FATHER ABRAHAM

FATHER ABRAHAM AND HIS HOMETOWN

Ur (modern day Tell al-Muqayyar), Abraham's "home town," is located in southern Iraq, 200-220 miles southeast of Baghdad, halfway to the Persian Gulf). The ruins of Ur were discovered and first excavated in 1854-55 by British consul J.E. Taylor. British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley directed the most extensive excavations at Ur from 1922 to 1934 for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania. In Abraham's day, Ur was the wealthiest city in Mesopotamia, with a complex system of government and a well-developed system of commerce; trade routes joined Ur with other great towns to the north and the south. Writing was in common use (e.g., issuing of receipts, and making contracts). Schools trained people for religious, commercial, and governmental work. The curriculum included mathematics, language, geography, botany, and drawing. The city had streets, a drain system, two-story houses, a great temple tower (called a ziggurat), and various other evidences of a highly developed civilization. Ur was sustained by a healthy agricultural system based on irrigation ditches from the river bank, stone ploughshares, and flint sickles. With this technology the Babylonians grew two crops each season. In a typical house the street door opened into a small lobby, perhaps provided with a jar of water for those arriving to wash their feet. A doorway at one side led into a courtyard. There were other rooms around the sides of the courtyard, among them store-rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. In the kitchen there might be a well, a brick-built table, an oven, and grinding stones for making flour, as well as the pots and pans the last owners left behind. A long room at the center of one side could have been the reception room. In these houses there is usually a well-constructed staircase at one side of the courtyard. Arab houses built in recent times in the towns of Iraq follow almost the same plan. Clay tablets left in the houses, some in small archive rooms, tell what the occupants of those houses were doing. Among them were merchants, local businessmen, priests and others in the service of the temple. Their records deal with the sale and purchase of houses and land, slaves and goods, with adoption, marriage and inheritance, and all the affairs of a busy city. In a few houses there were many tablets of a much different nature. On round balls of clay, flattened to a bun shape, pupils had copied the teacher's handwriting in exercises to learn how to form the cuneiform signs. The teachers helped their pupils learn the old Sumerian language by using tables of verbs, and for arithmetic they had tables of square and cube roots and reciprocal numbers. The Royal Tombs of Ur reflect the immense wealth of the city. Kings and queens drank from gold and silver beakers. For show, the kings wore daggers with golden blades, the queens exquisite jewelry of gold and colored stones. Abraham left all this to become a dweller in tents, having no certain home, embarking upon a pilgrimage