![]() The tapering end of the bit of ebony, Stone said, hints that it was the stylus of a high-ranking scribe. Fortunately for scholars today, its rulers were obsessed with recording the most minor of transactions on clay tablets, usually with a stylus fashioned from a reed. This period saw the creation of the oldest known law code, the Code of Ur-Nammu, as well as one of the world’s most bureaucratic states. Traders from India and the Persian Gulf crowded the busy wharves, and caravans arrived regularly from what is now northern Iraq and Turkey. ![]() The sprawling city was home to more than 60,000 people, and included quarters for foreigners as well as large factories producing wool clothes and carpets exported abroad. Some of the earliest known writing-called cuneiform-has been uncovered at Ur, including seals that mention the city.īut the real heyday came around 2000 B.C., when Ur dominated southern Mesopotamia after the fall of the Akkadian Empire. Ur emerged as a settlement more than 6,000 years ago and grew to prominence in the Early Bronze Age that began about a thousand years later. ![]() A massive stepped pyramid, or ziggurat, rose above the city and still dominates the landscape today. Unlike earlier generations, today’s archaeologists are less interested in breathtaking gold objects than in clues like the bit of ebony that will help them understand more fully this critical time in human history.Īlthough now situated on a flat and dry plain, Ur once was a bustling port on the Euphrates River laced with canals and filled with merchant ships, warehouses, and weaving factories. The work was supported in part by the National Geographic Society. A joint U.S.-Iraqi team reopened excavations there last fall, digging at the site for ten weeks. At the time, the discovery rivaled that of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt.īut Ur and most of southern Iraq has been off limits to most archaeologists during the past half-century of war, invasion, and civil strife. In the 1920s and 1930s, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug up some 35,000 artifacts from Ur, including the spectacular remains of a royal cemetery that included more than 2,000 burials and a stunning array of gold helmets, crowns, and jewelry that date to about 2600 B.C. ![]() “But this is our first physical evidence.” “There are texts that speak about the ‘black wood of Meluhha,’” said Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who is co-leading the Ur excavations. ![]()
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