This is truly the Land of Ur; the place where out of the waters of southern Mesopotamia the first cities were born. It is the place of "creation" in Mesopotamia legend. It is here that "man" left the peace of villages and began to live in large numbers in cities. It is here at places like Eridu and Ur that life changed dramatically and began to shape history in new ways.

1. Eridu (Tell Abu Shahrain)

The main deity of Eridu was the water god known to the Sumerians as Enki and to the Akkadians as Ea. A sounding at Abu Shahrain undertaken by Iraqi archaeologists in the 1940s provided most of what we know about the Ubaid period (conventionally dated to the 6th and 5th millennia B.C.), the earliest period of occupation on the southern Mesopotamian floodplain.

2. Ur

The traditional birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham (Genesis 11:27-32), Ur was extensively excavated by a Joint Expedition of the British Museum and The University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, directed by Sir Leonard Woolley during the years 1922-1934. Woolley excavated a large cemetery dating to the mid-3rd millennium (2600-2500 B.C.). Known as the Royal Cemetery, it included a number of richly furnished burials. Woolley also uncovered the temple of the moon god Nanna/Suen (Nanna is Sumerian; Suen, Akkadian), including the ziggurat, later restored by the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities. The finds from Ur were divided among the Iraq Museum, the British Museum, and The University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.