Ur’s moon-god ziggurat rose where the Euphrates once met the Gulf
Ur, at Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq’s Dhi Qar Governorate, was a major Sumerian city-state once coastal near the Euphrates mouth on the Persian Gulf—silt has since moved the shore. Named from UNUGKI, “abode of Nanna,” it worshipped the moon god Nanna/Sin from a partly restored ziggurat dug in the 1930s.
When Ur was founded it stood near the Persian Gulf shore, probably amid marshes where irrigation was unnecessary and its canals served mainly for transport. Fish, birds, tubers and reeds may have sustained the city without the farming revolution sometimes assumed to be a precondition of urban life. Traces of occupation go back to the Ubaid period, about 5500 to 3700 BC, named after nearby Tell al-’Ubaid, where Henry Hall began excavating in 1919, followed by Leonard Woolley.
The mound measures about 1,200 by 800 metres and rises some twenty metres above the plain, split into northern and southern halves by an old canal and ringed by the remains of a wall. The settled area grew from roughly 15 hectares in the Jemdet Nasr period to 90 in the Early Dynastic, 108 under the Third Dynasty of Ur and 140 in the Isin-Larsa period, spilling beyond the walls. The Royal Tombs date to around the twenty-fifth or twenty-fourth century BC, and the bull-headed, eleven-stringed Lyres of Ur were found in 1928.
Religion gave the city its weight. It housed a prominent Temple of Inanna, and after Sargon of Akkad conquered Ur he made his daughter Enheduanna high priestess of Nanna, the moon god. For five centuries afterwards, control of Nanna’s priesthood signalled political mastery over the Babylonian region.
Enheduanna may be the first named author in history, credited with hymns such as The Exaltation of Inanna, though scholars are unsure whether she or a scribe wrote them. Under the Third Dynasty, praise hymns to rulers flourished, and as that era ended poets mourned the city in the Lament over the destruction of Sumer and Ur, which tells of King Ibbi-Sin’s capture by the Elamites.
Source: Ur
