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Excavations at Ur, 1926–7. Part II1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Extract

During the second part of the season 1926–7 the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania was engaged in excavating a cemetery, or rather cemeteries, lying inside the temenos wall and at the south-east end of the enclosure. In 1922, during the early days of our first season at Ur, we had dug here a trial trench of no great depth and had found several groups of pottery and some jewellery which, owing to its nearness to the surface, I had assumed to be of late date (see Ant. Journal, vol. iii (1923), pi. xxix). Work of this sort, however, could not be done satisfactorily with the absolutely untrained gang which we had just enrolled, and the discovery of the temple E-Nun-Mah in another part of the temenos enabled me to abandon what the men named ‘the Gold Trench’. Now, after four years, the time had come to complete the topography of the temenos by clearing up what was the only large area within its walls still untested. The negative results of our original trench—negative so far as walls were concerned— and the evident denudation of the site, did not inspire confidence, but the ground had to be proved, and there was at least the prospect of further discoveries of small objects.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1928

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References

page 4 note 1 Mackay, TheACemetery at Kish, Field Museum Publications.

page 4 note 2 Hall and Woolley, al-'Ubaid, p. 157.

page 5 note 1 C. J. Gadd in al-'Ubaid, p. 136.

page 9 note 1 This is proved by the fact that the paste was still soft when the pots were placed on it, and the boat is often distorted alike by their weight and by the inequalities of the soil on which it rested.

page 9 note 2 See Gadd in al-'Ubaid, p. 145.

page 20 note 1 In Egypt, at a later date, there occur gaming-boards on which also the number five plays an important part. For a Twelfth Dynasty example see Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, Five Years' Exploration at Thebes, pl. L, and pp. 57 sqq.

page 26 note 1 It is likely that in the gem-cutter's field this primitive way of representing the ssshuman face lasted longer, owing to the prevalence of work with the tubular drill, than it did in larger scale carving ; cf. the Ur-Nina stelae in the Louvre.