Читать книгу Excavations at Ur - Charles Leonard Woolley - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Ur lies about half-way between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, some ten miles west of the present course of the Euphrates. A mile and a half to the east of the ruins runs the single line of railway which joins Basra to the capital of Iraq, and between the rail and the river there is sparse cultivation and little villages of mud huts or reed-mat shelters are dotted here and there; but westwards of the line is desert blank and unredeemed. Out of this waste rise the mounds which were Ur, called by the Arabs after the highest of them all, the Ziggurat hill, ‘Tal al Muqayyar’, the Mound of Pitch.

Standing on the summit of this mound one can distinguish along the eastern skyline the dark tasselled fringe of the palm-gardens on the river’s bank, but to north and west and south as far as the eye can see stretches a waste of unprofitable sand. To the south-west the flat line of the horizon is broken by a grey upstanding pinnacle, the ruins of the staged tower of the sacred city of Eridu which the Sumerians believed to be the oldest city upon earth, and to the north-west a shadow thrown by the low sun may tell the whereabouts of the low mound of al ‘Ubaid; but otherwise nothing relieves the monotony of the vast plain over which the shimmering heat-waves dance and the mirage spreads its mockery of placid waters. It seems incredible that such a wilderness should ever have been habitable for man, and yet the weathered hillocks at one’s feet cover the temples and houses of a very great city.

As long ago as 1854, Mr. J. E. Taylor, British Consul at Basra, was employed by the British Museum to investigate some of the southern sites of Mesopotamia, and chose for his chief work the Mound of Pitch. Here he unearthed inscriptions which for the first time revealed that the nameless ruin was none other than Ur, so-called ‘of the Chaldees’, the home 12 of Abraham. Taylor’s discoveries were not at the time apprised at their true worth and his excavations closed down after two seasons; but more and more the importance of the site came to be recognized, and though, partly through lack of funds and partly because of the lawless character of the district into which foreigners could penetrate only at their own risk, no further excavations were undertaken, yet the British Museum never gave up hope of carrying on the work which Taylor had begun.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century an expedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania visited Ur and contrived to do a little excavation of which the results have never been published, and then again the site lay fallow until the Great War brought British troops into Mesopotamia and gave an opportunity for long-cherished hopes to be revived and realized. In 1918 Mr. R. Campbell Thompson, formerly assistant in the British Museum and then on the Intelligence Staff of the Army in Mesopotamia, excavated at Eridu and made soundings at Ur. The British Museum was encouraged to put a regular expedition into the field, and when Mr. Leonard King, who was to have led it, fell ill, Dr. H. R. Hall took his place and during the winter of 1918-19 dug at Ur, Eridu, and al ‘Ubaid. Dr. Hall’s work at Ur was of an experimental nature, richer in promise than fulfilment, but his expedition was of prime importance in that he discovered and partly excavated the little mound of al ‘Ubaid with its remarkable remains of early architectural decoration.

Again the want of pence which vexes public institutions brought matters to a standstill. Then, in 1922, Dr. G. B. Gordon, Director of the University Museum of Pennsylvania, approached the British Museum with the proposal of a joint expedition to Mesopotamia; the offer was accepted, and Ur was chosen as the scene of operations.

The directorship of the Joint Expedition was entrusted to me and I carried on the field work without interruption for the next twelve winters. We could not in that time excavate the whole of Ur, for the site is immense and to reach the earlier levels we often had to dig very deeply so that, although 13 work was always done at high pressure and the number of men employed was the maximum consistent with proper supervision—at one moment it topped the four hundred—only a minute fraction of the city’s area was thoroughly explored. None the less, we did secure a reasonably detailed picture of Ur throughout its four thousand years of existence and had made discoveries far surpassing anything we had dared to expect; now there was the danger that more digging would yield results more or less repetitive, and the preparing of our material for publication, an imperative duty, could not be undertaken while field work was still in progress; it was therefore decided, in 1934, to close down the Expedition.

Almost from the outset our work at Ur attracted the interest not only of scholars but of a wide general public and it was to satisfy that interest in what had already been done and to enable people to follow future discoveries with better understanding that in 1929 I published a small book, Ur of the Chaldees, dealing with the results of our first seven years. In the present volume I am concerned with the whole of the twelve years of excavation and, since it is meant to be a comprehensive account, a good deal that was written in my former book must be repeated. The facts, of course, remain, and the description of them cannot be radically altered, but the conclusions which we formed about them may have been modified by later discoveries so that there must always be a certain amount of re-writing, even where the finds belong to our early seasons; and all the later discoveries, as numerous and as important as those of the first seven years, have now to be duly recorded.

This is a book about excavation, about the buildings and the objects that we unearthed, and the wealth of our archæological material is so great that I do not propose to deal with anything outside it. So far as is possible I shall treat of things in historical order, but I am not writing a history of Ur; that has been done, and admirably done, by Mr. C. J. Gadd[1] who draws, as I am not qualified to do, upon literary sources, and I shall do no more than try to 14 show how our finds illustrate or supplement his historical framework. But the introduction to my book does seem to be the appropriate place in which to describe the positive additions to history afforded by our work in the field.

When the Expedition was being planned I was told that we might expect to recover monuments taking us back so far in time as the reign of King Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, but should probably find nothing earlier. King Ur-Nammu was indeed almost the first character in the history of Mesopotamia acknowledged by scholars to be historically authentic. It was known that cities went back far beyond Ur-Nammu; there were in museums actual monuments of earlier kings with their names written against them—but there was no means of saying when they reigned; about one great figure, Sargon of Akkad, there were poems and legends—but so late as 1916 Dr. Leonard King[2] found it necessary to argue at length the real identity of one who had been discounted as a mere hero of romance. There was even a list of kings which had been drawn up by Sumerian scribes soon after 2000 B.C., a sort of skeleton of history not unlike the King-list ‘William I, 1066, William II, 1087 . . .’ of our English school-books, but unfortunately it did not seem to help; the earlier part of the list is printed here on p. 251, and anyone looking at it will understand why scholars could give it little credence. It starts with kings who reigned ‘before the Flood’ and the reigns of eight kings add up to the total of 241,200 years! In the first dynasty after the Flood the rulers are credited with reigns of a thousand years each, on the average, in the next with an average of about two centuries, and although the dynasty after that, the First Dynasty of Ur, is marked by no such wild exaggeration, it is followed by other dynasties of impossibly long-lived kings. The figures from the Flood to the accession of Sargon of Akkad give a total of 31,917 years, and even though one may assume that dynasties overlap, and were really contemporary, as is known to be the case with those after Sargon’s time, the entire chronology is palpably absurd. The natural result was 15 that scholars were led to reject the King-lists altogether and to maintain that history properly speaking began little if at all before the time of Ur-Nammu of Ur.

It was therefore most satisfactory to find at Ur contemporary records of Sargon of Akkad, these including a portrait group of his daughter, who was High Priestess of the Moon-god, and the personal seals of three officials of her suite. Much more important was the discovery at al ‘Ubaid of the foundation-tablet of the little temple there which stated that it was built by A-anni-pad-da King of Ur, son of Mes-anni-pad-da King of Ur; the latter figures in the King-lists as the founder of the First Dynasty of Ur, and with the discovery that First Dynasty, which had been regarded as mythical, emerged into history. It also cleared up a minor difficulty. Owing to the similarity of the two names that of A-anni-pad-da had dropped out of the King-lists and Mes-anni-pad-da was credited with the unlikely reign of eighty years; as soon as it became evident that the figure had to be divided between father and son the improbability vanished and the record could be accepted as authentic. The written history of the country had been carried back for something like five hundred years; and although nothing could justify the swollen chronology of the King-lists one could at least suspect that behind it all there lurks an element of misunderstood truth. At an archæological congress of excavators held at Baghdad in 1929 it was agreed that the early civilization of Southern Mesopotamia could be classified in successive phases which should be called, after the places where the evidence for each was first discovered, the al ‘Ubaid Period, the Uruk Period (named after Uruk, the Biblical Erech and the modern Warka), the Jamdat Nasr Period, and then the Early Dynastic Period within which (but relatively late in it) comes the First Dynasty of Ur. On this archæological sequence all of us agree, but for my own part I am inclined to go farther and to emphasize the extent to which our factual sequence harmonizes with the divisions of the King-lists; the al ‘Ubaid Period is pre-Flood, properly speaking, and survived the Flood only in a degenerate form and for a short while; we have two periods corresponding to the two dynasties 16 (of Kish and Erech) given by the Lists, and the next dynasty is proved to have existed. There may, after all, be something in the tradition on which the Sumerian scribes based their scheme of history—but they were hopelessly wrong with their dates.

We too cannot possibly establish a fixed chronology for the early periods, for the simple reason that writing was unknown (it seems to have been invented in the Jamdat Nasr Period) and without written records there can be no exact dating. Even when writing comes in a positive chronology is hard to arrive at, and any system that we may adopt must be regarded as tentative and liable to revision. Thus when we found at al ‘Ubaid the tablet of A-anni-pad-da Assyriologists reckoned that the First Dynasty of Ur, now shown to have existed, must have started about 3100 B.C.; naturally I accepted this decision and, further, since I knew that the Royal Cemetery dated to just before the First Dynasty of Ur and, judging by the number of royal burials, must represent a considerable period of time, I suggested that it be put between 3500 and 3200 B.C., and these are the dates given by me in Ur of the Chaldees. But very soon after that book was published a revised version of the chronology brought the First Dynasty of Ur down to 2900 B.C., and to-day some Assyriologists at least favour a further reduction and make Mes-anni-pad-da come to the throne about 2700 B.C.—and the dates of Sargon of Akkad, of Ur-Nammu of Ur and of Hammurabi of Babylon have all been subject to reduction. The question has to be settled on literary evidence, and the archæologist must accept that; consequently I adopt here a chronological system quite different from that put forward in 1929; the inconsistency really witnesses to the advance of knowledge. But I would point out that no change in the positive dates can upset or alter the archæological sequence, which is based on observed facts.

When the Joint Expedition began its work at Ur no other digging was being done in Iraq, but later on other archæological missions entered the field, and at one time there were no less than eleven engaged in different parts of the country, and although some of those were shortlived and none of them 17 are functioning at the present time, yet for very many years the Archæological Department of the Iraq Government has worked without interruption and with excellent results. Now no single dig, however successful, can give a complete picture of the history even of its own site, much less of the whole country. Sites may be very large, so that the excavations cannot cover their entire area, or may be very complicated so that digging has to be done down to great depths in order to reach the earlier levels, and the expense of such work may be prohibitive. Part of a site may at one time have been deserted, with the result that excavation in that part will fail to produce any evidence of a cultural phase which elsewhere on the site may be well represented; in preparing the foundations of an important building the old builders may have swept away a whole series of earlier strata and so have made a gap in our archæological series which we have no reason to suspect; or that building may have stood unaltered throughout a period of time that saw many vicissitudes in the town’s history—but if our excavation is limited to the building it will tell us nothing of those vicissitudes. Our own excavations therefore do not give us the full story of Ur; what they do give has to be amplified and sometimes modified by the results of the many other digs on other sites; but since the subject of this book is the Ur excavation and not a complete history I shall refer to the other digs only when such reference is necessary for the proper understanding of what we found. If then I say little or nothing about the discoveries made by fellow archæologists working in Iraq it is not because I under-rate their importance but because they do not fall within my province. But I should indeed be doing injustice if I failed to acknowledge the debt that I owe to my own staff. In the course of twelve years I had the help of a large number of assistants; my wife was with me for ten seasons, Professor Mallowan for six, others for four or less; if they are not mentioned individually in the course of this book it is because the work was team-work throughout and each was prone to sink his personality in the common task; looking back now, I am surprised to find how seldom I can say of a particular job ‘So-and-so did that’;—nearly always 18 it was a joint affair. And perhaps that is the highest praise I can give to a staff which deserves all my praise and gratitude; they did not do this job or that—they were the Expedition, and its success was the measure of their devotion.