Читать книгу Excavations at Ur - Charles Leonard Woolley - Страница 4

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Lower Mesopotamia, the Sumer of the ancient world, is no more nor less than the river-valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates; it does not include the high-lying Syrian desert to the west, because that is desert—a waterless expanse of gravel barren for most of the year at least—where the wandering Bedouin may pitch their tents for a brief space but no man claiming to be civilized could make his home; and it does not include the Persian mountains that fringe it on the east because always those mountains were held by warlike tribes more ready to raid the cultivated fields of the valley people than to submit to their sway. And it is a land of recent formation. Originally that arm of the sea which we call the Persian Gulf extended far inland, to the north of modern Baghdad, and it was only at a relatively late date in human history that salt water gave place to dry land, a change due not to any sudden cataclysm but to the gradual deposit of river silt filling the great rift between mountain and desert. If the Tigris and the Euphrates alone had been concerned the formation of the delta would have followed the normal pattern; starting in the extreme north it would have pushed southwards very gradually, and man’s occupation of the newly-made soil would have been conditioned by that slow progress so that only after centuries or indeed millennia could he have settled in the south country where Ur lies. But as a matter of fact this was not the case at all. The people of Sumer themselves believed that the oldest of their cities was Eridu, which lies about twelve miles south of Ur, and excavation there by an Iraqi Government expedition has gone far towards confirming this belief; nowhere in Lower Mesopotamia proper 20 have there been found traces of a settlement so ancient as that at Eridu. Clearly this requires explanation, and we must look again at the physical geography of our area.

Fig. 1. Lower Mesopotamia

The Tigris and the Euphrates are not the only rivers that empty into the Persian Gulf. Close to the modern town of Mohammerah is the mouth of the Karun river which from the Persian mountains brings down almost as much silt as do the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates together; almost opposite to it is the Wadi al Batin, now a dry valley but in ancient times a great river draining the heart of Arabia; not so violent a stream as the Karun, it must yet have carried down in its waters no less heavy a charge of mud collected from the light surface soil through which its long channel was cut. The two rivers, facing each other and flowing at right angles to the Gulf, discharged into it a mass of silt which in time formed a bar across it; this neutralized the scouring action of what little tide the Gulf can boast and also slowed up the current of the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates so that the silt brought by them was heaped 21 against the inner side of the bar; the first dry land to be formed was in fact in the extreme south. The immediate result of this was to turn the upper end of the old gulf into a stagnant lake, whose waters, fed by the great rivers, gradually turned from salt to brackish and from brackish to fresh, and over the whole of it the silt of those same rivers was dropped uniformly, raising the level of the lagoon’s bed. Undoubtedly the action would be quickest near the mouths of the streams and dry land would be formed first in the north and in the south with, in the middle, a vast marsh diversified by low islands; but in time this too shrank until where there had been an arm of the sea there stretched a great delta through which ran rivers so flush with their banks that they were for ever changing their courses; every year the spring floods swamped the flat valley, in summer a pitiless sun scorched it, but its light and stoneless soil was as rich as could be found anywhere upon earth. The story of the Creation of the world as man’s home which we find in the Book of Genesis was taken over by the Hebrews from the people of Lower Mesopotamia, where it originated, and most faithfully does it record the facts. ‘God said “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear”, and it was so . . . And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’ It was indeed a good land, inviting settlement, and there were plenty of people ready to accept the invitation; immigrants moved in, land-hungry men snatching at each acre of fertile soil as soon as it emerged from the waters, and with their coming the first chapter in the long history of Sumer began.

This earliest phase was illustrated for us by three distinct sites examined by the Ur expedition, by Ur itself, by Rajeibeh and by Tell al ‘Ubaid.

In 1919 Dr. H. R. Hall, who was carrying out an experimental dig at Ur on behalf of the British Museum, discovered and partly excavated a little mound called by the Arabs Tell al ‘Ubaid, which lay some four miles to the north of Ur; the results were so important that the complete 22 excavation of the site was one of the first items in the programme of the Joint Expedition when it took the field three years later. The most sensational discovery was that of the First Dynasty temple which will be described hereafter (p. 92); what interests us now was something entirely different and very much older. About sixty yards from the temple ruins there was a low mound—it rose no more than six feet above the plain—the surface of which was strewn with flint implements and fragments of hand-made painted pottery, of a sort which had already been found at Eridu, south of Ur, and had been recognized as ‘prehistoric’, though little more than that was known about it. We excavated the mound and were somewhat taken aback to find how little work it required—everything lay quite close to the surface. Under a few inches of light dust mixed with potsherds there came a stratum not more than three feet thick composed of hard mud in which were quantities of sherds of painted ware, flint and obsidian tools, and bits of reed matting plastered with clay mixed with dung or, less often, with a mixture of earth and bitumen; below this was clean water-laid soil. This was, in fact, an island of river silt which originally rose above the marshy plain and had been seized upon by immigrants who had erected on it their primitive hut dwellings of reeds plastered with clay. The village had later been deserted and the dust and potsherds of the topmost layer represented its ruins; at one point we found in this layer the foundations of a mud-brick wall contemporary with the First Dynasty temple close by, and since this lay immediately in and over the older remains from which it was separated by an unknown length of time, we could conclude that our village had been definitely abandoned and that its site remained for long uninhabited. The three feet of hard mud and household rubbish had accumulated during the village’s lifetime, as the flimsy huts fell down and others were erected over them; the lighter soil above represented the last buildings, but much of it had been eroded by the desert winds (which accounts for the mass of potsherds exposed on the surface) and this must have happened during the time when the site lay desolate. But, 23 scanty as the remains were, they were enough to tell us a great deal about the people who lived there. First and foremost, they belonged to the Late Stone Age; at al ‘Ubaid not a trace of metal was found, and if copper was known to them at all it can have been used only for small objects of luxury; all their implements were of stone. The larger tools, such as hoes, were chipped from the flint or chert that can be got from the upper desert; knives and awls might be of rock crystal or obsidian—volcanic glass—both of which had to be imported from abroad; beads were made from rock crystal, carnelian, pink pebble and shell, and these were all chipped into shape and not polished; but one or two ear- or nose-studs of polished obsidian found on the surface may date from this period and if so show that a finer working of stone was not beyond the powers of the al ‘Ubaid craftsman. But that in which they excelled was their pottery [Plate 1]. The vessels were hand-made without the use of the wheel, but were thinly walled and finely shaped, and the characteristic ware was decorated with designs in black or brown paint on a ground which was intended to be white but often, through over-firing, assumed a curious and rather effective greenish tint. The patterns were all geometrical, built up from the simple elements of triangles, squares, wavy or vandyke lines and chevrons which might be filled in solidly or with hatching, but these were most skilfully combined and in all cases the design was admirably adapted to the shape of the vessel; it can safely be said that this, the earliest pottery of Lower Mesopotamia, is artistically superior to any that was to be produced there until the Arab conquest. At al ‘Ubaid the pottery seems to be from the outset fully developed; it is not of local growth. In more recent times excavations at Eridu have brought to light an earlier phase of the same ware, but the difference is one of degree only, not of kind, and the essential characteristics of the al ‘Ubaid pottery are already there. It is evident that the first settlers in the river valley brought with them a ceramic style which had been developed in their original home. Now the only thing of the sort known to us at present is the prehistoric painted ware of Elam, discovered in the excavations at Susa; it is by no means the 24 same, but there are certain unmistakable similarities, at least enough to warrant the idea that the two have a common ancestry; if that be the case the al ‘Ubaid people must have come down into the valley from the Elamite mountains to the east. It would be natural enough that the attraction of the drying marsh-land with its promise of rich crops should have appealed first to the dwellers on the land’s borders; since such nomads as there were in the western desert would have had small interest in agricultural possibilities the invasion must have come either from the east or from the north; what we know of northern pottery makes any connection with al ‘Ubaid impossible (the earliest pottery there is unpainted) and even the partial analogy with Elam should settle the question.

Quite definitely the newcomers were agriculturalists; the commonest stone implement is the hoe; many of the small flints seem to come from the sledges used for thrashing grain; stone querns and pounders show that this was used for bread. But the most curious evidence is that given by the sickles, which, or rather the fragments of which, litter the site of the village. These sickles were made of baked clay. Clay would seem to be the very last material that one would use for a cutting instrument, but the shape is indisputable, and the clay is so hard-baked and the jagged edge of the blade so keen that they would cut more or less; and if it be argued that they would certainly break the answer is that they did, only too easily, and that is why we find them in such numbers, and hardly ever one of them intact. The people then tilled the ground, and they kept domestic animals—the cow-dung in the mud plaster of their huts is evidence for that, and we found a clay figurine of a pig; spindle-whorls of baked clay or of bitumen prove that thread was spun, woollen thread presumably, and heavy clay discs pierced with two holes are almost certainly loom-weights. Fish-bones found in the hut ruins show that fish were eaten, as one would expect in a village close to river and marsh; some were so small that the fish must have been taken in nets, and a number of grooved pebbles that we found may have been net-sinkers; we found also a clay model of an open boat with 25 canoe-like body and curled prow. We have seen that nose- or ear-studs were worn, and beads; part of a painted clay figurine shows a woman wearing a very wide necklace and on the shoulders there are painted lines which may represent drapery; another figurine fragment, the lower part of the body, shows either tight-fitting breeches laced down the front or else tattoo marks on the flesh.

Fig. 2. Flint hoes

One day two Arabs came to the expedition house at Ur and from a folded handkerchief produced four or five big flint hoes (Fig. 2) which they had picked up, they said vaguely, ‘in the desert’. They received a good baksheesh and, as I had hoped, returned a day or two later with more hoes, but again would not specify where they were found. When they came for the fourth time I refused any reward, protesting that I had hoes enough, but told them that they would be well paid if they would guide us to the find-spot; which, seeing that that was the only chance of making any more money, they agreed to do. The site, called by the Arabs Rajeibeh, lay some six miles to the North East of Ur; it was so low a mound as to be hardly noticeable, but as soon as we came to it the mystery of our visitors’ hoe-harvest was explained; one could not walk a step without setting one’s foot on worked flints and painted potsherds lying so thick as to hide the desert surface. It was a site exactly like al ‘Ubaid but much larger. No excavation would have availed here, for directly below the stone and pottery refuse was the clean silt of the island on which the settlers had made their home; 26 nobody in later times had ever built upon the site[3] so that there were no upper strata to protect it, and the wind had carried away everything that wind could carry. Probably there had been here successive building levels representing a fairly long period, and the flints, etc. (too numerous to be all of one date) must have been distributed throughout a deposit of considerable depth; but as the process of wind erosion went on the heavier debris of the upper levels had settled down until all the dust of the decomposed dwellings had been blown away and the flints and potsherds of many generations had sunk to one common level which was virtually flush with the surrounding desert and so offered no challenge to the winds. Rajeibeh did not give us any information beyond what al ‘Ubaid had given, but its importance lay in the fact that it repeated exactly the al ‘Ubaid story; in both cases we have a natural island in the marsh-land inhabited by immigrants of the same stock and culture and in both, after a period of continuous occupation, the site is completely and finally deserted. Why this was, we were to learn from the excavations at Ur itself. And another point on which we needed evidence was the relative date of these village settlements, we knew from the stratification at al ‘Ubaid that they were older than the First Dynasty of Ur, and everything pointed to their being of the Late Stone Age, but we had no means whatsoever of showing how long was the time-gap between the Stone Age and the First Dynasty, nor anything to illustrate the development of history during that time; the al ‘Ubaid culture was an isolated phenomenon which, as one scholar wrote at the time,[4] ‘ought to have some place in the Sumerian historical tradition, and doubtless had, but the connection is at present missing’.

In the year 1929 the work of excavating the Royal Cemetery at Ur was drawing towards its end. On the evidence then to hand I was convinced that the cemetery came before, but only just before, the First Dynasty of Ur; the treasures recovered from its graves illustrated a civilization 27 of an astonishingly high order and it was therefore all the more important to trace the steps by which man had reached that level of art and culture. That meant, presumably, that we had to dig deeper; but it was just as well to begin by a small-scale test of the lower levels which could be carried out with a minimum of time and cost. Starting then below the level at which the graves had been found we sank a little shaft, not more than five feet square at the outset, into the underlying soil and went down through the mixed rubbish that is characteristic of old inhabited sites—a mixture of decomposed mud brick, ashes and broken pottery, very much like that in which the graves had been dug. This went on for about three feet and then suddenly, it all stopped: there were no more potsherds, no ashes, only clean water-laid mud, and the Arab workman at the bottom of the shaft told me that he had reached virgin soil; there was nothing more to be found, and he had better go elsewhere.

I got down and looked at the evidence and agreed with him; but then I took my levels and discovered that ‘virgin soil’ was not nearly so deep down as I had expected, for I had assumed that the original Ur was built not on a hill but on a low mound rising only just above the surrounding swampy land; and because I do not like having my theories upset by anything less than proof I told the man to get back and go on digging. Most unwillingly he did so, again turning up nothing but clean soil that yielded no sign of human activity; he dug through eight feet of it in all and then, suddenly, there appeared flint implements and fragments of painted al ‘Ubaid pottery vessels. I got into the pit once more, examined the sides, and by the time I had written up my notes was quite convinced of what it all meant; but I wanted to see whether others would come to the same conclusion. So I brought up two of my staff and, after pointing out the facts, asked for their explanation. They did not know what to say. My wife came along and looked and was asked the same question, and she turned away remarking casually, ‘Well, of course, it’s the Flood.’ That was the right answer. But one could scarcely argue for the Deluge on the strength of a pit a yard square; so in the next season I marked out on 28 the low ground where the graves of the Royal Cemetery had been a rectangle some seventy-five feet by sixty and there dug a huge pit which went down, in the end, for sixty-four feet. Now the graves, which had been pretty deep-lying, had been dug down, from a ground-surface much higher than the level at which our pit started, into rubbish-mounds heaped against the flank of the old town; we had cleared away the graves and the rubbish and the level of the pit’s mouth therefore was necessarily older than the graves by the (unknown) length of time required for so much rubbish to accumulate; it was probably quite a long time.

Fig. 3. Section of the ‘Flood-pit’.

Almost as soon as the new dig started we came upon the ruins of houses. The walls were built of mud bricks of the ‘plano-convex’ type—rectangular but rounded on the top instead of flat—which we had found alike in the First Dynasty temple at al ‘Ubaid and in the Royal Cemetery, and such pottery as lay in the rooms was of the sort common in the graves higher up. Below these ruins (Fig. 3) came a second building stratum, and then a third; in the first twenty feet we dug through no fewer than eight levels of houses, each built above the ruins of the previous age; but in the lowest three the wall-bricks were not plano-convex but flat-topped, and there were types of pottery different from any that the Royal Cemetery had produced. Then, abruptly, the house-ruins stopped and we were digging down through a solid mass of broken pottery which continued for about eighteen feet and in it, at different levels, were the kilns in which the pots had been fired. It was the site of a vase-factory; the sherds represented the pots which went wrong in the firing—were cracked or distorted—and having no commercial value were smashed by the potter and the bits left lying there until they were heaped so high that the kiln was buried and a new kiln had to be built on the top of them; an accumulation of eighteen feet of wasters meant that the factory was in production for a long time, and the changes of fashion during that time could be traced from its discards. The sherds in the upper debris were for the most part similar to the few found in the lower house levels, but amongst them were fragments painted in red and black on a buff ground identical with a ware which on a site called Jamdat Nasr, a hundred and fifty miles to the north of Ur, had shortly before been found associated with written clay tablets of a most primitive sort; but Jamdat Nasr, like al ‘Ubaid, was as yet an isolated discovery whose relation to Sumerian history was a matter of guesswork only. Lower down in our kiln stratum the character of the potsherds changed, the polychrome wares disappeared and in their place all the distinctive fragments showed a monochrome decoration, plain red produced by a wash of hæmatite or grey or black resulting from the use of the ‘smother-kiln’ in which the smoke is retained to carbonize the clay; this was a ware which the German excavators at Warka (the ancient Erech) had been finding in the lowest levels they had yet reached. Low down in this ‘Uruk’ stratum we found a remarkable object, a heavy disc of baked clay about three feet in diameter with a central pivot-hole and a small hole near the rim to take a handle; it was a potter’s wheel as used by the maker of the ‘Uruk’ vases, the earliest known example of that invention whereby man passed from the age of pure handicraft into the age of machinery. And only a foot or so below the point at which the wheel was found the character of the pottery changed again and we were digging through sherds of the hand-turned painted ware of al ‘Ubaid. But this was al ‘Ubaid with a difference. The hand-made pots were of the same clay and had the same whitish or greenish surface, but in most the decoration in black paint was reduced to a minimum—plain horizontal lines or the simplest patterns perfunctorily and carelessly drawn; clearly they belonged to the last stages of decadence. Then—it was only a thin stratum—all the pottery came to an end and we had, as we expected, the clean silt piled up by the Flood. A few graves had been dug down into the silt, and in them was al ‘Ubaid pottery of a richer sort than that in the kiln rubbish above; in one of them there was a copper spear-blade, the earliest example we have found of metal being used for weapons or tools; the bodies all lay on their backs, rigidly extended, with the hands crossed below the stomach, a position not found in Mesopotamian graves of any later date 31 until the Greek period; such a difference in the ritual of burial is most important in that it implies a difference in the basic religious beliefs of the people. In some of the graves there were terra-cotta figurines of the type also found in the al ‘Ubaid house ruins; they were always female and nude [Plate 2], sometimes showing a woman suckling a child but more often a single figure with the hands brought in front of the body very much in the attitude of the dead beside whom they lay. These graves, dug into the silt deposit, were of course later than the Flood, but they had been made before the vase factory occupied the area in the last phase of the al ‘Ubaid period.

At this point the clean silt measured about eleven feet in thickness and except for one scarcely noticeable stratum of darker mud was absolutely uniform throughout; microscopic analysis proved that it was water-laid, subject to the action of gentle currents, and it was composed of material brought down from the middle reaches of the Euphrates. Below it came the level of human occupation—decayed mud brick, ashes and potsherds, in which we could distinguish three successive floor levels; here was the richly-decorated al ‘Ubaid pottery in abundance, flints, clay figurines and flat rectangular bricks (preserved because they had been accidentally burnt) and fragments of clay plaster, also hardened by fire, which on one side were smooth, flat or convex, and on the other side bore the imprint of reed stems, the daub from the walls of the reed huts which, as we saw at al ‘Ubaid, were the normal houses of the pre-Flood people, as they are of the Marsh Arab to-day.

The first huts had been set up on the surface of a belt of mud which was clearly formed, for the most part, of decayed vegetable matter; in it were potsherds (thicker at the bottom of the belt) all lying horizontally as if they had been thrown there and had sunk of their own weight through water into soft mud; below this again, three feet below modern sea level, there was stiff green clay pierced by sinuous brown stains which had been the roots of reeds; here all traces of human activity ceased and we were at the bottom of Mesopotamia.

The digging of so great a pit was a long and expensive matter, but it amply repaid us in historical results; it confirmed the sequence which had been tentatively drawn upon the strength of our own and other excavations—particularly those of Warka—and it added a lot of valuable detail.

The green clay at the bottom was the floor of the original marsh bordering the island which was occupied by the first settlers in the part of the valley; it was dense with reeds, and with the decay of their stems and leaves and with the rubbish thrown into the water from the island the bottom rose and gradually dry land was formed; when it was dry enough people set up their huts on it at the foot of what was by now the city mound. All this low-lying quarter was overwhelmed by a great flood and buried beneath its silt. There were survivors, of course, and they carried on the old culture, as we can see from the graves, but they were a disheartened and impoverished remnant and when, some time later, the kilns were established on the site of the old graveyard the traditional arts were in their last decadence.

The appearance in the kiln stratum of the red, black or grey ‘Uruk’ pottery marks a new chapter in the history of the delta. Into the rich but now sparsely-inhabited valley there poured a new wave of immigrants, coming this time from the north, who brought with them a more advanced culture—they enjoyed a free use of metal and were skilled workers in copper, and they made their pottery not by hand but on the potter’s wheel; and though they were content to settle down side by side with the al ‘Ubaid survivors they very soon made themselves the masters of the country. Above the ‘Uruk’ potsherds comes the painted ‘Jamdat Nasr’ ware, made on the same factory site, and this again means a fresh invasion, probably (though we cannot yet be sure) from the east; the lordship passes to a new stock who developed if they did not actually invent the all-important art of writing, for it is with the Jamdat Nasr pottery that we find tablets with the pictographic writing which was gradually formalized into the cuneiform script of the Sumerians. Then, high up in our pit, with the fourth stratum of house ruins Jamdat Nasr disappears, round-topped bricks replace 33 the old flat type, and the pottery becomes that which we find in the Royal Cemetery—it is the beginning of what we now call the ‘Early Dynastic Period’. But the houses were to decay and be rebuilt three times, and thereafter the site of them was to be abandoned and turned into a rubbish-heap before the first grave of the Royal Cemetery was dug; that cemetery therefore, and the First Dynasty of Ur which immediately succeeded it, do not introduce the Period but come relatively late in it.

Such is the outline of history given by the stratification of our great pit. It shows, beyond all question, the order of the historic phases, and until we know that order there is no history at all; but it does not necessarily tell us much about any one phase; the picture has to be completed from the results not of one dig but of many. Thus from the three superimposed floor levels found below the Flood silt it might be argued that the Flood happened when the settlement was still young; but that is far from being the case. At Eridu the Iraq Government expedition unearthed the ruins of fourteen temples, one above the other, and all belonged to the first al ‘Ubaid period, prior to the Flood; at Warka the Germans found an al ‘Ubaid occupation stratum no less than forty feet thick; evidently the period was very long. We might have found similar evidence if we had been digging into the centre of the prehistoric town, but as it happened our pit was outside its walls, so that our houses represented the town’s expansion at a relatively late date. Again it might have been supposed that the people of the al ‘Ubaid I phase, before the Flood, being still, apparently, in the Neolithic stage of culture, must have been savages of no concern to the rest of the world. But their peculiar painted pottery spread to the northern limits of Mesopotamia and was thence carried eastwards to the valley of the Orontes river and to the shores of the Mediterranean, witness to a far-flung trade; and actually, in the house ruins under the Flood silt at Ur, we found two beads made of amazonite, a stone of which the nearest known source is the Nilghiri hills of central India; it was a fairly sophisticated community that could import its luxuries from lands so far away. Even the terra-cotta figurines cannot 34 rightly be classed as primitive. The slender bodies, conventional as they are, are skilfully modelled and the queer reptilian faces with the high bitumen-covered head-dress are due not to lack of art but to intention; these are goddesses who must not be represented otherwise. What the religion of the people was we cannot tell, but religion of a sort they certainly had. Whether or not these al ‘Ubaid people should properly be called Sumerians is a matter of dispute; but this much at least can safely be said, that the culture which they evolved was not a sterile growth doomed to be obliterated by the disaster of the Deluge, but contributed not a little to the Sumerian civilization which in later times was to flower so richly. And amongst the things which they handed down to their successors was the story of the Flood; that must have been so, for none but they could have been responsible for it.

The familiar Bible story of Noah’s Ark is not by origin a Hebrew story at all; it was taken over by the Hebrews from Mesopotamia and incorporated, with suitable emendations, in their own sacred canon; it is exactly the same tale as we find on tablets written before the time of Abraham, and not only the incidents but even much of the phrasing is identical. The Sumerian legend is in the form of a religious poem reflecting the beliefs of a pagan people, and if that were all that we were told about the Flood we might dismiss it as a piece of fantastic mythology. But it does not stand alone. In the King-list which I have already discussed (see above, p. 14) we see enumerated at the beginning a series of kings, presumably fabulous, who enjoyed phenomenal reigns of thousands of years each, and then ‘The Flood came. After the Flood came, kingship was sent down from on high’ and the list gives a dynasty of kings whose capital was at Kish, then a dynasty whose capital was at Erech, and thirdly the First Dynasty of Ur, the historical reality of which has been proved by our excavations. Here there is no picturesque legend, only what the old historians meant to be a plain statement of fact. The statement is indeed so plain that it implies the legend, for otherwise it would have no meaning; ‘The Flood’ was for the Sumerian reader the only flood that really mattered, what we call Noah’s Flood.

Both at Ur and on other Mesopotamian sites there has been found evidence of local and temporary water action occurring at various times in history; sometimes this was no more than the effect of rain in an enclosed area, and never is there anything approaching what we found in our ‘Flood-pit’. There, it can safely be said, we have proof of an inundation unparalleled in any later period of Mesopotamian history. We were lucky to find it at all because a flood does not, of course, pile up silt everywhere—on the contrary, where the current is strongest it may have a scouring effect; the silt is deposited where the current is held up by some obstacle. To settle this point we dug a whole series of small shafts, covering a large area, in which the depth of the mud differed considerably, and when these were duly plotted it was clear that the mud was heaped up against the north slope of the town mound which, rising above the plain, broke the force of the flood waters; on the plain east or west of the mound we should probably have found nothing. Eleven feet of silt—the maximum—would probably mean a flood not less than twenty-five feet deep; in the flat low-lying land of Mesopotamia[5] a flood of that depth would cover an area about three hundred miles long and a hundred miles across; the whole of the fertile land between the Elamite mountains and the high Syrian desert would disappear, every village would be destroyed, and only a few of the old cities, set high on their built-up mounds, would survive the disaster. We know that Ur did survive; we have seen that villages such as al ‘Ubaid and Rajeibeh were suddenly deserted and remained desolate for long or for ever. The compilers of the King-lists regarded the Flood as something that made a breach in the continuity of their country’s history; we find that it put an end to the al ‘Ubaid culture as such; they dated the Flood as coming two ‘dynasties’ before the First Dynasty of Ur; if we choose, as I think we may, to correlate with those ‘dynasties’ our archæological periods of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr and to make the First Dynasty of Ur symbolize 36 our Early Dynastic period of which it is indeed the culmination, then the time of our flood agrees with Sumerian chronology as handed down by tradition. We have proved that there really was a flood, and it is no straining of probabilities to maintain that this is the Flood of the Sumerian King-lists and therefore of the Sumerian legend and therefore of the story in the Old Testament. Of course this does not mean that all the details of the story are true; the background is a historic fact, but both the moralist and the poet have embroidered the account of it to suit their several aims. But the facts remain. The Genesis version says that the waters rose to a height of twenty-six feet, which seems to be true; the Sumerian version describes antediluvian man living in huts made of reeds, which at al ‘Ubaid and at Ur we found to be the case; Noah built his ark of light wood waterproofed with bitumen, and just on top of the Flood deposit we found a big lump of bitumen bearing the imprint of the basket in which it had been packed, as I have myself seen the crude bitumen from the pits at Hit on the middle Euphrates being packed in baskets for export down stream. It was not a universal deluge; it was a vast flood in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates which drowned the whole of the habitable land between the mountains and the desert; for the people who lived there that was all the world. The great bulk of those people must have perished, and it was but a scanty and dispirited remnant that from the city walls watched the waters recede at last. No wonder that they saw in this disaster the gods’ punishment of a sinful generation and described it as such in a religious poem; and if some household had managed to escape by boat from the drowned lowlands the head of it would naturally be chosen as the hero of the saga.

Plate 1

Painted pottery of the al ‘Ubaid period

Plate 2

Clay figurines of goddesses of the al ‘Ubaid period