In the end we did all that was humanly possible. Infinite time and patience were necessary, first to reduce the filling laid against the face of the walls to a mere skin; then to remove what remained with such implements as razor blades and porcupine quills, so that the paint could be fixed and preserved for recording.
What emerged, is today fairly well known;
particularly the altar frescoes with their spotted guardian lions on either
side or the altar front painted like a little miniature temple. However, the
upper parts of the men and animals in the processional scenes were
unfortunately lost forever.
So here at Uqair was a situation exactly
resembling that at AR Ubaid itself; a settlement of the “’Ubaid” period on the
larger hill and beside it a temple which had been repeatedly rebuilt in later
times. Our greatest curiosity was to know what, at both sites, would have been
the character of the original AL ‘Ubaid period temple, contemporary with the
settlement.
For Sir Leonard Woolley had familiarized us
with the idea that the makers of the AL ‘Ubaid pottery were a primitive marsh
dwelling people who built only in wattle and daub. It was at Tell Abu Shahrein,
the ancient city of Eridu that I was later able to solve this problem; and it
is to that site, perhaps the most extraordinary from a technical point of view
ever excavated, that we must now turn.
Beginning Eridu
From the beginning Eridu seemed a likely source of information on such subjects, if only because of its historical reputation for extreme antiquity. The Babylonian “Legend of Creation” in the “bi lingual” version simply states “All the lands were sea: then Eridu was made.” There is much else in Sumerian literature to confirm the traditional priority of the city, since it was the home of Enki, God of the Abyss, who was also the source of human wisdom.
Here he dwelt in his shrine upon the shores
of the “deep” which, like the so-called “waters” in Genesis, was divided as a
preliminary to Creation. The site as one sees it today certainly seems a
perfect setting for such a legend. The mound stands about fourteen miles south
of Ur, in a very isolated wilderness of dust and camel thorn. It takes the form
of a platform, about three hundred yards square, with the ruins of a ziggurat
tower rising above it at one end.
travel for beauty 