Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place? - The BAS Library
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Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place?

By Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt

The ancient woodwork has perished, the metal has been stripped from the walls,” Sir Leonard Woolley wrote in 1936. “The ruins which excavation lays bare are but skeletons from which the skin and flesh have gone, and to re-create them in imagination we must use such evidence as the ruins may afford, eked out by descriptions in the cuneiform texts. A king will boast how he overlaid the doors of a sanctuary with gold, and amongst the ashes on the threshold of a temple gateway there may be found shreds of gold leaf overlooked by plunderers who sacked […]

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Endnotes

1.

Leonard Woolley, Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), pp. 90–91.

2.

C.B. Gordon, letter to Frederic Kenyon, June 12, 1922, University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives: Ur, box 1. Quoted in Richard L. Zettler and Lee Horne, eds., Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), p. 12.

3.

Woolley, Excavations at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years’ Work (London: Ernest Benn; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), p. 13.

4.

Woolley, Excavations at Ur, p. 52.

5.

Woolley, Excavations at Ur, p. 53.

6.

Woolley, Excavations at Ur, p. 123.

7.

Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1977), p. 363.

8.

Christie, Autobiography, p. 363.

9.

Woolley, Abraham, p. 187.

10.

Woolley, Abraham, p. 60.

11.

Woolley, Excavations at Ur, pp. 68–69.

12.

See Susan Pollock, “Ur,” in Eric M. Meyers et al., eds., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, 5 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), vol. 5, p. 288.

13.

Horace H.F. Jayne, quoted in Zettler and Horne, Treasures from the Royal Tombs, p. 19.