The first part of the lecture continued the history of excavations and publications. The study of texts from the Palaeo-Babylonian period was given fresh impetus in 1976, when the excavation report that Woolley and Max Mallowan had been completing for years was finally published (EU 7). Thanks to the catalog of objects (pp. 214-254), it was finally possible to place the texts, which had been published typologically: archival documents (UET 5), school exercises (UET 1, 7 and 8) or "literary and religious texts" (UET 6), in their archaeological context. As soon as I had completed my post-graduate thesis in 1979, I set to work on this task, which culminated in a State thesis in 1984, from which emerged Le Clergé d'Ur, published in 1986 [1].
We then retraced the main discoveries made during the two new excavation campaigns, in autumn 2015 and spring 2017. Elisabeth Stone resumed her exploration of the so-called "AH" quarter, southeast of the heart of the city, with a threefold objective. Firstly, to improve our knowledge of the houses excavated by Woolley. The excavation showed that he had often stopped at the first level encountered, without investigating the earlier phases of the dwellings he was exploring; as a result, many tombs were discovered. The second objective was to find the dwellings dating from the end of the third millennium, the ruins of which were to be found below the Paleo-Babylonian level. To this end, two test pits were dug in areas already excavated by Woolley: the first ("Area 1") at "No. 1 Baker's Square", the second ("Area 2") in "Niche Lane". The latter led to the discovery of 18 accounting texts from the Akkadian period, a period hitherto poorly represented in Ur.
E. Stone finally wished to extend the area explored by Woolley, and this was done on the edge of the AH quarter, to the north-west ("Area 3") and to the south ("Area 4"). The idea was that the excavation of Palaeo-Babylonian houses using modern archaeological methods would advance our knowledge of this residential quarter, thanks in particular to the study of plant and animal remains, which was not practised in the 1930s, as well as to a more precise study of the common material remains to which Woolley paid little attention: his analysis of the ceramics, for example, only took into account the complete forms and not the sherds.
