DISCOVERY 



259 



all the space was occupied by a series of long-service 

 chambers which were used either as store-rooms or 

 for other purposes connected with the temple. Several 

 times in the course of its history E-nun-makh had 

 been destroyed, and as often rebuilt from the ground 

 up, and still more often had kings and rulers of Ur 

 patched and repaired the venerable shrine ; but all 

 had been careful to adhere to its original ground-plan, 

 using what remained of the old walls as foundations 

 for what had to be built afresh ; one or other might 

 make some addition to the temple, increasing its area, 

 but none ventured to alter the type which his prede- 

 cessors had laid down once and for all. The first 

 royal builder whose name is recorded on the bricks 

 is Ur-Nammu, but the temple had been razed and re- 

 built at least three times before he came to the throne 

 in about 2300 B.C. ; we have objects dedicated in it 

 by Rimush, who was king of Agade about 2650 b.c, 

 but that date would hardly take us back through 

 more than one period of reconstruction ; the walls of 

 lerye pisce (stamped-down earth) which we found 

 underlying the earliest mud-brick structure may well 

 belong to the fourth millennium before Christ. The 

 Third Dynasty was brought to an inglorious end by 

 an Elamite invasion, when the temple of the Moon- 

 god must have suffered severely ; certainly' it had to 

 be repaired fairly extensively by the kings of the 

 Larsa Dynasty who in their turn controlled Ur, for 

 we find cones and bricks of Nur-Adad, Arad-Sin, and 

 Rim-Sin. A thoroughgoing reconstruction was 

 undertaken by King Kudur-Mabug, about 2000 B.C., 

 and there are few parts of the existing building where 

 his work cannot be traced. 



But the reconstructed building was not destined 

 to endure for very long. Early in the second mil- 

 lennium a fresh disaster overwhelmed the city, and 

 the Moon-god's shrine was destroyed ; beneath the 

 pavement of the succeeding period was found a thick 

 stratum composed of the fragments of stone vases, 

 dedicated in the temple by royal worshippers ranging 

 from Rimush to Rim-Sin, which had been wantonly 

 smashed and thrown away — an act of sacrilege which 

 can only have been ventured on by an alien conqueror. 

 Kurigalzu, who reigned about 1600 B.C., was obliged 

 to rebuild E-nun-makh from its foundations. His 

 temple, subject to minor repairs, e.g. by Sin-balatsu- 

 ikbi, Chaldean governor of Ur under the Assyrian 

 overlord Ashur-bani-pal (669-626 B.C.), lasted for a 

 thousand years ; then, about 600 B.C., Nebuchadrezzar 

 not only rebuilt but remodelled it. The King of 

 Babylon respected the ancient sanctuary, but he swept 

 away all the service-chambers that lay in front of its 

 door, and substituted for them two paved courts — 

 a lower and larger court extending across almost the 

 whole width of the original platform, an upper court 



opening off it and surrounded on three sides by the 

 sanctuary facade and by two new wings that were 

 now built up against the same. Thus the whole 

 character of the place was changed ; whereas the 

 sanctuary had been shut away in the midst of its 

 outbuildings, approached only by a winding passage 

 (a sanctuary, it is evident, reserved for a priesthood 

 practising a secret ritual) ; it now formed the back- 

 ground of an open court where the public could 

 assemble and watch the sacrifice being performed 

 on the upper terrace, and see, beyond the officiating 

 priest, the golden statue of the god inside the shrine, 



Fig. 4. — HFAi'i.i; 



~S MAirF, OF I-'NTKMEXA; - 



Koiiud at Ur, 1923. 

 By co'.irtesy of the British Museum. 



set on the base of which, and immediately fronting 

 the door, the foundations still exist. There had been 

 a change from private to public worship such as is 

 hinted at in the story of Nebuchadrezzar and the 

 Three Children in the Eook of Daniel. | The same 

 arrangement of the temple was observed when Cyrus 



