ITCHY FEET TRAVELS

UR

Nasiriyah, Iraq

June 8, 2023

Of all the sites, Ur was the simplest to access. Ali, who is from Nasiriyah has never been there and he had rounded up yet another friend, Mohammed who also had never been. A short 10 kms from Nasiriyah, this was simple to get to and being firmly on the tourist trail of Iraq, this is easily accessed. Passport registered, I paid the usual foreigner fee of 25000 IQD (free for locals) and we walked up to the site.

The earliest artifacts from the area date back to the Ubaid period of 6500-3800 BCE, a time of wetlands and marshes when the level of the waters in the Persian Gulf was much higher. The figure of a lizard-headed woman seen in the Iraqi museum in Baghdad is from this time.

Ur emerges into prominence during the First Dynasty of Ur of 2700 BCE and the royal graves with their wealth of gold, silver, precious and semi-precious stones were from this period. Burials of kings were accompanied by court officials, servants, women and teams of domestic animals. Along with them were buried musical instruments, mosaic pictures, shell plaques, statuary and carved cylinder seals. Today the area of the tombs is fenced off and I poke my lens through the wires to try and get a decent photo.

Little is known about the Second Dynasty of Ur but this city again came into prominence under Sargon of Akkad. Sargon I was the near-mythical king Akkad (2334-2279 BCE) who had first unified the city states of Sumer and Akkad into an empire. Famous artifacts of Sargon I lie in museums around the world. It was just last November 2022 that I saw an exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York which is turn gave me the impetus to visit Iraq this summer. Starting with worship of female goddesses, even as late as 3^rd millennium BCE, women held positions of power and were revered goddesses, and priestesses. The She Who Wrote exhibit was a fascinating introduction to this culture, celebrating Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon and high priestess who was the first author in history. She wrote an autobiography. All documents prior to this had been accounts  of commerce of war but never a book. Imagine that – the first book written by humans and it was a woman who was the author. I pored over the exhibit, visiting it more than once to absorb it all. The photos of arts and artifacts will have to wait until I get back home and create a new page. There are a few cylinder seals from this Akkadian era in the Baghdad museum but the signage is poor, lacking information.

Link to Exhibit of Endehuanna to be added. Stay tuned.

Even more fascinating is the evidence of contact with other contemporary civilizations. Seals of the type found in Mohenjodaro have been found here indicating contact with Indus Valley Civilization. Hundreds of clay tablets show foreign trade via the Persian Gulf going back as early as Sargon’s reign. I marvel at the thought and mentally link what I see here with what I saw at the site of Indus Valley Civilization in present day Pakistan. What a delight!

The next period of grandeur comes with the Third Dynasty of Ur (2123-2015) BCE, at its height including a vast area. I remember visiting the ziggurat in present day Susa, Iran in 2013 which was part of this powerful dynasty. The most famous kings of this dynasty were Ur Nammu and his son Shulgi of Ur and during their reigns Ur basked in a period of renaissance. This was when the much-photographed ziggurat of Ur and much of the city of Ur was built. At its peak, this vast city had a population od 65000, 10% of the world population at the time. A megacity indeed! Although destroyed by the Elamites, Ur remained a city of importance and was regarded as a center of learning and culture. Successive kings of Isin and Larsa paid their respects to Ur by repairing the temples as did the Kassites and the Assyrians who followed them.

The ziggurat rears up from the plains with the stairs reaching to the first platform. There are side stairs too that go up on either side. These have been restored although they are off limits to curious travelers.

To the southeast of the ziggurat, are the ruins of a small building, called E Dublal Makh, meaning the House of Tablets. Initially a gateway to the ziggurat, it is thought to have then served as a storehouse for tablets, later a court of law and later still, at the end of the Third Dynasty, as a shrine. A man whose family have for several generations helped various archeological teams is onsite. He has keys to the padlocked building and opens it for us. He points out many bricks with inscriptions on them. I had not expected to see this and am over the moon with delight. It is like a treasure hunt, looking for bricks with inscriptions. As with other sites, this is vast and we see barely a fraction. Oh, to be able to see it all!

It was Shulgi who built the next structure called the Kur Sag building. Built on a vast scale, it is still easy to see the layout, the bricks, even the bitumen between layers.

Another brief period of glory for Ur came with the Babylonian phase of Nebuchadnezzar II and the ziggurat was expanded to a much larger scale. But the fate of cities in Mesopotamia have always been at the mercy of the two rivers. Euphrates proved capricious and changed its path and by 400 BCE, Ur had disappeared from the map of the world.