THE main work at Ur in recent weeks has been in the area northwest of the ziggurat. The great tower stood upon a raised platform or terrace whose borders were enlarged and its retaining walls refaced by one ruler of Ur after another. At the foot of the terrace wall built by Kuri-Galzu of Babylon in about 1400 B. C. the expedition has found a street with a range of chambers, or magazines, of the same date along one side. This appeared to form one side of a court, but further excavations revealed that in the places where the other boundaries of the court should have been there were instead streets and private houses of Persian and Neo-Babylonian times. The fact that these later buildings lie so low compared to the Kuri-Galzu construction is evidence that the ground level took a sudden drop and that the ziggurat therefore stood, not on a simple platform, but on an impressive composite terrace carried down in steps to the general level of the town, the steps being occupied by buildings connected with the temple.
Museum Object Number: 32-40-454
Image Number: 192061
Most unexpected was the discovery, made in one of the houses of the Persian period, of three objects of unusual interest. The first was an unbroken mug of grey stone. Next to it lay a curious stone object shaped somewhat like the body of a fiddle; it was decorated with incised rosettes and circles, while three minute figures on the upper edge had been broken off, only their feet remaining. The third object was a straight-sided bowl of dark soapstone on the sides of which were carved five figures of standing bulls [Plate XIII]; the bodies, seen in profile, are in low relief and the heads, turned outward over the shoulder, are cut in the round. This is a favorite motive in Sumerian art, of which this bowl is one of the finest examples of its period yet known. How an object dating from about 2400 B. C. came to be in a house of the Persian period of the fifth or fourth century B. C. is something of a mystery.