DISCOVERY 



257 



to the west and in Baluchistan to the east, and 

 oven so far east as Honan in China. It may be re- 

 lated also to the early pottery of the Black Sea region 

 and Thessaly. In Babylonia it would appear to have 

 been abandoned in the Sumerian period for a plain 

 drab ware that persisted till the end. 



A Vast Sacred Enclosure 



At Ur one of the chief discoveries of 1919 was that 

 of the wall of the sacred enclosure and temenos of the 

 Moon-god, which was identified as such in 1919. The 

 upper part of this wall was then uncovered for a 

 stretch on the east side of the temple tower, at each 

 end of which a great gate was discovered by the 

 explorers of 1923, Messrs. C. L. Woolley, F. G. Newton, 

 and Sidney Smith (of the British Museum). This 

 renewed work of the British Museum was^ shared in, 

 under the direction of Mr. Woolley, by the University 

 of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia Museum). 



In the 1922-3 season, the main work was the trac- 

 ing of the outlines of the sacred enclosure. This was 

 found to be a rectangle some four hundred yards long 

 by two hundred wide, surrounded by a heavy wall 

 built of unbaked brick which enclosed intramural 

 chambers ; its outer and inner walls were each more 

 than three yards thick, the chambers over four yards 

 across, so that the total width of the whole wall was 

 some thirty feet ; its exposed faces were decorated with 

 buttresses and with vertical T-shaped grooves in the 

 brickwork. There were apparently si.x gates (of 

 which only four have been excavated) ; as a rule, the 

 gateway lay in the centre of a fairly deep recess set 

 back from the wall line ; strong towers flanked the 

 entry, which passed through a gate-chamber formed 

 by the two pairs of boldly projecting buttress-jambs 

 and was closed by a wooden door set between the 

 outer jambs ; the gate-chamber was roofed with heavy 

 palm-logs overlaid with matting and earth as are the 

 modern houses of the country. 



There must have been a sacred enclosure at Ur 

 from the earliest times, but a large number of inscribed 

 clay cones found along the wall line inform us that 

 the wall was built by Ur-Nammu or Ur-Engur, the 

 first king of the Third Dynasty (c. 2300 B.C.), who 

 probably enlarged at the same time as he refortified 

 the old enclosure. How much of the surviving work 

 is to be attributed to Ur-Nammu it is hard to say ; 

 the wall was patched and even rebuilt by his suc- 

 cessors down to the last days of the city, and as all 

 of them employed mud brick, and built in the same 

 style and more or less on the same lines, there is little 

 to distinguish the early brickwork from the later ; 

 most of the gates, where the use of inscribed burnt 

 bricks and of inscribed stones as hinges for the doors 

 affords dating evidence, have been entirely rebuilt, 



and the names encountered in them are those of 

 Nebuchadrezzar, Nabonidus, and Cyrus the Great 

 (559-529 B-C), so that they date from the last century 

 of the town's existence. 



Within this enclosure lay the chief temples of Ur. 

 Towards the eastern corner rose the huge ziggurat. 



I'IG. 2.— E-XCAVATING THK TEMPI.E: OF THE JIOOX-GOD AT UR 



IX 1919. 



The ziggurat, or temple-tower, in background. 



By courtesy of the British Museum. 



the staged tower already mentioned above which was 

 the outstanding feature of all Sumerian towns, its 

 bulk dwarfing all the other buildings of the place and 

 dominating the flat alluvial plain around ; even to- 

 day its ruins are a landmark visible for many miles. 

 In the south corner there may have been the palace 

 of the king, a site which perhaps still awaits excava- 

 tion ; the rest of the temenos, so far as we can yet 

 judge, was occupied by temples. 



Temples and Palaces 



In 1919 Mr. Hall discovered and excavated partially 

 to the south-east of the tower a brick building (pro- 



