The Washington times., 1918-07-28
: The Search
In Lost "Ur
: of the
Chaldees y for
the World $
First Library

THIS great world-war is going to
build as well as destroy. 1t promises
= to solve more than one new problem
of modern life, and is quite as sure to shed
flood of light upon questions which have
seemed almost past human understanding.
Professor Langdon of the University of
Pennsylvania has pointed the way to a most
promising field of investigation and dis
covery. He has discovered upon a very
careful and close study of some of the
thousands of Babylonian clay tablets in
the museum Of the University, brought
as they were from the great library of
Nippur, that some of the most important
inscriptions were actually copies of still
more ancient tablets, which are as yet un-
discovered. And Professor Langdon has
done very much more, for he has ascer-
tanned the very site at which the American
excavator must plant his spade, If he is
10 bring to light tablets which will astound
the religious world, carrying back the his
tory of human thought thousands of years.
References upon the tablets of Nippur
to still older tablets, which we're the orig
inals, of which these are comparatively
late copies, have proved to him and to
other scholars that if the originals are to
be uncovered the excavators will have to
dig long and deeply upon the site of an
cient Ur. Ur was the city from which,
according to Genesis, XII, 81, Abraham
emigrated when he went to the Promised
Land, with his family and his nephew.
Lot.
Fortunately for the projected work the
site of Ur has been known ever since 1S47,
when Sir Henry Rawlinson, the famous
and original British ,Babylonian scholar,
deciphered inscribed tablets found in the
ruin mounds of what the Arabs called
Mugheir, proving that here once stood the
mighty city of Ur, with its majestic tenn
pie to Sin, the Moon-God.
1t lies on the west bank Of the Eu-
pirates, half way between Babylon and
the Persian Gulf. 1t was undoubtedly the
great capital of Babylon at the earliest
period of the civilization of that powerful
monarchy, and thus helps to bear out
Professor Langdon's suggestion that here
will be found the primaeval originals of
that extensive literature which furnished
they built up the earlier chapters of the
Bible itself.
For more than sixty years, or ever since
the first translation of the Deluge Tab
lets was made by George Smith, scholars
have recognized the more than striking
similarity between the story of the flood,
as told in the Bible and as deciphered
upon the clay tablets found in the ruins
Of Nineveh. But how the Hebrews pos
sessed themselves Of this very ancient
Semitic tradition was a constant puzzle
to students of the Bible, who had no record
before them Of any contact between the
Hebrews and the city of NIneveh in very
ancient times.
Many a scholar has desired to dig over
the ruins of Ur, simply because it had been
the home Of Abraham, and not for a mo-
ment suspecting that here was all that
Professor Langdon promises, but the Turk
ish Government refused to grant frman,
or permission, because that would have
meant that they would give adequate pro-
lection to the excavating party, and that
they were not in a position to offer, be-