Question
Describe the well-known facts regarding Ur, one of the earliest cities to have been excavated.
Solution
Facts regarding Ur:
1. Ur was a town whose ordinary houses were systematically excavated in the 1930s Narrow winding streets indicate that wheeled carts could not have reached many of the houses. Sacks of grain and firewood would have arrived on donkey-bac.
1. Ur was a town whose ordinary houses were systematically excavated in the 1930s Narrow winding streets indicate that wheeled carts could not have reached many of the houses. Sacks of grain and firewood would have arrived on donkey-bac.
Narrow winding streets and the irregular shapes of house plots also indicate an absence of town planning. There were no street drains of the kind we find in contemporary Mohenjodaro
.
Drains and clay pipes were instead found in the inner courtyards of the Ur houses and it is thought that house roofs sloped inwards and rainwater was channelled via the drainpipes into sumps* in the inner courtyards
2. This would have been a way of preventing the unpaved streets from becoming excessively slushy after a downpour.
3. Yet people seem to have swept all their household refuse into the streets, to be trodden underfoot! This made street levels rise, and over time the thresholds of houses had also to be raised so that no mud would flow inside after the rains.
Lightcame into the rooms not from windows but from doorways opening into the courtyards: this would also have given families their privacy.
There were superstitions about houses, recorded in omen tablets at Ur: a raised threshold brought wealth; a front door that did not open towards another house was lucky; but if the main wooden door of a house opened outwards (instead of inwards), the wife would be a torment to her husband!
4. There was a town cemetery at Ur in which the graves of royalty and commoners have been found, but a few individuals were found buried under the floors of ordinary houses.
