ABSTRACT
TH E chief work carried out by me at U r was the excavation of the building ‘B ’ (Fig. 1 06), the discovery of which has been briefly recorded pn p. 123 . It soon became evident that a building of some size had been discovered, with a big outer wall of fine square burnt
bricks, 14 inches in diameter, of the type associated with the Illrd Dynasty of Ur. On 5 March I was able to concentrate our chief effort upon it. Several large rooms within were now appearing out of the sandy soil, all rectangular, with walls 5 feet thick; the Babylonian knew how to build so
as to keep out both heat and cold! They were the ground-floor rooms, or in a sense the cellars, of a great building, rooms analogous to the serdabs in which the modern ‘ Iraqi takes refuge from the heat of the sun in summer. The upper stories were probably of lighter construction; but they had dis appeared. In a corner of one of these lower rooms were found on the 6th the first tablets from ‘B ’, a few business documents of the II Ird Dynasty and Isin periods: such as Brit. Mus. No. 1 14060, an account tablet, dated in the 1 6th year of Gungunum, king of Larsa, about 2 1 5 5 b .c . ; and No. 114059,
another, of the reign of Idin-Dagan of Isin, about 2 1 3 0 b . c . Next day the south corner of the building was traced, and its south-east wall began to appear. The corner is rounded off. The wall was extremely well built, with the same splendid bricks, and is preserved up to a height of 8 feet above a foundation ‘step’ of brick which Mr. Woolley afterwards found to rest on crude brick foundations. The walls have panelled faces, about 8 inches deep and 10 feet long, alternating with ‘buttresses’ of about the same length, in much the same style as the wall of the ziggurrat (Fig. 107).
