Ur

Feel the ground under your shoes first. It is not quite sand and not quite soil. It is pale, dry and crumbly, and it is full of tiny fragments: broken pottery, flecks of baked brick, a glint of something that might once have been glazed. The wind comes off the flat desert with almost nothing to stop it. In the middle of all that flatness, one great brown mass rises from the plain. This is Ur, and you are walking on a city.

Ur sits in southern Iraq, in Dhi Qar Governorate, not far from the modern city of Nasiriyah. Today the landscape feels empty and far from water. That was not always true. In antiquity the Euphrates River flowed much closer to the city, and the marshes and the waters of the Gulf reached further inland. Ur was a river port. Boats brought timber, stone and precious metals to a land that had almost none of its own.

The people who built Ur were the Sumerians. They lived in southern Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates — and they were among the first people anywhere to build cities and to write. Ur was not the only Sumerian city, but it became one of the most powerful. Its patron was the moon god, whom the Sumerians called Nanna. Everything here, in a sense, was organised around him.

The great structure in front of you is the Ziggurat of Ur. A ziggurat is a stepped temple platform, a kind of artificial mountain built in tiers. It is not a pyramid and it is not a tomb. At its top there once stood a shrine to the moon god. The ziggurat was built by a king named Ur-Nammu, who founded what historians call the Third Dynasty of Ur, around the twenty-first century before Christ. His son Shulgi is generally credited with completing it.

Look closely at the walls. The core of the ziggurat is made of sun-dried mud brick. Over that core, the builders laid a thick skin of fired brick, harder and more resistant to rain. They set those bricks in bitumen, the black natural tar that seeps from the ground in this region. Here is a detail most visitors walk past: the walls are pierced by narrow slots. These are drainage channels. They let water escape from the inner mud brick, so the structure would not swell and burst from within.

The ziggurat you see today is not entirely ancient. The lower stages carry original Sumerian brickwork, but the facade and the great stairways were heavily reconstructed by Iraqi authorities in the late twentieth century. The upper tiers and the shrine are gone. Even in antiquity, the ziggurat was a restoration project. In the sixth century before Christ, the Babylonian king Nabonidus — a ruler with a deep devotion to the moon god — repaired and rebuilt parts of this temple, already ancient in his own day.

Now let your eyes travel away from the ziggurat across the low mounds. Under them lie streets, houses, temples and courtyards. Most of what we know about this ground comes from a long excavation in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was led by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, in a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Woolley worked here season after season with large teams of local workers. His reports are still read today.

Woolley's most famous discovery was the Royal Cemetery. Here, archaeologists found burials of extraordinary wealth: gold headdresses, jewellery of carnelian and lapis lazuli, cups of gold and silver. One tomb belonged to a woman named Puabi, identified by a cylinder seal found with her body. Some of the graves held not only the dead noble but many attendants, apparently buried alongside them. Why this happened is still debated. It remains one of the most unsettling scenes in Mesopotamian archaeology.

You will not see those treasures here. They are now divided between museums in Baghdad, London and Philadelphia. Among them is the so-called Standard of Ur, a wooden box decorated with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli, showing scenes of war and of feasting. There is also the figure known as the Ram in a Thicket, a goat standing upright against a golden plant, and a lyre with a bull's head in gold. Ur's music, quite literally, was buried in this ground.

Here is a surprise for many visitors. One of the first writers in history whose name we know lived and worked at Ur. Her name was Enheduanna. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, a king who united much of Mesopotamia, and he appointed her high priestess of the moon god in this city. Hymns attributed to her survived on clay tablets. Long before the poets of Greece, a woman at Ur was composing verses to the gods.

Another story attached to this site is more personal. Woolley's young assistant was an archaeologist named Max Mallowan. The crime writer Agatha Christie visited Ur, met Mallowan here, and later married him. Her novel Murder in Mesopotamia draws on the life of an excavation camp. There is also a much older tradition. The Bible mentions Ur of the Chaldees as the home of Abraham. Many people associate that name with this city, and a restored house nearby is often shown as his — though that link rests on tradition rather than proof.

Ur still draws the world. In 2016, it became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing for southern Iraq, together with the marshlands and the ancient cities of Uruk and Eridu. In 2021, Pope Francis came here for a meeting of different faiths, because so many traditions trace a thread back to Abraham. Woolley also reported a thick layer of flood silt deep beneath the city. He linked it to the story of the Flood. Most scholars today see it as evidence of a local disaster instead.

Before you leave, stand at the foot of the great stairway and look up. Notice how the lines of the walls lean slightly inward as they rise. Notice the colour of the brick, close to the colour of the ground itself. The ziggurat and the desert are made of the same earth. Listen to the wind, and to the small crunch of potsherds under your feet. For roughly four thousand years, people have looked up at this platform from where you stand. Take your time walking back... the city is still underneath you.