Who ruled Ur?

Ur was one of the great city-states of Sumer, the civilisation of southern Mesopotamia. Its ruins lie at Tell el-Muqayyar, the "mound of bitumen", in Dhi Qar Governorate in southern Iraq, about 16 kilometres south-west of Nasiriyah. Settled in the sixth or fifth millennium BCE, it reached its peak around the twenty-first century BCE as the capital of an empire that dominated Mesopotamia, and was finally abandoned in the fifth century BCE.

When the first settlers arrived during the Ubaid period, Ur stood close to the shore of the Persian Gulf, among marshes rich in fish, birds and reeds. The gulf has since retreated, so the ruins now stand well away from the sea, on the Euphrates' southern bank. The city's patron was the moon god Nanna, known in Akkadian as Sin.

By the middle of the third millennium BCE Ur was rich and powerful. The Sumerian King List names Mesannepada, who probably lived in the twenty-sixth century BCE, as the first king of its First Dynasty. The royal cemetery of this era held objects of precious metal and semi-precious stone brought from as far away as Afghanistan and India, as well as the famous Standard of Ur. Dozens of attendants were buried with some of the royal dead; modern scans of their skulls point to death by a blow to the head. In the following centuries Ur fell under the influence of rival cities, first Lagash and then Uruk and Umma.

In the twenty-fourth century BCE Sargon of Akkad brought Ur into his Akkadian Empire and made his daughter Enheduanna high priestess of Nanna. She is often described as the first author known by name, though scholars are unsure whether she wrote the hymns credited to her. When the Akkadian state collapsed, partly under pressure from the Gutians of the Zagros mountains, Lagash again dominated the city for a time.

The king of Uruk, Utu-hengal, drove the Gutians out, and after his death his governor at Ur, Ur-Nammu, moved the seat of kingship to Ur. Ur-Nammu built the great ziggurat whose restored base still dominates the site, and issued a law code that predates that of Hammurabi by about three centuries. His son Shulgi reigned for at least 42 years and turned the realm into a highly centralised bureaucratic state. According to one estimate, Ur may have been the largest city in the world for a few decades around 2000 BCE, with perhaps 65,000 inhabitants. The empire ended around 1940 BCE, depending on the chronology used, when the Elamites captured its last king, Ibbi-Sin, a disaster mourned in the Lament for Ur.

After the fall of the Third Dynasty, Ur came under the kings of Isin and then Larsa, who rebuilt parts of it. Hammurabi of Babylon took the city from Rim-Sin I of Larsa, and under his successor Samsu-iluna it was abandoned for a time. It later belonged to the Sealand Dynasty and from the sixteenth century BCE to the Kassite kings of Babylon, under whom it was a minor town. The Middle Assyrian kings held it at intervals, and from the tenth century BCE it lay within the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

At the end of the seventh century BCE Ur passed to the Chaldean dynasty of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar II built there, and the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, restored the ziggurat. After Babylonia fell to the Achaemenid Empire, Ur declined from around 530 BCE and was empty by the early fifth century BCE, probably because of drought, shifts in the river and the silting of its outlet to the sea.

Ur is often identified with "Ur of the Chaldees", named in Genesis as the birthplace of Abraham, but other sites have been proposed and the Chaldeans did not live in the region until long after the period traditionally assigned to him.

Travellers noticed the inscribed bricks from 1625, and Henry Rawlinson's reading of bricks brought to England confirmed the identification. John George Taylor dug at the site in the 1850s, and between 1922 and 1934 Leonard Woolley, working for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, uncovered about 1,850 burials, including the royal tombs. American, Iraqi and German teams resumed excavation from 2015. The ziggurat is now the best-preserved monument on the site, which the US Army handed back to Iraqi authorities in 2009. Pope Francis visited Ur in March 2021.