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The Excavations at Ur, 1925–6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Extract

The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania began its fourth campaign at Ur on 1st November 1925, and closed down in the field on 13th March 1926. The season was the longest we have yet had, and at its height as many as three hundred men were employed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1926

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References

page 369 note 1 These walls were really the mud-brick enclosing walls of the Third Dynasty, and only the facing of burnt brick was the work of En-an-na-tum.

page 371 note 1 We were led to the discovery of the tombs by the fact that in the next period the builders had strengthened their foundations by laying heavy timbers across the ground broken up by the tomb-robbers ; the wood had decayed, but its impress was clear in the mud mortar in which the beams had been embedded.

page 382 note 1 In spite of the strong objection to ray views voiced by Dr. Andrae in the Orientalische Literaturzeitung for 1925, Nr. 7/8, p. 473, I must repeat that these are characteristically private dwelling houses and that the analogy holds good with the plan of the (Neo-Babylonian) temple Z found at Babylon by Koldewey.

page 400 note 1 No satisfactory explanation has yet been given for the ‘apsu’. It seems to be associated with the waters below the earth, i. e. with the level of perpetual saturation, the source of wells and springs, also with a pavement and with a solid platform or terrace. It was deep and dark. Our drains do not go down nearly so low as the water-level, but they go towards it; they are deep and dark, they start in the pavement of the chamber or shrine and they pierce the foundations of the solid terrace on which the shrines stand. The identification of such drains with the ‘apsu’ has already been suggested by Mr. Sidney Smith on the basis of a text which implies that the ‘apsu’ was actually inside the shrine, close to the statue of the god, and of a drain found at Ur inside the building which I have assumed to be the palace of Dungi (Smith, S., ‘The consecration and induction of a divine statue’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1925, i, p. 37Google Scholar).