the finding of buried records extending backward to a period four thousand years before Christ, and the yet more miraculous discovery of the key to these writings.

But why should a city of such considerable antiquity be called ‘of the Chaldees’? The Chaldeans are known to have been a small Semitic tribe of which nothing is heard till a relatively late date, whereas Ur, till long after its prime, was a city of the Sumerians, who were neither small nor late nor Semitic, but a great people who played their part before any Semites appeared on the Mesopotamian plain. The explanation is simple. The Book of Genesis was written long after the Sumerians had fallen on evil days, when the Chaldeans lived in some of their cities. The Persians were then masters of the land; and the captive Jews in Babylon, learning that the Chaldeans lived at Ur, called it Ur of the Chaldees, and in compiling the Book of Genesis so wrote its name. But Ur was then a city fallen from its place and power. It was in a halfruinous condition, and Babylon had long since confirmed its supremacy over all cities, however ancient. To the Jews of the Captivity, it was Ur of the Chaldees, the heritage of a small tributary tribe; but to their father Abraham, fifteen hundred years before, it had been a royal city of the Sumerians, and the tradition that he, a Semite, was born there would involve the presumption that at an early date it harbored aliens of the race that actually came into possession of it in its later and less glorious days.

Before laying down our Bible and taking up the pick and shovel to pursue our proper quest, let us bear in mind the fact that the Book of Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, depicts the valley of the Euphrates as the cradle of civilization. To-day men are at work turning over the sands of that desolated valley, and in the light of their labors the plain watered by the Euphrates is revealed once more as the place where civilization began. Indeed, that desert plain might itself be described to-day as the new-found Book of Beginnings, because as the excavators go on turning over layer after layer of sand, as one turns the pages of a book, they read backward through millennium after millennium, in clear and tangible outlines, a wonderful story that carries us toward the very dawn of what we know as history. It was not a false dawn, for the light that rose on the Sumerian horizon, though many times obscured by storm cloud and eclipse, has never been totally extinguished. It penetrates our own historical background and survives in some of the replenished lamps of our religious and economic life.

II

Ur of the Chaldees was one of the oldest cities in the Euphrates Valley. It was situated about ten miles west of the river, surrounded by the desert; and, till our excavations began, its ruins were completely covered by the sand that wrapped itself around the towers and temples and palaces as one wraps a flower bed with litter in the autumn to protect it from the weather. This wrapping-up in the desert sand has preserved the ruins from total obliteration; for Ur was lost to human knowledge, swallowed up in the desert, its very name forgotten, for more than two thousand years.

To understand how that name came to be restored to the pages of history and geography we must come down to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the circle of human knowledge was rapidly widening, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, the great archæologist, was traveling down the valley of the Euphrates and through the neighboring land of Persia. Searching for clues to the past, he picked up some writings on stone and on clay tablets, in an unknown language and in strange characters. His discovery of the key to these writings is one of the great triumphs of the human intellect. Since then thousands of similar documents have been unearthed, and these obscure records can be read by scholars to-day about as readily as we read the equally obscure headlines in a newspaper. Among these documents, preserved for ages in the sand, were some that mentioned the city of Ur, gave the names of some of its kings, and enabled Sir Henry Rawlinson and others to go to the very spot where the proud city once stood and stir the sand and conjure up the hidden secret of the Arabian desert. That was the magical beginning of our late recovery of the lost history of Ur.

I have said that the discovery of the lost key was one of the triumphs of human ingenuity; but, like many great discoveries, it looks very simple when you know how it was done. The writings are inscribed in characters called cuneiform, because they are wedge-shaped. We know now that they were invented more than six thousand years ago by the Sumerians and adopted by their successors, the Babylonians, who employed these cuneiform signs to write documents in their own language, a language entirely different from that of the Sumerians. Much later still the Persians borrowed and employed these symbols to reduce to writing their own language, the Persian. The Persian kings, when they wrote inscriptions on their monuments, often took the trouble to place side by side with the Persian text the same matter in the older Babylonian language. Now, when Rawlinson saw these two columns of writing side by side in cuneiform characters, it occurred to him that they might contain the same message in two different languages. Moreover, he noticed that certain groups of signs occurred in the same position in the two inscriptions. These combinations of signs he guessed to be words. Then he ventured on another guess. Knowing that personal names are usually written down in different languages without changing their sounds, he concluded that these words, repeated in the two inscriptions, must be the names of kings, assuming that the symbols stood for sounds. But of what kings? As certain of these inscriptions, of special prominence, were carved on a rock near an ancient royal city of the Persians, Rawlinson hit upon the idea that the names, if such they were, must be those of Darius and Xerxes, the greatest of the Persian kings. All his guesses proved correct, and he now had in his possession the phonetic key that enabled him to translate the inscriptions. After him came scores of eager scholars inspired by his wonderful example, and through their combined labors not only the Persian texts of 500 B.C. but the Babylonian texts of 2000 B.C., and even the Sumerian texts of the third and fourth millenniums before Christ, have yielded up their mysteries; and a vast body of literature in all three languages, and in other languages as well, has been restored to the world from thousands upon thousands of tablets recovered from the earth by the excavator’s spade. The cuneiform signs in which this literature was preserved were to the ancient world what the Latin alphabet is to the modem world — the medium through which many languages now extinct were reduced to writing. The oldest of these extinct languages was the Sumerian, the language that first employed the cuneiform script. These earlier writings scholars are now finding in the excavations at Ur, and they carry us back six thousand years and enable us to reconstruct the life of the city in the days of that remote antiquity.

III

Sir Henry Rawlinson was the real discoverer of Ur and he wrote the first chapter of its recovered history. But we have had to wait till to-day for the later chapters of that history. He was followed in the last century by Taylor, and during and at the conclusion of the war the place was visited and examined by Thompson and by Hall. All these scholars were from the British Museum.

Until the Great War, the Euphrates Valley was in the hands of the Turks, who, holding all European scholars to be suspicious characters, practically prohibited excavation. Since the war that land of ancient empires has been governed by the Arabs under British guidance, and the work of the excavator and scholar is no longer discouraged. A serious and sustained effort to recapture the history that was made so many millenniums ago could be attempted. By an interesting combination of circumstances, the University Museum of Philadelphia and the British Museum of London found themselves joined in this arduous undertaking, and together they are digging up out of the desert sands and piecing into a plan the disjointed fragments that time has spared of the ancient city of Ur. The work was begun in 1922 and has been continued until now under the direction of Major Leonard Woolley, a learned and experienced excavator, who is accompanied by a staff of scholars and expert assistants. The labor necessary for the spade work is recruited from the Bedouins of the neighboring desert, who, though more accustomed to handle a sword than to flourish a spade, are willing to be introduced to the arts of peace and enlisted in the cause of science for a consideration of about a shilling a day. Two hundred of these untamed sons of the desert are learning in this way to appreciate the blessings of labor and, in the excitement of their novel experience, to forget for the time their hereditary feuds. So great is the interest of these uncommon recruits that there has not been a strike in three years. Their special delight is to dig up something that has writing on it, and so clever are they that they have learned, by arts of communication known only to the East, to recognize the names of the ancient Kings of Ur stamped upon the bricks. Major Woolley and his colleagues have grown accustomed to hearing the names of Ur-Engur and Gimil-Sin and Sanballat shouted exultingly as each gang announces its latest discovery. At first Major Woolley and his companions were startled at the keenness of observation whereby these tribesmen, who cannot read their own language, picked up without instruction enough of the scholar’s accomplishment to enable them to detect and distinguish the names of kings written thousands of years ago in a language of which they know nothing whatever. But, having grown used to it, the investigators are now careful to give their Ishmaelite confederates due credit for great learning, and this pleases the latter almost as much as their pay.

But native Arab versatility soon outstripped the erudition of the scholar, for the eye of the latter is blinded by scruples, and his understanding is dulled by excessive respect for facts. These prejudices leave the Arab cold. He delights in a freedom that serves his mental processes as well as his personal honor, and he has a quick and ready perception of the essential fitness of things. With the help of these resourceful allies, it was not long before the Expedition began to make discoveries sufficient to establish the reputations of a host of scholars. One was the House of Abraham, duly identified and labeled. Another, a footprint on a brick, was promptly recognized as Abraham’s footprint, and a similar impression left by an antique dog was declared with voluble confidence to be the footprint of Abraham’s dog.

No one need be troubled to account for Abraham’s fame among the Arabs. Are they not the descendants of Ishmael, his eldest son? And is there not a deadly feud between the Ishmaelite and the Hebrew to this day? Abraham is their Patriarch, and they repeat many wonderful stories, some of which are quite as creditable to him as some of those related of him in the Book of Genesis. Who has a better right to recognize his footprints on the brick pavements of Ur and pronounce upon the place of his dwelling? Not that they really care; but it would be unseemly if they should fail to instruct the infidel in these matters. They would not willingly be shamed in their own house by the giaour.

They are indeed like children, content to be happy with trifles, — a cheerful, amiable, and wholly uncivilized delegation of the desert, — and one can hardly help liking them. At night they make the darkness vocal by recounting the day’s adventures or by singing tribal songs and reciting tribal legends till they fall asleep under the stars and leave the desert to its silence and to whatever spirits may be abroad on the new-swept pavements of Ur.

To illustrate the hazards of life at Ur one little incident will suffice. During its first season in the field the Expedition’s camp was attacked one night by a band of tribesmen armed with rifies. The only protection was a party of five native guards, also armed with rifles. Many shots were fired and, though no member of the Expedition was injured, some of the guards were killed. As peace and security are conditions essential to the pursuit of archæological investigation, Major Woolley had recourse to an approved form of desert diplomacy. He negotiated a treaty with the most powerful sheik of the district. According to its terms the sheik guarantees the peace of the Expedition, undertaking to secure its protection from all attack and himself going security for the integrity of the treaty. The sheik receives in return an annual subsidy in cash. Under this neighborly arrangement the Expedition has enjoyed profound peace and freedom from all anxiety.

Work in the excavations is not continuous the whole year round, for during the hot months the thermometer goes up to 125° in the shade, and there is n’t any shade. Then the Arabs fold their tents, and Major Woolley and his companions pack up their discoveries and return to London and to Philadelphia to await the next season of cooler weather.

IV

I have mentioned the fact that the people who founded Ur and dwelt there for some thousands of years are known to scholars as Sumerians. Where they came from and in what country they lived before they settled in the Euphrates Valley are among the mysteries still to be resolved. What has been made clear is that after they had possessed themselves of the fertile plain of the lower Euphrates they were a people well advanced in the ways of civilization. In their new habitations they kindled a flame that illuminated the ancient world with their Sumerian culture, and they remained the torchbearers of civilization for not less than two thousand years. They themselves gave way to other less civilized peoples and eventually vanished from the scene, but they passed on their light and their learning to their conquerors and successors. The place of the Sumerians in the human pageant is therefore a place of peculiar importance, filling and illuminating a space between the utterly obscure and the earliest legendary passages that precede and usher in the dawn of history. Ur was first a Sumerian city; in the course of time it became a possession of the conquering Babylonians; it passed in turn to the Assyrians, when they extended their rule over the country; and finally it fell to the Persians, when they became the masters of Mesopotamia and all adjoining lands.

Cyrus the Great himself rebuilt the ancient city, which he found in a ruinous condition, and restored it to some of its ancient power and influence. That was in the year 538 B.C., the year in which Cyrus permitted the captive Jews in Babylonia to return to Jerusalem to repair its walls and rebuild the Temple. The restoration, at about the same time, of the Temple of the Moon God at Ur by Cyrus is one of the facts discovered by archæologists of the Joint Expedition. When Cyrus made himself ruler of Babylonia and master of Ur, taking the title of King of the World, it was a very ancient city that he inherited with his kingdom, for the recent excavations have brought to light the name of a king who reigned in that city about 4000 B.C. His name was A-an-ni-pad-da and he was the second king of the First Dynasty of Ur. He appears on a small marble tablet that had been imbedded in a foundation that he laid — the foundation of the Temple of Nin-Khursag, the Goddess of Creation. The inscription on the tablet records his name, the name of his royal father, and the name of the Goddess, and it is the oldest inscription in the world to-day. The temple stood at a little distance from the walls of Ur, in a small suburb of the city. It was a convenient place of pilgrimage for the Urites, who in their periodical excursions to its shrine found their spiritual wants not more urgent than the need of the body for nourishment. Inns and places of refreshment have come to light in the excavations not far from the Temple of Nin-Khursag, with kitchens not unlike those now in use in Mesopotamian towns and villages. In time a little town grew up at El Obeid.

This Temple of Nin-Khursag is of absorbing interest on account of its very great antiquity; the details of its architecture have been studied with so much success that a restoration of it has been prepared. Its porch was adorned with a pair of columns of wood encrusted with a mosaic in red, white, and black tesseræ of stone and motherof-pearl inlaid to form an idealized date-palm trunk. On the façade were several remarkable friezes. The lowest of these ornamental features is more correctly described as a detached row of bulls in the round standing on a ledge that formed a slightly advanced lower wall. Between the bulls were clusters of artificial flowers resembling gigantic daisies, the petals made of white and colored stones. The bulls were of copper very skillfully wrought upon wooden cores. The wood was completely decayed, and the metal when found was converted into a soft friable substance difficult to handle and to preserve. Nevertheless, two complete examples have with infinite patience been preserved. These and the other copper animals found on the same building are the oldest examples of historic sculpture that have ever been found. Although only twentyseven inches high, these copper bulls were proportionate to the scale of the building, which was small in size though rich in ornament.

At a higher level a band of ornament in relief consisted of young bulls, this time in a reclining position, very natural and effective. The metal shell of each animal, as in the case of the bulls in the round, enclosed a core of wood that had been carved to the proper form and proportions. The head of each was made in a separate piece of copper, cast and attached to the body by means of rivets. These castings, being thicker than the plates forming the bodies of the animals, still retain the copper metal.

At a still higher elevation was a most remarkable frieze of which some panels have been preserved. One panel represents a milking scene and a byre — cows being milked while their expectant and unwilling calves are tied to the heads of the mothers. Accompanying these scenes are figures of men preparing the milk jars and straining the milk. These pictures are all wrought in white limestone inlaid in asphalt, with wooden backing edged with copper plates, and the whole is attached to the brick wall by means of copper fastenings. Above this frieze ran still another, in similar technique, representing a procession of cattle, each animal being constructed of separate pieces of shell fitted together and admirably carved.

In what had been the interior of the Temple were found remains of wooden columns and wooden beams all encased in copper. The structure of the walls and the platform on which they rested was composed of brick, — sun-dried brick for the upper part and burnt brick for the lower, — all laid in bitumen or in mortar made of mud. The foundations of the platform were of stone, and it was provided with a flight of stone steps very well cut.

The builder of six thousand years ago, like the builder of to-day, had his problems, and his expedients anticipated the methods of modern construction. ‘Brick for stone and slime for mortar’ describes the method of the builders of the tower of Babel. That was the prevailing fashion even earlier. The excavators at Ur have found a small amount of stonework also, but stone was scarce in that country; it had to be imported and was rarely used in building construction. They have also found columns and arches, inventions that associate themselves with the history of architecture throughout the ages. The problem of decoration was met and solved with materials and methods familiar enough to the building trade to-day. In that remote era we see the beginnings of a trade that has had six millenniums of development without changing in essentials. The first lessons embodied the principles on which cities and palaces and temples are being built to-day. Even the skyscraper may be recognized in the ziggurat. Civilization has since built for itself better habitations and ‘temples more divinely beautiful,’ but the later builders were not better builders than their predecessors in that very remote antiquity at which the excavators have now arrived.

The association of the bull with the Temple of Nin-Khursag and the milking scene found in the same connection may be explained by the fact that the bull was a symbol of divinity, and by the essential fitness of a dairy to express the life-giving principle appropriately associated with the Goddess of Creation. The symbolism came naturally to the minds of a people largely dependent on pastoral pursuits and deeply impressed by an aspect of existence that was always before their eyes. In fact, the Goddess NinKhursag presided over a large farm in the suburbs of Ur. Besides being the Goddess of Creation, she was the mother of gods and of divine kings.

V

Within the walls of Ur, where the principal excavations are being conducted, a scene of great activity may be witnessed to-day. Busy gangs of workmen, under the watchful eyes of the native foremen, — Arabs of standing, possessed of authority, very proud of their position and faithful to their trust, — are engaged in filling wicker baskets with sand and débris, while a continuous line of their companions are transporting these burdens on their heads to the dump. Going and coming, these bearers move with the deliberate progress and the swinging gait of men whose movements are adjusted to the slow march of the centuries, unconscious or scornful of the fluttering pace of upstart peoples who are hurried and harassed by an uneasy sense of the shortness of existence. Their ample flowing garments of many colors take the rhythm of their bodies, or resign themselves to the action of the winds, while their voices are heard in improvised chants celebrating the virtues of their masters, reflecting upon their tasks, intoning their troubles, or simply liberating their feelings.

Meanwhile brick walls come to light, brick pavements are cleared and swept clean, doorways are laid open, and foundations are traced. Objects of art: fragments of statues, ornaments of gold and precious stones, stamped bricks bearing the names of royal builders, clay tablets covered with writing — the records of transacted business or of historic event; door sockets of hard stone with inscriptions dedicating the building to the god or to the divine king; pottery vessels and utensils of stone; precious fragments of literary compositions — all these are in the day’s work. They are gathered into the laboratory in the house of the Expedition, cleaned, recorded, translated, and carefully packed for transport to their destinations.

Where yesterday the wandering Bedouin or the rare traveler from Europe saw only rolling waves of sand that seemed to beat against the shapeless mass of the Ziggurat rising like a rock in a sea, to-day the semblance of a plan reveals itself — the plan of a city built by men. It is a broken and a confusing plan; parts of it are effaced and other parts are barely visible. It is fantastic, like the images of a disordered dream. All is disarray and ragged, interrupted outline. No feature is altogether whole and it all needs to be interpreted by expert intelligence trained to see and to divine. But it is the task of the archæologist to reverse the action of time and translate chaos and confusion into an intelligible plan, tracing, even in the empty void, the thoughts and purposes of the forgotten builders. The most delicate operation known to surgery is not more a matter of skill and experience than are the operations of the excavator properly performed.

The Ziggurat of Ur, that formless rock in the sea of sand, presents, after excavation, a fairly regular outline and is indeed an imposing monument, the most imposing in all of Mesopotamia, though the upper stages are in ruin. It rises foursquare on its broad platform and on an immense scale, in massive buttressed tiers of brick laid in bitumen. A hundred feet above the level plain its upper stage once supported a sacred shrine lifted into the heavens that now know it no more. The receding stages, connected by stairways, though solid and serving no other purpose than to attain elevation, still lend to the lofty structure very much the effect that we associate with certain very modern methods in building-construction in great cities. The very name of ziggurat as rendered by scholars is the equivalent of skyscraper. In every ancient city of Mesopotamia the ziggurat was the principal feature, a towering landmark flinging its shadow across the flatness of the land. The most celebrated and the highest was the Tower of Babel, which was nothing else than the Ziggurat of Babylon, the loftiest, structure known to its builders. It was three hundred feet high.

Of the Tower of Babel not a brick remains, but the scheme and method of the builders as described in the Book of Genesis are found to be reproduced in the older Ziggurat of Ur.

What was that scheme and what the idea embodied in the plan of the ziggurat? It was in its inception an artificial mountain with a shrine on top. The receding stages, on which trees and flowers and shrubs were cultivated, represented the steep mountain-sides, for it was meet to worship on mountaintops under the watchful stars and invoke at close quarters the gods in their abode. And as that level land afforded nothing resembling a mountain it was necessary to build a mountain in every city that there might not be wanting a place to worship. ‘Let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven ‘ and storm the Almighty in His starry mansions — a plan so bold that the Lord was moved to intervene, and brought confusion on the builders and their works. But there must have been a strong tradition back of this gigantic plan, to act as an incentive to such great effort and audacity. To supply this traditional incentive, scholars have supposed that the Sumerians, the first builders of ziggurats, were a people who at an earlier period in their history had dwelt in a mountainous country where they had formed the custom of making their communications with Heaven from the highest ground — a very natural and a not ignoble thought.

The Bible has much to say concerning idolatry in ‘high places’ — the antique worship upon which the priests and prophets of Israel, jealous for their covenanted rites, poured the vials of their wrath. In the name of the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob — the God who chose a mountain-top to reveal Himself anew to Moses — the pious and the faithful, the orthodox among the Jews, breathed destruction on the altars built on mountain-tops. The image is used with fine poetical effect in King David’s threnody on the death of Saul: ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places.’ The sense of the song is that Saul and his sons had been slain as a sacrifice to the heathen gods of the Philistines at altars set on high.

VI

To return to Ur. The remarkable state of affairs revealed around the base of the Ziggurat may be briefly described. In that sacred area, dominated by the aspiring pile and enclosed by a protecting wall, are grouped, in a complex plan, all the buildings connected with the worship of the patron god and with the government of the city, for that government was conceived on a divine model and framed in a spirit of obedience to the divine will. The Moon God was the actual ruler; and the king, himself half a god, held communication with his protecting deity, whose word he translated into action and whose decrees were put in operation by responsible ministers and minor officials. Taxes were collected in the name of the Moon God and public works were executed by his command. The group of buildings recently brought to light contained the offices of this hierarchy, where the ministers of State and their subordinates transacted the business of the god and ran the government. There was system in these offices. Documents found in them, clay tablets, show for instance that taxes were paid in kind, each citizen bringing his corn, oil, copper, wool, dairy produce, cattle, kids, hides, beer, ointments, spoils of the chase, fruits of the earth, or whatever he dealt in or produced. The exact amount of his payment was written against his name on a tablet that was kept on file with thousands of others. At the same time the taxpayer was given a receipt for his payment, and his account was carried in a special ledger. There was a factory where ninety women were employed at looms and paid by the piece according to their labor and their skill. Each weaver had a separate account and was charged minutely with the materials used and the provision furnished for her maintenance. There was a school where apprentices were taught how to conduct business.

Did the youthful Abraham attend that school? In any event, spending his impressionable youth within the orbit of the lunar deity and subject to his sway, his mind could not fail to receive and retain some lessons from the common experience. Life at Ur under a reign of such rigid commercialism must have been well fitted to develop any native business talent, such as Abraham undoubtedly had. Big business folded in the trappings of a State religion — that was the tidy package that the illustrious emigrant carried with him on his enterprising journey. In the land where he was a stranger and a sojourner, his investments always paid, and there is told only one instance where it would almost appear that he took a loss, though it is not expressly so stated. That affair concerned his interest in the Cities of the Plain. When he drove a hard bargain with God for the purchase of Sodom and Gomorrah, he demonstrated a capacity for high finance that might have done credit to the Moon God’s government and the Ziggurat at Ur. Though it appears to have failed, it was a most interesting and honorable transaction. But there was a slight miscalculation, and the reduced price at which cities were selling on that day was still more than he could manage. There were not ten righteous men to be found in Sodom and Gomorrah, — or else they failed him, — and nothing came of the transaction. Whatever were the Patriarch’s investments in the wicked cities, they went up in smoke and flame. It was Abraham’s only failure, if I read the Scriptures right.

Perhaps some of his methods were not strictly in keeping with our own professed business principles. Such were his dealings with the house of Pharaoh, and likewise with Abimelech, the Canaanite. When we are told that both Pharaoh and Abimelech — who, if he knew not the fear of God, was at least a gentleman — were plainly shocked at the behavior of their neighbor and guest, we are inclined to sympathize with them; but perhaps it is our judgment that is at fault, for is it not written that Abraham prospered ? And what is prosperity if not the reward of righteousness? That seems to me to be the main burden of this Scripture story. It is a point that is labored considerably. Whatever construction we may put upon the extraordinary story of Abraham’s life after his arrival in Palestine, we must suppose that his character was formed in that Urish environment that it is my present purpose to describe. Still I would allow a large margin for the workings of a peculiar mentality. I have no great reason to suppose that the moral atmosphere of a Sumerian market place was very different from that of many modern cities, where it is a common observation that individual aptitudes and hereditary traits assert themselves strongly. In the case of Abraham, these influences were doubtless quite as strong as the influence of early environment. His character may well be a cause of amazement to some and of embarrassment to others, but there is really little occasion for either feeling. After all, Abraham was an Oriental sheik, and moreover he was the father of all Israel.

I find that it is impossible to write of Ur without reflections such as these, and it is difficult to keep on digging without digression for the sake of the emigrant who made its name a household word. Our minds have great capacity for little things. Abraham’s departure from Ur could not have made the slightest impression on that city. If it was mentioned in the market place, it did not move the councils or cause any commotion on the Ziggurat. But his posterity produced a Book, and his fame fills its pages; and, because it tells us that Ur was the place of his nativity, we can think of that great city of antiquity in no other terms than these. To many familiar with its name it conveys no other message — has no other meaning. Let us, however, keep in mind the fact that to the serious student of history and antiquity Ur occupies a position determined solely by a consideration of the weight that it pulled in the long, laborious march of civilization. That is the test of its importance.

VII

Turning once more to our study of the unfolding plan before us, we are informed that a long range of buildings in that official quarter of the town within the Temenos wall contains the habitations of the priesthood, with its troops of acolytes and servants and all the pageantry of public worship and official rites. A huge building, now roofless and with ruined walls showing an open gateway surmounted with a round arch, was the Hall of Justice, where the judges sat and read the law and heard cases argued and made decisions and accepted fees — all in the Moon God’s name, for he was a mighty god and a just god, who showed mercy to the weak and punished the wicked. The arched gateway faces a great court between the Hall of Justice and the Ziggurat. It is paved with burnt brick, and there the crowd of minor litigants gathered with their counsel before the judges who sat in the gate. Another court paved with asphalt was the place where prisoners, offenders against the State, were brought before the magistrates — a police court, in fact. And so the plan goes on unfolding itself, each feature, as it emerges and renders the picture more complete, being identified by some sign or inscription or stamp on a brick, with the added help of a little imagination or a little shrewd guessing that makes the pursuit of knowledge under these conditions such a satisfying game. If the next move confirms your first guess, the game is yours. If the contrary, you revise your calculations, guess again, and await developments. It takes a lot of practice, but few games are so absorbing. Time is your antagonist and Time is a most accomplished player, but accomplishment is by no means all on one side, nor is the game always to the most adept, for it is a game of chance as well as a game of skill. But Time is the banker, and you know that Time will always be ahead of the game no matter what your winnings. The pieces of the game you play are cities and castles and kings, and your tablet is the realm of the dead —that populous realm.

A great and rich city, with accumulated treasures and adorned with art, always has its powerful neighbors that seek a safe occasion to make it a prey. When a city is sacked — and it would appear that Ur was sacked several times — several things happen. The population is disposed of or it finds safety in flight. Its treasures are carried off to enrich the conqueror, and its most celebrated monuments of art are removed to his capital as trophies of victory. The statues and memorials of its rulers that are not wanted as trophies are demolished, and the principal edifices, palaces and halls and temples and the dwellings of rich and poor, having been given up to plunder, are left in ruin and destruction.

Restoration and rebuilding are the first tasks of the returning population. The refuse of the sack — broken monuments, headless statues, mutilated forms that have been a sculptor’s pride, splintered columns and graven images defaced, and tablets shattered to a thousand pieces — all these are leveled with the dust, discarded relics of a ruined past, and laid beneath the new foundations. Or, mingling in disorder and consolidated, they repose in layers between the older pavements and the new, like veins of historic ore. In these deposits are found some of the best clues. The scattered fragments, recovered and laboriously pieced together, assume once more their proper form and deliver their messages, although usually something is missing. When search and skill and perseverance and patience have exhausted their resources, there remains a headless statue, a reconstructed torso, the half of an alabaster vase engraved with the name of a king, an incomplete inscription, a broken seal, a plaything, or a battered and half-obliterated form in which perchance a trace of beauty lingers. Such are the bricks of the new Babel.

This is a day of antiquarian pursuits, but the builders of old time also had their antiquarian tastes and their curious contemporaries who spelled out old inscriptions and salvaged ancient monuments in the interest of learning. Sometimes the labors of restoration and rebuilding were combined with research and sweetened by discovery. Ancient foundations laid by remote ancestors or early dynasties, on being penetrated by their descendants, yielded deposits in sealed receptacles that told the story of legendary builders who had wished to be remembered by posterity. Or the restorers found mutilated monuments in long-forgotten rubbish layers, and all these recovered relics of their past they carefully preserved and passed on to later generations, together with their own commentaries. One such museum, three thousand years old, was discovered in the year of grace 1925 in the Temenos of Ur.

Again the finding of a really great monument is a rare event, and one such event that rewarded the excavators during the year 1925 must be mentioned in some detail because the monument is imposing in itself and because it illustrates the form and the symbolism by which the Kings of Ur sought to commemorate and preserve a knowledge of themselves and of their works. Before it was shattered into many pieces by the followers of some conqueror, the stela of Ur-Engur stood near the Ziggurat. It was a slab of basalt about fifteen feet high, six feet broad, and eighteen inches thick, covered with sculpture on the front and on the back. The scenes portrayed were arranged in orderly fashion in three horizontal divisions on each face of the stone and were very skillfully carved in relief. As the broken parts came to light one by one and were fitted together, the pictured scenes were restored like a jigsaw puzzle on a gigantic scale. When all had been recovered that could be recovered, the upper and the lower portions were still missing, and the great stela of King Ur-Engur remains incomplete but yet a document of the very first importance.

Ur-Engur lived forty-six hundred years ago and his great stela had stood beside the Ziggurat for six hundred years when Abraham was born. It was a familiar object to him. The part that has now been recovered preserves a faithful record of the building or rebuilding of the Ziggurat and the execution of other public works by UrEngur, King of Ur. In one scene the king is shown in consultation with the Moon God concerning the building of the great tower. In another the king goes forth to lay its foundation, carrying builders’ tools over his shoulder — measuring rod and line, compasses, bronze axe and bar, and a curious implement of unknown use. The building operations are shown in another picture: the stages rise and workmen go up and down on ladders; the bricklayers are seen above. Another scene represents the sacrifice of a bull and divination by signs on his liver, performed by the priests of Ur. Men are shown beating a big drum and gods are seen in council. The king pours a libation. Two flying angels pass overhead, each pouring from a vase a copious stream of water that parts into two streams as it descends. This evidently refers either to the construction of irrigation works or to the making of rain. The flying angels are full-breasted females in long flowing robes, the oldest female angels or spirits on record. They are clearly beneficent beings. One cannot help lamenting the loss of missing scenes that would complete the tale of King Ur-Engur’s works as told in his own fashion by the aid of his skillful artists. A long inscription completed the proud performance, but only a few broken lines remain to mortify the scholar, to sustain and satisfy the cynic, and to reprove the proud.