Two Great Households of Old Babylonian Ur

Stone, Elizabeth; Otto, Adelheid; Charpin, Dominique; Einwag, Berthold und Zimansky, Paul (2021): Two Great Households of Old Babylonian Ur. In: Near Eastern Archaeology, Bd. 84, Nr. 3: S. 182-191

Abstract

Visitors to the ruins of Ur venturing into the residential area south of the ziggurat and royal cemetery are confronted with a reconstructed House of Abraham (fig. 1), named after the city's most famous putative resident. It is not clear who decided that this particular structure was the ancestral home of the patriarch, but it was certainly not Sir Leonard Woolley, who closed his celebrated excavations here in 1934. While he was convinced that this city was indeed the Ur of the Chaldees of the Bible-a claim that has not gone unchallenged-and even wrote a book postulating that the Old Babylonian houses here shed light on the origins of Yahwistic religion (Woolley 1936), he doubted that archaeology could ever link Abraham to a specific artifact or building. The massive brick structure one sees today was actually erected only two decades ago to promote tourism in anticipation of a papal visit that was delayed until March 2021. It was built on the ruins of half a dozen individual houses that Woolley had excavated in the area he called AH, generally following their ground plans but connecting the units with doorways to create a single edifice many times larger than any private residence of the early second millennium BCE (fig. 2). If the idea of naming this new creation after Abraham was to promote tourism, it has been a success: Among the thousands who visit Ur every spring, some even come to pray in these rooms, ignoring all warnings that the association with the family of Abraham is suspect. Figure 1. Drone image of Ur facing northward, House of Abraham in foreground and ziggurat in the background. Photograph by Berthold Einwag. Figure 2. Woolley plan (in red) on drone image of modern reconstruction of House of Abraham. In the reconstruction internal doors were used to join separate houses into one large structure. The geometry does not match precisely. Drone photograph by Berthold Einwag.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Kulturwissenschaften > Department für Kulturwissenschaften und Altertumskunde
• Themengebiete: 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 900 Geschichte
• ISSN: 1094-2076
• Sprache: Englisch