The site of Ur can be recognized from afar by the imposing mass of its multi-storey tower, otherwise known as its ziggurat; the modern Arabic name of the site, Tell al-Muqayyar, means "bitumen hill", as this material was used as mortar in the construction of this edifice.
Pietro della Valle was the first Western explorer to mention the site of Ur, in the second half of the 17th century. The first excavations were carried out by John G. Taylor, British vice-consul in Basra, between 1853 and 1854. He discovered inscribed clay cylinders and bricks bearing the imprint of inscriptions that enabled Henry Rawlinson in 1862 to identify Tell al-Muqayyar as the city of Ur, which was immediately likened to "Ur Kasdim", Abraham's homeland according to Genesis. Taylor also discovered some 30 tablets which were sent to the British Museum, where they were mixed with those from the excavations Loftus had carried out at Tell Sifr at the same time; it was only in 1980 that they were correctly identified [1]. Undocumented excavations were carried out in the following decades, fortunately on a relatively limited scale: around two hundred Palaeo-Babylonian tablets from Ur are thus to be found in various collections. Just after the First World War, exploration of the site resumed, with Reginald Campbell Thompson in 1918, then Harry Reginald Holland Hall in 1919.
A mandate over Iraq, newly created from the remains of the Ottoman Empire, was then entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations, prompting that country's archaeologists to take an interest in the territory. From 1922 onwards, Leonard Woolley led twelve excavation campaigns at Ur, funded by the British Museum in London and the University Museum in Philadelphia: he stayed on site for several months each year, with a supervisory team of around five people, including an epigraphist. In fact, the harvest of texts was impressive, and no less than six Assyriologists worked on the site: Sidney Smith (first campaign, 1922-1923), Cyril John Gadd (second campaign, 1923-1924), Léon Legrain (third and fourth campaigns, 1924-1925 and 1925-1926), Eric Burrows (fifth to eighth campaigns, from 1926-1927 to 1929-1930), Chauncey Winckworth (ninth campaign, 1930-1931) and Cyrus Gordon (tenth campaign, 1931-1932).
