Translation of an article by archaeologist Brad Hufford, who visited the Sumerian city of Ur in 2016. He tells what happened to the ruins of the city in 90 years and how things are going there.
I have been studying the Sumerian city of Ur for over 10 years, but due to the constant war in Iraq, I still could not visit it. It turned out just now. I just got back from there. I spent a couple of months there. Now I want to compare old and new photos and tell how things are going there.
Now the long-abandoned ruins in Ur look ugly - the once massive walls of the city are no longer visible, except for the ziggurat, which, by the way, was reconstructed in the 1960s. The soil around is beautiful: gray, like the surface of the moon, only strewn with fragments of ceramics and bullet casings.
Professor Woolley's excavation in the 1920s was stunning. In one season, he dug 6,000 cubic meters of soil. At the excavations near the ziggurat, a new "ziggurat" was growing out of the mud. The large number of clay shards was amazing. Broken pottery is the most common find at most archaeological sites, but Woolley threw them away with the mud.
I can't imagine how big these shards were. Erosion has turned them into small pieces so much that if you walk along the mounds of mud, it seems that it is an ordinary rock. Real stones were rare.
There is also something obvious. The soil of such new mountains of mud must disappear somewhere over time in low places. Eighty years of archaeological work, combined with dust and wind, have filled the former excavations of Professor Woolley. This led to the fact that the Sumerian Ur now looks inconspicuous, completely without walls.
1925 and 2015.
Compare, for example, the two photos above. This is a view of the ziggurat from the southeast. The first photograph of the excavation in 1925. We see the excavated ruins of ancient buildings. Large brick-paved square. The wall of the ziggurat terrace is clearly visible. An employee stands on the steps, and another is next to the wall, showing its height. In a modern photograph, the wall of the terrace is not visible at all, only a small part of the building, which still rises nearby on the right side. The reconstructed walls of the ziggurat are cleaner, but all around are gray mud and fragments of pottery.
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Before I went to Ur, I thought that most of the walls had collapsed by themselves. The adobe parts wear out, but adobe is very common in Ur. Now many walls are simply covered with dust. The ground has risen nearly 1 to 2 meters since the old excavations, and Woolley's deep pits, reaching up to 18 meters, are now 6 meters deep.
Even the inner area, where Woolley described walls up to 3 meters high, is now filled with beige columns growing from the gray mass. Nowadays, it is even difficult to find the outlines of buildings from a satellite, although 80 years ago Woolley unearthed and mapped the walls of 50 houses.
1930 and 2015.
Compare the photos above. This is Straight Street in Ur from the southeast in 1930 and 2015. The second photo shows a mess and low walls. This is a burnt brick that was laid at the foot of the walls to strengthen the foundation. Solid walls up to two meters were made of it in Ur. Then, an already unfired brick was placed on it. In a recent photo, it is at the top, which means that the original top of the fired brick is still in place.
In the old photograph, you can see at least 18 layers of fired brick, and sometimes 23. Today only 10 are visible. It turns out that the upper parts did not collapse, it was the lower tiers that were covered with mud and fallen bricks, so that the street itself is no longer visible. This is perhaps a good thing, because the dirt protects the lower parts of the walls from vandals. But if the ziggurat ever becomes a popular tourist destination, it is best to clean up the dirt and somehow protect the walls so that people can walk the streets again like they did 4,000 years ago.
Dmitry Konoshonkin