When the British mystery writer Agatha Christie visited the excavations at Ur in 1928, Woolley himself took her on a grand tour of the site. Wherever we happened to be, he could make it come alive. It was his reconstruction of the past and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also. Eric Burrows, a priest and epigraphist working at Ur, offered Christie a more sober, and perhaps more balanced, understanding of the site. Burrows s method as he guided the mystery writer around the site was entirely different from Woolley s.
Nobody can be sure.
No, I think probably it was not . He brought with him those stories of the world s creation and of the Flood which, moralised by his descendants, have been as history or as parable treasured by half the world for four thousand years. He brought with him the laws of Ur and, handing them down through the generations of his house, laid the foundations of that Mosaic code which is still the Law of the Jews and has been professedly adopted by most Christian nations as the basis of their own systems. The migration of Terah s house becomes rather ridiculous if the move were but for a dozen miles or so and the new home was actually in sight of the old. In 1927, having become more confident in bis team and in his own understanding of the site s stratigraphy, Woolley returned to the cemetery he had struck in his first season.